Brendan Nyhan

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  • Local headline of the day

    Breaking news from the News & Observer: “Colleges find drinking deeply rooted.” Coming next week: “Area schools find homework deeply disliked.”

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  • Colbert-loving liberals and PC-hating conservatives

    I continue to be struck by the unrelenting blogger love for Stephen Colbert’s unfunny White House Correspondents’ Dinner routine. It’s reminding me of the days during the mid-’90s when many conservatives felt silenced by “political correctness.” They resented the fact that they felt like they had to self-censor themselves. So Rush Limbaugh or other commentators

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  • More on George Allen from TNR’s Ryan Lizza

    Following up on his devastating story about George Allen’s ugly racial history, Ryan Lizza slams Allen again: Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where’s Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there’s the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High

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  • Durham DA Nifong re-elected

    I’m sad to report that Mike Nifong, the district attorney who turned Durham into a media circus, has been elected to a full term in office: District Attorney Mike Nifong kept his job as the county’s top prosecutor in a heated election that featured Nifong’s handling of the Duke lacrosse rape investigation as its central

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  • Bush 1999-2000 vs. Bush 2006

    When President Bush came out against singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, I wondered if he had committed the same offense in the past. The answer, it turns out, is yes. Atrios points to this quote from Kevin Phillips’ book American Dynasty: When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, [Bush] would

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  • Bush vs. Nixon: Presidential approval

    Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution plots their approval trajectories. It turns out that disapproval of Bush right now is almost as high as Nixon’s when he resigned:

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  • Stephen Colbert: Not that funny

    I have to admit that, like Noam Scheiber and Bob Somerby, I didn’t find Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner very funny. But a lot of people are obsessed with it and the media’s failure to devote much coverage to it. Here’s Scheiber’s analysis: My sense is that the blogosphere response is

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  • Evan Bayh: Abolish the Electoral College

    I’m not a big Evan Bayh fan, but I’m excited he supports abolishing the Electoral College (via Drudge): Q: “Why do you think we should abolish the Electoral College?” BAYH: “I think our president should be chosen by the majority of the American people. That is ordinarily the case. But in 2000, as we all

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  • Defense motions in Duke lacrosse case

    A defense lawyer in the Duke lacrosse case has requested the removal of District Attorney Mike Nifong, among other things, in motions filed today: Kirk Osborn, the lawyer for one of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, filed legal motions this morning, including one that demanded that Durham’s district attorney drop out of the

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  • David Sirota: The liberal spin vanguard

    In an essay about his new book Hostile Takeover, David Sirota compares American politics to The Matrix (“the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”) before unleashing a barrage of frenzied populism: The fact is, most of that nonsensical political discourse is designed to hide the two fundamental

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