Uncategorized
-
Brooks misquotes Hillary
Today, David Brooks repeats the false report that Hillary Clinton referred to “Wall Street money-grubbers” — a widely circulated misquotation: Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. In fact, as her campaign’s fact-checking blog points out, she actually criticized “Wall Street money
-
A “he said,” “she said” highlight and lowlight
Media Matters flags a terrible example of “he said,” “she said” journalism in this Washington Post story: The Washington Post uncritically quoted a voter’s assertion — apparently referring to a chain email containing a photograph of Sen. Barack Obama standing, but without his hand over his heart — that “[f]rom what I can tell, if
-
Will the gas tax help Obama?
Jon Chait makes the counterintuitive argument that Barack Obama’s refusal to pander on the summer gas tax holiday will actually help him, but I think he omits a key factor: Obama will be proved right if a holiday is enacted and prices at the pump don’t fall much or at all this summer. (It might
-
Brit Hume v. reality on Fox’s audience
Brit Hume, the Washington managing editor of Fox News, makes up a “fact” to fit a narrative he wants to promote: All of a sudden, the once-frosty relationship between Fox News and the Democratic candidates seems to have grown warmer. Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, who steadfastly refused to attend Fox-sponsored debates last year, are
-
Obama smear watch: Ann Coulter
Media Matters documents more suggestions that Barack Obama is a traitor, which this time come from (who else?) Ann Coulter: On the April 30 edition of CNN Headline News’ Glenn Beck program, conservative pundit Ann Coulter asked of Sen. Barack Obama: “Is Obama a Manchurian candidate to normal Americans who love their country? … Or
-
Technical problems fixed
Apologies for the pirate snafu, which seems to be over. If you went to brendan-nyhan.com in the last two days, you saw one of my “Pirate Captain” posts instead of the regular homepage (that’s why Google is currently displaying an awesome banner ad for a pirate website in the left sidebar). I still have no
-
The problems with superdelegate indecision
Matthew Yglesias comments on the need for Democratic superdelegates to make up their mind: Ambinder says “given that undecided superdelegates have said that their primary criterion for determining who they’ll choose is who has the best chance of beating John McCain in the fall, there’s no real reason for those superdelegates to choose in June.
-
Obama’s sports talk strategy?
Given Barack Obama’s well-known weaknesses among downscale white men, his campaign seems to be trying to use sports to help him appear to be more of a regular guy. In addition to playing more basketball on the campaign trail (he’s reportedly pretty good), Obama appeared on a local sports talk station this morning here in
-
The new DNC McCain ad
For the record, Josh Marshall is once again wrong in describing the new DNC ad against John McCain as “[c]ompletely honest.” McCain said he’d be ok with US troops staying in Iraq 100 years “[a]s long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” That may be unrealistic, but the ad
-
The Gore-ization of Obama
Chris Matthews, who was last seen critiquing the way Barack Obama ordered orange juice in a diner, is now obsessed with the idea that Obama can’t connect with people in a diner: A week after claiming that Sen. Barack Obama “can’t walk into a dinette [sic] with five or six guys there, white guys, in