Uncategorized
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Hacked by pirates?
For some reason, my main page is defaulting to a 2006 post about the attempted impeachment of the NC State student body president known as the “Pirate Captain.” Not sure what’s going on — maybe there are some pirate hackers out there? Anyway, I’ve asked Typepad for help, but in the meantime, just click on
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The WWE’s faux Hillary-Obama match
I didn’t know this — the New York Times reports that after the presidential candidates made their embarassing appearances on WWE’s “Monday Night Raw,” the league staged a match between Obama and Hillary impersonators: Trust me: it’s worse than you imagine.
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Hillary’s Holocaust metaphor
Can we put a moratorium on Hillary Clinton using a poem about the Holocaust to talk about free trade and outsourcing? Talk about inappropriate metaphors… At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to
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NYT “objectivity” on candidates & the budget
Here’s a New York Times lede that annoys me: 3 Candidates With 3 Financial Plans, but One Deficit By LARRY ROHTER and MICHAEL COOPER The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates differ strikingly in their approaches to taxes and spending, but their fiscal plans have at least one thing in common: each could significantly swell the
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Scandals in the primary and the general
One aspect of the media’s failure to distinguish between primary and general elections is the way that they fail to differentiate between the types of criticisms candidates face in each stage of the campaign. On Monday night, Jon Stewart asked Barack Obama this semi-facetious question that captures one aspect of this misunderstanding: Senator Clinton’s response
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Anti-Obama smears from the fever swamp
I just deleted this comment from my post on the National Enquirer smearing Barack Obama: B HUSSEIN Obama IS a muslime, always was, always will be. He has sold out the USA for $200 MILLION from muslimes for his campaign. He will turn over the country to them if he wins. America will cease to
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Primaries aren’t like general elections
After weeks of bluster about Hillary Clinton’s strength in key general election states, it’s great to see the NYT’s Patrick Healy make an obvious but crucial point (I’ve been repeating this for weeks): [T]he Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made
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Why John McCain is like George H.W. Bush
Historically, it seems to be relatively unusual for a party to nominate a heterodox candidate at a time when they control the presidency. That’s why I predicted (wrongly) that John McCain would not win the GOP nomination. McCain’s (exaggerated) reputation as a “maverick” is certainly an asset in the general election. But Democrats should remember
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Obama support graphs with PA
It’s time to update my previous work on the predictors of support for Barack Obama. Here are updated plots of state-level support for Obama by race, which show that Pennsylvania is sadly consistent with the overall trend of racial polarization: My standard regression shows that Obama’s state-level support is still associated with the same variables:
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NYT omits McCain’s supply-side remarks
The excellent New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt has a profile of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain’s top economic adviser, in today’s newspaper that omits one very relevant fact. Leonhardt’s piece makes two important points. First, under Holtz-Eakin, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office started engaging in “dynamic” analysis of tax cuts but found that “any