Brendan Nyhan

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  • NY Times cheap shot at San Francisco

    Since when did this sort of crack become acceptable in a straight news story? Seattle would appear to be the first in the United States to impose fees on both kinds of shopping bags. Last year, San Francisco banned plastic grocery bags outright, but paper bags can still be used, and without a fee. Seattle,

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  • FYI: Additional Obama charts

    If you missed it, I added some new charts to my post on interpreting primary results after it was linked on Talking Points Memo today. Also, don’t miss Josh Marshall discussing David Sirota’s column and my post in a TPM video:

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  • Bogus FL/MI disenfranchisement claims

    Ezra Klein flags an email from Hillary Clinton claiming that “It is a bedrock American principle: we are all equal in the voting booth… But millions of people in Florida and Michigan who went to the polls aren’t being heard.” This statement echoes her husband’s claim that Obama has “this new strategy of denying and

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  • Be careful interpreting primary results!

    My posts analyzing state-level predictors of support for Barack Obama were cited by Richard Florida, the academic guru of the “creative class,” in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail: Ms. Clinton is more popular among voters without college degrees. Meanwhile, Duke University political scientist Brendan Nyhan has crunched numbers that show a college education

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  • Brooks cites McCain 1983 speech

    In his column Friday, David Brooks cites John McCain’s 1983 speech arguing for US withdrawal from Lebanon, writing “This was not the speech of a man who thinks military force is the answer to every problem. It was the speech of one who conforms policies to facts.” For those are interested, here is a more

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  • My favorite award ever

    I just found a post on Eat the Press (the Huffington Post media blog) naming my Time.com column on ending my guest blogging for The American Prospect as the “Most Overanalyzed Defenestration” of 2006. I’m so proud.

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  • Dean: Keeping everybody happy

    This quote from DNC chairman Howard Dean should be seen as more evidence that big name Democrats are not going to push Hillary Clinton out of the presidential campaign any time soon: Faced with such disturbing trends, some Democrats want party elders either to persuade Clinton to drop out, or to orchestrate enough superdelegate endorsements

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  • NYT omits GOP’s supply-side claims

    Here’s the lede to a Louis Uchitelle story in Wednesday’s New York Times about the “political comeback” of supply-side economics: When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to cut taxes in what seemed, at the time, a magical way. Tax revenue would go up, not down, he said, as the economy boomed

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  • Yglesias: The case for partisanship

    Writing in The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias does a good job emphasizing a point I’ve also made here — namely, that the reduced partisanship of the mid-twentieth century was largely a result of the ugly history of race in the South: Yet as today’s presidential candidates call for a less divisive kind of politics, it’s worth

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  • Bizarre blog comments

    I’ve deleted a couple of choice comments to avoid wrecking the threads, but they’re just too wacky not to share. Full details after the jump.

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