Uncategorized
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Bush’s history on appeasement/strawmen
Back in 2006, I proposed Nyhan’s corollary to Godwin’s law in a column for Time.com: A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability. Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate with
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Fact-checking Matthews on Obama and pool
There’s no fact that Chris Matthews
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West Virginia results by demographics
As predicted, Obama got drubbed in West Virginia, so it’s time to update my series on the predictors of his state-level support. If we put the exit poll data in context, we can see that he did much worse among whites in West Virginia than we would expect based in states with similar black populations:
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NPR story on transgender children
Don’t miss Alix Spiegel’s NPR series (part one, part two) on the struggles of families with transgender children, though it will break your heart. Our society has such a long way to go in how we deal with these issues. As Spiegel notes, the parallels to the “treatment” of homosexuality in past decades are all
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The Obama plague!
Did The Onion ghostwrite this Robert Novak column on conservatives “[promoting] the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency”? Can this possibly be real? Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These
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Great moments in Supreme Court citations
Some Antonin Scalia news you can use from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick: [Antonin] Scalia’s writing style is a disarming mix of the lowbrow and the lofty. He recently served up the Supreme Court’s first citation to Oscar the Grouch (PDF).
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2008 vs. previous races by education
A reader shared the link to an excellent table that was posted on the website FiveThirtyEight.com back in April: Hillary performs fully 11 points better against McCain than Obama does among voters with a high school education or less. But Obama performs 6 points better than Hillary among adults with some college, 10 points better
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Profiled in Duke Magazine
For those who are interested (hi Mom!), there is a brief profile of me in the current issue of Duke Magazine. It includes some of my thoughts on the relationship between Spinsanity and my academic research.
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ABC: 82% say wrong track
The latest ABC News poll/Washington Post poll shows how negatively the public has come to view the direction of the country under President Bush (PDF): 82% of the public thinks the country is on the wrong track, which is just one percentage point lower than the 1973 record. (John McCain, once again, is in big
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The randomization reform agenda
Thought of the day: Couldn’t reform-minded liberals and pork-busting conservatives agree that we should have randomized evaluations of almost everything the government does in social welfare, health care, etc.? When will Washington join the experimental revolution and find out which programs actually work? Update 5/12 10:19 PM: In comments, Dave White points to a CRS