Uncategorized
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The bizarre Koh sharia myth
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick debunks the absurd claim that Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and President Obama’s nominee to serve as legal advisor to the State Department, wants to institute Islamic sharia law in this country’s courts — a claim that is based on a single person’s recollection of a talk Koh gave
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Fighting the mythical global currency
Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is hyping the myth that the Obama administration is planning to replace the dollar with a global currency. In fact, the proposal under discussion (which the Obama administration does not support) would create a new global reserve currency — it would not replace the dollar as the legal currency here in
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David Horowitz is making sense
It’s time for some serious man-bites-dog news from the punditocracy. Conservative gadfly David Horowitz — yes, that David Horowitz — is denouncing the excesses of anti-Obama rhetoric from the right: I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the Right, which is beginning to cause me concern. I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in
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Kantor’s Democratic “deficit hawk” snark
Jodi Kantor’s New York Times profile of Obama OMB director Peter Orszag includes this bit of unjustified snark: A former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Orszag is what passes in the Democratic Party for a deficit hawk. “[W]hat passes in the Democratic Party for a deficit hawk”? Is Kantor aware of the fiscal
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Obama press conference theater criticism
I skipped the Obama press conference Tuesday night (I was celebrating after my dissertation defense — hooray!) but I’m horrified by a couple of the articles I saw on it yesterday. First, the New York Times ran an especially stupid analysis by Peter Baker and Adam Nagourney that recycled the “wooden professor” trope that the
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An old favorite: Kass on cones
An Instapundit link reminds me of one of my all-time favorite posts, which details the objections of Leon Kass (the former chair of President Bush’s bioethics council) to eating ice cream cones in public. Yes, ice cream cones. If you haven’t read the post yet, it’s a treat!
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Reuters pushes GOP spin on Obama’s goals
Drudge is linking to a Reuters analysis that illustrates how partisan spin can harden into conventional wisdom. The article, which was written by Tabassum Zakaria, claims that (as the headline puts it) “Resistance grows to Obama’s bigger government.” At one point, after discussing the absurd claims that Obama is a socialist, Zakaria offers the following
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Nyhan world HQ on the move (twice)
For those who are interested in my future plans, the latest news is that I’ll be starting a two-year postdoc in the fall as a a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan (see the program’s announcement of the incoming cohort). After that, I’ll be joining the Department of
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Thomas Friedman’s unity fantasy on banking
Thomas Friedman’s proposed solution to the banking crisis reads like a parody of high Broderism: Which is why I wake up every morning hoping to read this story: “President Obama announced today that he had invited the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in