Uncategorized
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Why I have no comment on the debate
A reader asked recently why I haven’t blogged about the presidential debates. One reason is that they don’t matter very much at this point, so I have a hard time forcing myself to sit through them. In general, though, I frequently don’t have anything interesting or new to say about debates, which are over-analyzed to
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The problem with new ideas, part 2
The New Republic’s Jon Chait wrote an excellent piece last year titled “The Case Against New Ideas,” which explodes a series of myths about the supposed power of new ideas to shape political outcomes. (See also my post on new ideas and the “gridlock zone.”) The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein now offers a more mundane
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GOP continues to link Iraq to 9/11
Via Josh Marshall, the Boston Globe reports that Republican presidential candidates are following in President Bush’s footsteps by implying links between Iraq and 9/11: In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that
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Paintball as performance art
Via Kevin Grier, here’s an exceptionally weird link for you. An Iraqi-born artist is living in an art gallery installation that allows visitors to his website to shoot paintballs at him. Here’s how the FAQ explains it: In Domestic Tension, viewers can log onto the internet to contact, or shoot, Bilal with paintball guns. Bilal’s
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Silly NYT story on Obama & basketball
Thank goodness the New York Times is covering the important issues in the 2008 presidential campaign — like how Barack Obama plays basketball. As my friend Ben Fritz asked, is Jodi Kantor trying to become the next Maureen Dowd? Or is she just helping to generate material for Dowd’s next column? In any case, it’s
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More on Obama, drugs, and stereotypes
Matthew Yglesias takes issue with my concern that Barack Obama’s admitted history of drug use will be used to trigger racial stereotypes among voters: I dunno about this. It seems to me that if you have an African-American candidate whose admitted to past cocaine use, that attacking him for past cocaine use is less an
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Fact-checking Lou Dobbs on leprosy
Via Tyler Cowen, David Leonhardt of the New York Times has performed some much-needed fact-checking on CNN’s Lou Dobbs: The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago. The segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing background research for it, a “60 Minutes”
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NYT public editor knocks caption
As I noted yesterday, the New York Times ran this caption alongside an article about opposing pro- and anti-war demonstrations at a street corner in Delaware: Jeffery Broderick, foreground, standing alone last week in support of United States troops as demonstrators for peace occupy an opposite corner. This language clearly suggests that Broderick “alone” supports
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McCain attacks Obama’s drug use
John McCain’s slam on Barack Obama last week is the first prominent attack on Obama’s admitted drug use: McCain responds to Obama in tough enough, if predictable, language: “While Senator Obama’s two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience combined with conversations with military
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NYT caption smears war opponents
Reader Joel Wiles flags a caption in the New York Times suggesting that opponents of the war in Iraq do not support the troops. The article in question describes pro- and anti-war demonstrators who stand on opposite corners of an intersection in Delaware: On one side of the street, Jeff Broderick stands alone while he