Brendan Nyhan

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  • White House press challenges Snow

    Chris Mooney and Brad DeLong report that the White House press corps is finally challenging Tony Snow aggressively on the administration’s dissembling about global warming and the revenue effects of tax cuts, respectively. It’s amazing what a 33% approval rating will do for their backbone. (Compare and contrast, for instance, to all the cases documented

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  • William Kristol smears Barack Obama

    Isaac Chotiner flags a disturbing statement by William Kristol from Fox News Sunday in which he suggests that Barack Obama would have backed Stephen Douglas over Abraham Lincoln: We’re electing a war president in 2008. If I can go back to Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech in 1858 was

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  • Conservatives question the Reagan myth

    The near-godlike status of Ronald Reagan among conservatives is

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  • Steve Benen: Obama not inexperienced

    Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report has joined me in questioning the conventional wisdom that Obama is less experienced than Hillary: And one last word about experience. Clearly, in his third year in the U.S. Senate, Obama enters the presidential race with the least federal experience among the leading Democrats. But I have a hunch

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  • WSJ dissembles on health care

    The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who shares my obsession with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, destroys a cartoonishly dishonest editorial on health care: Pointing out intellectual dishonesty on The Wall Street Journal editorial page has a certain tiresome dog-bites-man quality to it. I generally restrain myself to only the most hilarious and/or flagrant examples.

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  • NYT distorts Summers remarks again

    Back in December, I complained about a New York Times story that mischaracterized a controversial statement by former Harvard president Larry Summers : Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are

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  • Russert busted on the stand

    The way that Tim Russert’s trademark tactic was used against him in the Scooter Libby trial is pretty amusing: Mr. Wells, using the technique that Mr. Russert is known for as moderator of “Meet the Press,” then put up on video screens throughout the courtroom Mr. Russert’s words in an affidavit he filed later. In

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  • Is your car out of the closet?

    Most random Google ad ever — just saw this on Tom Maguire’s blog: On the Internet, there is a site for everything.

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  • 1996 exit poll on Powell vs. Clinton

    In a New York Times op-ed, former CBS News political director Martin Plissner claims that a 1996 exit poll shows that Americans are ready to vote for a black presidential candidate: On Nov. 5, 1996, Voter News Service — the organization hired by the TV networks to do exit polling — asked people at the

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  • Weisberg: Third-party candidate “less likely”

    Writing in Slate, Jacob Weisberg is notably more skeptical about a third-party presidential bid than his elite pundit colleagues: It is a rather obvious point that leaving the country’s biggest problems to fester can’t be good policy. What is less obvious is that it may not be good politics either. A two-party system is a

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