Brendan Nyhan

It’s shocking how many people still don’t understand the impeachment process only a few years after we went through it with President Clinton. The New York Times was forced to run a correction of a correction today after botching its explanation of the removal of Alcee Hastings from the federal bench — here are the two corrections in sequence:

Correction: December 1, 2006

A front-page article on Wednesday about Representative Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pick Representative Alcee L. Hastings to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee misstated the timing of Mr. Hastings’s acquittal in a bribery case. He was acquitted in a criminal trial in 1983, not after he was impeached by the Senate and removed as a federal district judge in 1989.

Correction: December 8, 2006

A front-page article on Nov. 29 about Representative Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pick Representative Alcee L. Hastings to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee misstated the timing of Mr. Hastings’s acquittal in a bribery case. He was acquitted in a criminal trial in 1983, not after he was impeached and removed as a federal district judge in 1989. A correction in this space last Friday misidentified the body that impeached him. It was the House, not the Senate. (Officials are tried by the Senate and either acquitted or automatically removed from office if convicted.)

Via Drudge, a classy New York Post cover headline that equates the Iraq Study Group’s cautious plan for a phased withdrawal from Iraq with surrender:

It’s no “Headless body in topless bar”, but ridiculous nonetheless.

Since resigning in embarrassment from the Clinton White House, Dick Morris has become a national joke. This passage from an American Spectator article makes me cringe — it combines Morris’s unrealistic third-party boosterism with his desperation to get quoted:

The Lieberman victory bode well for a third party, triangulation master Dick Morris said in an interview for this story.

“Lieberman’s ability to cross party lines easily, certainly is attracting Republican and independent voters and certainly shows that Bloomberg could succeed,” Morris said. “His [Bloomberg’s] combination of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism and hawkishness on terror is a great combo for independent voters.”

Before we view Lieberman’s win as an omen for independent candidates, keep in mind he was a three-term incumbent in a race with no viable Republican opponent. Even an enthusiastic Morris will tell you a Bloomberg candidacy only works if Republicans nominate an arch conservative, not a John McCain or a Rudy Giuliani.

“Bloomberg would represent a middle course, which refuses to order from the dinner menu but demands a la carte,” Morris said. “An appetizer of pro-choice, a main course of pro-growth tax policies and a dessert of tough on terror.”

I love a dessert of tough on terror! Seriously, I assume Morris wants to work for Bloomberg, but I doubt he will run. And even if he does, he won’t win.

Writing on Tapped a few days ago, Ezra Klein gave credit to Mitt Romney for signing up Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, two top-ranked economists, as his economic advisers:

I don’t know how this process works, but Mitt Romney has named his two primary economic advisors for the 2008 campaign, and, to his credit, they’re proponents of, quite arguably, the most politically radioactive ideas in economics. Greg Mankiw’s current obsession is a significant gasoline tax, a policy he’s so committed to he’s created a Facebook group to promote it. Meanwhile, Glenn Hubbard provided crucial backup support when Mankiw admitted that outsourcing was good for the economy — a position that doesn’t play so well in The Rust Belt.

In a weird way, both these moves speak well of Romney… Both these guys are serious about policy — more so, in fact, than they are about politics. And Romney’s willingness to embrace them, impolitic statements and all, is evidence that there’s a current of such seriousness in him, too.

The problem, however, is that both of them already served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush, and have shown that they are unable or unwilling to stand up for honest economics in policymaking. President Bush has repeatedly contradicted his own economists (see here, here, here, and here) and constantly dissembled about economic issues (see chapters 4 and 7 of All the President’s Spin). During and after their terms as CEA chair, Hubbard and Mankiw failed to stand up to these practices. So it’s hard to see how their presence lends credibility to Romney now — why should we believe they will be more than window-dressing?

Ethan Wallison, a former Roll Call reporter, describes an astonishingly stupid move by Nancy Pelosi’s political team when he covered her in Congress:

At one point, it seems to have occurred to Pelosi and her associates that she could double the amount of money she raised – and thus double the amount she gave – if she opened a second political action committee. It never seems to have occurred to the group that, as a matter of law, this was preposterous. If one could double-up by simply opening another committee, why not ten committees? Or one hundred? Pelosi appears not to have had anyone at the time who could point out the obvious to her. So her machine, based in San Francisco, went ahead with the plan, opening a second PAC that was identical to the first in all but name. And soon that committee was taking and giving money in the usual order. The treasurer of both, former California Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, told me he had phoned the Federal Elections Commission beforehand and was told there was nothing wrong with the arrangement – a dubious story, since not even the commissioners are permitted to provide legal guidance over the phone. The FEC eventually fined Pelosi’s original PAC $24,000 for the screw-up. Her committee was also forced to retrieve all the illegal money that had been given to candidates and to reimburse its donors.

How could anyone possibly have thought that opening a second PAC would change the limits on giving? Here’s the AP report on the fine (Pelosi’s PAC was actually fined $21,000):

A fund-raising committee run by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was fined $21,000 for improperly accepting donations over federal limits, according to records and interviews.

The political action committee, Team Majority, was one of two PACs Pelosi used to fund candidates during the 2002 campaign. She stopped raising and donating money through the committee more than a year ago, after complaints that she was improperly using the multiple PACs to exceed limits.

The fine, which was paid in October 2003, was reported in Team Majority’s year-end campaign finance records, released this month. The case is still open and the Federal Election Commission declined comment, but Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said that the fine was connected to donations made to more than two dozen candidates from both of Pelosi’s so-called leadership PACs — Team Majority and PAC to the Future — that together exceeded federal limits.

“We checked with the FEC, we thought this was OK, when we found out it wasn’t we did everything aboveboard and we’ve been complying with them,” Daly said.

Daly said Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat and leading advocate of campaign finance reform, would dissolve Team Majority after the FEC case was concluded. Two Democrats — Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen and Julie Thomas, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Iowa — have been fined $2,500 each in connection with donations received from the committee. The agency was still negotiating with a third congressional committee before closing the case, according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Federal law dictates that if multiple PACs are under the control of the same person, they’re considered affiliated and must adhere to limits as if they were one. Federal law limits PAC contributions to candidates to $5,000 per election. Donors to PACs can give $5,000 annually.

In the 2002 election cycle, Pelosi gave more than two dozen candidates the $5,000 maximum contribution from Team Majority as well as PAC to the Future, which is her main leadership PAC — thereby exceeding contribution limits.

Team Majority gave back more than $100,000 that was collected in excess of limits, records show. But it also collected more than $140,000 that Daly said was within the proper limits. That money was spent last year to support Pelosi’s fund-raising activities — including money for salaries, legal fees and phone services, and $2,176 to entertain donors at a box at the Simon and Garfunkel Concert at the MCI Center in December, records show.

The fine was first reported Monday by Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper.

The best part, though, is this quote from former California Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, her campaign treasurer:

“The main reason for the creation of the second PAC, frankly, was to give twice as much hard dollars,” to candidates, McCarthy told Roll Call at the time. He was then treasurer of both committees.

And yes, Pelosi supports campaign finance reform such as Shays-Meehan.

Even as he praised the bipartisanship of the Iraq Study Group report today, President Bush seemed to derisively refer to his opponents as the “Democrat Party” — here’s the CQ transcript:

The country, in my judgment, is tired of pure political bickering that happens in Washington. And they understand that on this important issue of war and peace it is best for our country to work together. And I understand how difficult that is, but this report will give us all an opportunity to find common ground for the good of the country — not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democrat Party but for the good of the country.

The official White House transcript uses “Democratic,” but that sounds wrong to me. (You can listen for yourself — go to 1:54 of this video clip.)

As Ruth Marcus recently argued in the Washington Post, President Bush repeatedly uses “Democrat party,” “Democrat leadership,” etc. rather than “Democratic,” which is of course the actual name of the party. As she wrote:

If he wanted to, President Bush could change the tone in Washington with a single syllable: He could just say “ic.” That is, he could stop referring to the opposition as the “Democrat Party” and call the other side, as it prefers, the Democratic Party.

Instead, however, he prefers to keep sticking his thumb in their eye. It tells you all you need to know about his commitment to bipartisanship.

Weep for the state of TV journalism.

My friend and former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz runs a satirical website called Dateline Hollywood. This week they ran an obviously fake article titled “Michael Richards apologizes for blackface roast appearance” that the Baltimore CBS affiliate ran as “breaking news” twice yesterday. Here’s the item on it from the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column:

Poor Michael Richards. Seems people are willing to believe anything about him these days!

On at least two of its Monday evening news broadcasts, Baltimore’s Channel 13 reported that the disgraced “Seinfeld” comic had apologized for yet another racial uproar, when he showed up in blackface at a celebrity roast for Whoopi Goldberg.

What, you didn’t hear about that one? Yee-e-e-ah, well, see, that’s probably because it’s not true. A WJZ staffer ripped the story off the Web — without realizing that the source, DatelineHollywood.com, is a purely satirical site, which invented the completely bogus item as a riff on Richards’s real-life racist outburst at an L.A. comedy club last month.

“This was an error in judgment by one of our producers who did not follow our established policy,” said station spokeswoman Liz Chuday. “She failed to verify a story from a publication we were not familiar with before it aired.” The station caught the error in time to issue a correction by the 11 p.m. broadcast.

The producer missed some pretty obvious tipoffs– like the line about Richards pouring Aunt Jemima pancake syrup over Goldberg’s head. Also: The links to other “articles,” including “Britney Spears’ Vagina Asks Press for Privacy” and “Rupert Murdoch Found Dead Next to Bloody Glove.”

“Get out!” laughed Dateline: Hollywood creator Ben Fritz when we told him his fake news made the real news. The former political writer — a recent transplant from Adams Morgan to L.A. — said this wasn’t the first time the site’s satire cut too close to the bone.

“Last year we had an article about how Pat Robertson said Katrina happened because they picked Ellen DeGeneres to host the Emmys.”

No, of course he never said that, but “a lot of people thought that was real.”

The Baltimore Sun also ran a story on the blunder, which dwarfs the Robertson myth that Ben mentioned to the post. What an embarrassment.

A sharp letter to the editor in this month’s issue of The Atlantic catches historian David Kennedy making a common demographic error:

In the excerpts from the Aspen Ideas Festival (October Atlantic), the historian David M. Kennedy is quoted as follows: “Another asymmetry of very troubling proportions, it seems to me, is [in] the nature of today’s armed forces; 42 percent of today’s Army enlistees are ethnic or racial minorities—42 percent.”

Kennedy should be aware that the census shows that among U.S. residents under age forty, nonwhites are approximately 40 percent of the population. Since most members of the military are under forty, the “nature of today’s armed forces” does reflect the population at large, rather than a disproportionate number of “minorities.”

Mike Burns
Bakersfield, Calif.

The younger generations of Americans are increasingly diverse due to higher birthrates among some minority groups and immigration. But many people, like Kennedy, mistakenly compare minority representation to their proportion of the general population rather than the relevant age cohort. This error can have pernicious effects. In Kennedy’s case, it falsely suggests minorities are overrepresented in the military. And in the case of higher education, it means that minorities are more underrepresented in elite colleges and universities than people often realize (since they tend to compare student populations to the US population as a whole, rather than 18-22 year olds).

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, is quoted in the New York Times today trying to throw “cut and run” jargon back at Republicans:

The resistance to finishing the appropriations bills is not going over well with Democrats, who have accused Republicans of acting irresponsibly. The unfinished business could also prove a distraction for members of the incoming majority who would like to spend the first weeks of 2007 moving ahead with their own agenda rather than cleaning up from 2006.

“They cut and run from the troops by not doing their oversight, and now they are cutting and running from the country by not passing the spending bills,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who will be the chairman of the Democratic caucus next year.

It’s reminiscent of the conservative attempt to counter criticism of the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay leaders and members by portraying the group’s critics as themselves discriminatory. But turning jargon around in this way is unlikely to work. The reason is basic cognitive science: when a speaker uses a phrase like “cut and run,” it triggers associations with the concepts that are linked to that phrase. Needless to say, those associations are unlikely to be favorable to Democrats in this case.

Via Media Matters, Bill O’Reilly has declared that Iraq is not in the midst of a civil war (expert opinion to the contrary) and that the press is “rooting for the USA to lose in Iraq”:

NBC News has declared that there is indeed a civil war in Iraq. Now, that’s not shocking because NBC is the most aggressive anti-Bush network these days, as they have made a calculated effort to woo left-wing viewers. The question is, is NBC wrong about Iraq? The answer is, yes. Of course, the American media is not helping anyone by oversimplifying the situation and rooting for the USA to lose in Iraq. And that is what some media people are doing.