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Dan Rather on Letterman blackmailer
Dan Rather may have lost in court against CBS, but he can still toss off his trademark “Ratherisms”. Here’s what he told Lloyd Grove about the news that his former 48 Hours CBS colleague Joe Halderman had tried to blackmail David Letterman: Frankly, I couldn’t be more astonished that this guy was involved in something
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Regional differences in the GOP image
[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.] Josh Tucker (a political scientist at NYU) emails to ask if there are significant regional differences in the data on the state of the GOP
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Assessing the GOP brand
How weak is the Republican brand right now? This issue came up yesterday when a Media Matters criticized The Hill for failing to mention the GOP’s poor polling numbers in a story on the 2010 elections. Similarly, I recently suggested that that the damaged Republican brand might limit the number of seats that the party
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The coming swine flu shot myths
The grim news from the New York Times yesterday is that the swine flu vaccine is likely to cause an outbreak of misperceptions about its consequences for people’s health: As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures
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The politics of inflatable gorillas
Via an NPR story on Houston, one of the great news ledes of all time: The constitutional right to have a giant inflatable gorilla in a bathing suit and sunglasses grabbing consumer attention from a Houston business rooftop is the key issue in a trial that began in federal court on Wednesday. Eternal vigilance is
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Cook on the House: Focus on districts
In a comment on my post about the 2010 midterms yesterday, Charlie Cook protests the “lack of focus on actual Congressional districts”: What I find interesting about this whole conversation is the lack of focus on actual Congressional districts. When you look at the 84 CD’s currently held by Democrats, that went for either Bush
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Will 2010 be like 1994?
During his interview with President Clinton yesterday on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked a question that is increasingly occupying the minds of prominent Democrats — “do you worry about a repeat of ’94 politically?” Vice President Joe Biden raised a similar concern last week, telling attendees at a Democratic fundraiser in Delaware that “If
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Obama didn’t “appease” Russia
Last week I criticized those conservatives who rushed to describe President Obama’s decision to withdraw a missile defense system from Eastern Europe as “appeasement.” The comparison to the appeasement of Hitler was simply absurd on its face. And, as I pointed out in a comment, the rationale for the move was unknown — how could
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PPP national “birther”/”truther” poll
[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.] Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling continues his interesting polling on political misperceptions in a new national poll (PDF) that was conducted Sept. 18-21 and
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Romney’s 2012 positioning on TARP
Matthew Yglesias calls it “striking” that Mitt Romney and so many other conservatives are engaging in opportunistic position-taking against TARP: Dave Weigel points out that Mitt Romney is now slamming the TARP bill that he once favored. Shocking to see that guy change his position on something. But Romney aside, it’s striking to see the