Uncategorized
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The anti-Obama tag team
Reuters accurately sums up the state of the presidential race in its lede, which explicitly groups Hillary Clinton and John McCain together as the “rivals” of Barack Obama who both attacked him today: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came under fire on Friday for saying small-town Pennsylvania residents were “bitter” and “cling to guns
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The self-justifying war in Iraq
It’s become a cliché to point out the way that our failure in Iraq is used to justify the need for a continued presence in Iraq (we have to stay to clean up the mess we created), but I still can’t let this line from President Bush yesterday pass without comment: “Iraq is the convergence
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Brock’s McCain attack group
Just yesterday, I was complaining about the way Media Matters has contributed to the distortion of John McCain’s comments about staying 100 years in Iraq. And then today (Via Matthew Yglesias) I learn that David Brock, the head of Media Matters, is leading an independent group planning a $40 million attack campaign against McCain. It’s
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Graph of the day: Walmart & pickups
In search of demographic insights into Pennsylvania, Brian Schaffner posts an amusing graph from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study — the percentage of Wal-Mart shoppers vs. the percentage of pickup truck owners by state: His conclusion? “On these measures, Pennsylvania is most like Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and Illinois. And, of course, Obama
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Distorting McCain on “100 years” in Iraq
The constant distortions of what John McCain said about staying in Iraq for 100 years make me want to start Spinsanity back up. Liberals are tying themselves in knots trying to provide justifications for why it’s not being taken out of context. Sorry, but it is. Here’s what McCain actually said: QUESTIONER: President Bush has
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Presidential vote models: Fair and Hibbs
Ezra Klein highlights Ray Fair’s model of presidential election outcomes in a recent post. Fair is projecting that the GOP will receive 48 percent of the two-party presidnetial vote, but (a) his projection assumes a much stronger economy than we’re likely to have and (b) he tinkered with the specification a lot over the years
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Leon Kass on ice cream cones
I apparently missed this back in 2003 — University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass, the chair of President Bush’s bioethics council, objects to the public licking of ice cream cones (via Kieran Healy): Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone –a
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Idiotic DNC gotcha on McCain
In the hierarchy of idiotic online criticism, this DNC release attacking John McCain for a Google banner ad that appeared on some sketchy blog is one step above comparing him to a Nazi: Even as he quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words that “someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off
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I love state politics
Via TNR’s Josh Patashnik (here and here), the New York Times has run two hilarious articles in the last few days on the strange things that happen in state politics. The first tells the story of a referendum that ends the Wisconsin governor’s bizarre ability to edit specific words out of bills: Wisconsin governors have
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Misleading Obama donor statistics
Reader Joel Wiles points out that one of Barack Obama’s latest fundraising emails presents a little case study in the use of misleading statistical comparisons: In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just