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Bad CBS/NYT poll question on tax burden
If you want to see what the public believes about the size of the federal income burden, this CBS/New York Times poll question is not the way to do it: On average, about what percentage of their household incomes would you guess most Americans pay in federal income taxes each year — less than 10
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -TPM’s “House Crazy Caucus” (based on rhetoric) only overlaps slightly with my Congresional Myth Caucus (based on bill sponsorship/cosponsorship) -Quote of the day — Barbara Boxer on “death panels”: “Now why would I ever pull the plug on granny? I am granny” -Health care misinformation takes a turn toward the absurd
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Resistance to corrections in health
Christie Aschwanden has written an excellent article on how resistance to corrective information hinders progress in health and medicine for Miller-McCune. Here’s a sample: A surprising number of medical practices have never been rigorously tested to find out if they really work. Even where evidence points to the most effective treatment for a particular condition,
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Bayesian model averaging paper
Statistically-minded readers may be interested in a paper that Jacob Montgomery and I just had published in Political Analysis (normal people can stop reading here): Bayesian Model Averaging: Theoretical Developments and Practical Applications Jacob M. Montgomery and Brendan Nyhan Political science researchers typically conduct an idiosyncratic search of possible model configurations and then present a
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Obama birther myth not going away
CBSNews.com’s Stephanie Condon reports that the myth of Barack Obama being born in another country is not going away. The new CBS/New York Times poll shows that only 58% of Americans, and 41% of self-identified Tea Party supporters, think he was born in the United States: Although the Constitution requires American presidents to be natural
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -News that Jake Tapper won’t be reporting fact-checks on air makes This Week/Politifact arrangement far less important than it might have been -Rachel Maddow again hacks it up with claim that GOP is “already pledging to filibuster” Obama’s Supreme Court nominee -Republicans who didn’t believe in Iraq WMD or 9-11 ties
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Fleming latest to smear Obama on national security
Via Steve Benen, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) has joined the chorus of figures on the right who have smeared Barack Obama’s loyalty to this country. In a short article for The Daily Caller, Fleming alleges that Obama is “undermining this country’s national defense on purpose” — a grave charge to issue against the President of
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Electoral politics is a zero-sum game
In yet another 1994/2010 comparison piece, the New York Times suggests, as I once did, that the Republican Party’s image problems might limit its gains in November: Moreover, the Republican Party has a different image than it did in 1994. At that time, Republicans had been out of control of Congress for long enough that
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -Jon Chait on the conservative misinformation feedback loop and cracks therein -Which “very high-ranking Republican member of Congress” told TNR circa 2000 that Bill Clinton stole the 1996 election? -GW’s John Sides summarizes why significant spending cuts are politically impossible in one simple graph -Good news for naming and shaming: PolitiFact
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Tom Coburn counters health care misinformation
It’s great to see a Republican standing up to misinformation about health care reform: Sen. Tom Coburn, a staunch conservative from Oklahoma, is doing what seems almost unthinkable in this polarized political climate: Defending his Democratic colleagues from critics at Fox News. At a town hall meeting, Coburn suggested that a woman who said “they