Uncategorized
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Obama, Wright, and district congruity
With Barack Obama preparing a major speech on race for tomorrow, it’s worth taking a step back to put the Jeremiah Wright controversy in a larger perspective. As TNR’s Michael Crowley reminds us here and here, Obama’s membership in Wright’s church helped demonstrate his cultural authenticity to skeptical constituents in Chicago’s black community. But it’s
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Bill Kristol: Wrong on Obama/Wright
Bill Kristol cites a report by the “journalist” Ronald Kessler in today’s New York Times claiming that Barack Obama attended an incendiary sermon by Jeremiah Wright on July 22, 2007: It certainly could be the case that Obama personally didn’t hear Wright’s 2003 sermon when he proclaimed: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger
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Blog regulation “probably unconstitutional”
I love this quote — a state representative from Kentucky admits that his bill banning anonymous blog comments is probably unconstitutional: In response to a constituent whose high school daughter had been the target of derogatory comments online, Tim Couch, a state representative for Kentucky’s 90th District, filed a bill to make it mandatory for
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Read The Black Swan
Like Matthew Yglesias, I’m a non-economist without much to say about the ongoing financial meltdown, but one recommendation I can make is that you should read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is by far the best thing I have read about the ways in which humans
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The politics of recession
Via Greg Mankiw, outgoing National Bureau of Economic Research president Martin Feldstein is worried that the United States is in for a nasty recession: The United States is in a recession that could be “substantially more severe” than recent ones, National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein said on Friday. “The situation is very
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Ventura’s faux third party threat
I don’t think anyone is clamoring for Jesse Ventura to launch a third party presidential campaign, but he’s apparently using it to try to sell copies of his fourth (!) book Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!: To hear Jesse Ventura tell it, he’s either out to become president or an expatriate. In the opening
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Primaries aren’t necessarily predictive
Let me join Matthew Yglesias and others in reiterating what I’ve said before — primary election performance is not predictive of general election outcomes. Pundits: Stop doing this! Here’s a good example of why this approach is incorrect from TNR’s Josh Patashnik: John King on CNN just pointed out that Clinton did better in more
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Chris Matthews: Ignorant about policy
Via Bob Somerby, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews demonstrates his staggering ignorance about policy issues: During the March 11 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, guest Chris Matthews asserted that in order to “get something done in this country,” politicians need to “do the surprising move that grabs the center” and that “if a Democrat were smart, who
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Green/Gerber GOTV book event
Yale’s Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, the co-authors of the voter turnout study (PDF) I mentioned last week, are releasing the second edition of their book Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. There will be a seminar on the book and its findings at the Brookings Institution next Thursday for
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New Douglas Hibbs forecast for 2008
Via Mark Thoma, Douglas Hibbs has updated the 2008 forecast of his respected “Bread and Peace” model of presidential election outcomes and the news is good for Democrats (IE-only link): Presidential election outcomes are well explained by just two objectively measured fundamental determinants: (1) weighted-average growth of per capita real personal disposable income over the