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Alterman: No birther/truther parallel
In an online column last week, Eric Alterman and co-author Mickey Ehrlich denied any parallel in levels of partisan support for the “birther” and “truther” misperceptions: David Paul Kuhn at Time.com attempted evenhandedness by introducing the results of supposed “truther” polls conducted in 2007. His claim is that the same number of Democrats believed that
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“Appeasement” overuse redux
Back in 2006, I proposed the following corollary to Godwin’s law in a column for Time.com: A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability. Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate
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9/11 and birther misperceptions in NJ
Back in August, I created this plot showing the parallels in partisan misperceptions about President Bush (a 9/11 conspiracy) and President Obama (not a citizen): Public Policy Polling just asked questions about both misperceptions in the same poll in New Jersey (PDF). While the 9/11 question, which asks whether the respondent thinks Bush had “advance
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Dukakis’s “no comment” rationale
Via Taegan Goddard, Michael Dukakis confuses reporters with this classic rationale for not commenting on a possible Senate appointment: “I’m not commenting,” he said. “Why not? ‘Cause I don’t want to comment.” It’s either a PR masterstroke (you answer the question while saying nothing), or a statement of his belief in free will.
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The spread of the two million protestor myth
Chris Orr beat me to the metaphor, but has there ever been a more absurd game of political Telephone than the way the two million protestors myth was created and propagated online? Eric Boehlert of Media Matters documents the carnage: The conservative comedy of errors began on Saturday when Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, took
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Jon Chait on vacuous Senate moderates
Jon Chait follows up on his brilliant TNR column on the vacuousness of Senate moderates with a blog post in which he impersonates a moderate trying to avoid taking a position on where to go to dinner: My wife: Do you want to go out to dinner? Me: I don’t think there’s enough of a
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Deborah Solomon is harsh, part 5
As I’ve noted before, Deborah Solomon, who does the “Questions for…” feature in the New York Times Magazine, is an incredibly harsh interviewer (sample question: “You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?”). But as a friend notes, her interview with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane is especially nasty: SOLOMON:
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Interpreting “Who do you trust” polls
Though the public is closely divided on health care reform, Matthew Yglesias suggests an alternative interpretation in which “Obama is clearly winning” on the issue because of the zero sum nature of partisan politics. As evidence, he cites the public’s preference for Democrats on the “Who do you trust to do a better job handling
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NY Times omits Moore deceptions in doc story
A New York Times story today uses Michael Moore’s new documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” as a news peg for a discussion of new report on ethical issues in documentary filmmaking: At an early screening for the media and the film industry on this opening weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival, a packed house
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Obama’s health numbers: Not moving much
Last week, I predicted that President Obama’s primetime speech to Congress would fail to have a significant effect on public opinion. While it’s too early to reach a definitive conclusion, the early indications are largely consistent with that conclusion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Sept. 10-12 shows no statistically significant change in Obama’s approval