One of Barack Obama’s personality strengths is that he does not seem to get flustered and put off stride by events and attacks. He seems to respond calmly and in measured ways to events and people have wondered how he manages it. [Read more…]
So Mitt Romney has released his 2011 tax returns and a ‘summary statement’ about his taxes from 20 previous years. It was interesting that he released them on Friday afternoon, the ‘Friday news dump’ time, which is the traditional period for releasing news that you don’t want people to pay much attention to. I think this practice arose from the times when people got much of their news from the broadcast TV networks and few people watched them on weekends when they were often pre-empted by sports events. [Read more…]
Science journalism plays an extremely important role in translating the almost impenetrable jargon and style of journal articles into languagethat can be digested by the general public. Hence it is important that they convey accurately and in a balanced way the main conclusions of the research. But in order to make their work appealing to the general public, scientists make often make passing claims in their papers that are not as well supported by their data but catch the eye of journalists who then give them undue weight. Seth Mnookin has pointed out recent examples where this practice has caused widespread public misunderstanding of the results of research. [Read more…]
It falls to Fox News to try and clean up the repeated messes made by the Mitt Romney campaign. The Daily Show had an excellent three-part series on the extreme effort required by them to mitigate the damage done by the recent release of the video. [Read more…]
I was curious about the fact that there seems to have been no subsequent news about the effort to blackmail Mitt Romney about his past tax returns. [Read more…]
I appeared on Wednesday on the show HuffPost Live in a segment they call Community Sound Off where they have guests pick a Huffington Post article for discussion. [Read more…]
With all the attention focused on Mitt Romney’s verbal stumbles on the campaign, less attention has been paid to his running mate Paul Ryan’s activities. He too has had his share of awkward incidents. But while Paul Krugman has rightly been excoriating Ryan’s budget, calling him ‘an unserious man’ and his budget a ‘con game’, other commentators have focused more on Ryan’s odd penchant for embellishing his physical prowess to unrealistic levels. [Read more…]
(This clip appeared on September 18, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
… and he is not pleased. (Jennifer Rubin is a nutter blogger for the Washington Post.) [Read more…]