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New policy mood data from Jim Stimson
UNC’s Jim Stimson just updated his estimate of policy mood — a measure of public demand for more government across a range of issues that I frequently highlight here. Here’s a graph showing his current estimates of yearly mood for 1952-2008 where higher values indicate greater liberalism: The new data indicate that demand for more
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Do military MDs need to study philosophy?
NPR’s Alix Spiegel recently interviewed military psychologist Bryce Lefever, who used to work in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which trained US military personnel to resist brutal interrogation techniques including waterboarding. Toward the end of the interview, Lefever argued that the “real ethical consideration” governing interrogation practices is to do “the most
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The GOP’s Keep America Scared Act
Has any recent party-endorsed legislation been promoted as disingenuously as “The Keep Terrorists Out of America Act”? The PR campaign for the bill falsely suggests that the Obama administration is going to turn dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility loose on U.S. soil. For instance, a National Republican Senatorial Committee web
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Heritage’s comparative effectiveness dystopia
Matthew Yglesias flags a bizarre argument by the Heritage Foundation’s Dan Holler against comparative effectiveness research on health care: Second, the administration is pushing for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to be primarily organized by the government. The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created
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Limbaugh claims Obama supports reparations
Think Progress buries the lede in a post about how Rush Limbaugh echoed the absurd accusation of Rep. Pete Sessions that President Obama is intentionally increasing unemployement. In the same quotation from his show, Limbaugh states that Obama supports “forced reparations” — a phrase which suggests that the nation’s first black president supports reparations to
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Liberals go soft on Sykes’s Limbaugh “jokes”
I try to avoid blogging about entertainers, but there’s no avoiding the fact that what comedian Wanda Sykes said about Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents Association dinner was loathsome (video): “Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails,” Sykes said. “So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails’, you’re, like, ‘I don’t care about
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How far left has Specter moved?
While I stand by my claim that the significance of Arlen Specter’s party switch has been exaggerated, it’s still interesting to see how his voting patterns have changed since he defected from the GOP caucus. Stanford’s Simon Jackman has estimated an ideal point model for the 111th Senate treating Specter as a new legislator since
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Immigration politics in lucha libre
As someone who grew up watching WWF when the heels were often Russian or Middle Eastern cultural stereotypes, it’s fascinating (though not wholly suprising) that Mexican pro wrestling, which is known as “lucha libre,” has created anti-immigrant villains known as the Foreign Legion: It was billed as an invasion. On a chartered tour bus carrying
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The Congressional myth caucus revisited
Last month, I mocked two especially stupid bills in the House of Representatives. The first opposes the US dropping the dollar and the second opposes creation of a NAFTA superhighway. Unfortunately, both bills are based on misperceptions (see here and here, respectively). At the time, I dubbed the members of the House who sponsored or
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Scott Shane on the torture counterfactual
One more note on the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the debate over the effectiveness of torture, which I’ve recently highlighted in two posts (here and here). In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross that I only heard recently, New York Times reporter Scott Shane offered the most detailed exposition of this point that