In the September 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine, David Sirota had an excellent article (subscription required for the full article though you can see a shortened version here) that examined how the fact that almost all the major cities have become one newspaper towns lacking any competition has resulted in in an unhealthy collusion between the papers and local institutions and business leaders, with the papers often suppressing stories that might harm the interests and images of powerful people. [Read more…]
Some time ago, I wrote about this program by the New York Police Department to infiltrate Muslim organizations including “student organizations on college campuses outside their jurisdiction and even outside their state. The names of students taking part in such things as white water rafting are deemed worthy of entering in their files if they pray several times a day or discuss Islam, though you would expect that a Muslim student group would do just these things.” Merely speaking Urdu or frequenting a Lebanese café could trigger suspicions and your conversations recorded. [Read more…]
Academic political scientists tend to discount the value of opinion polls as predictors of presidential elections and tend to look at the so-called ‘fundamentals’. They construct models that correlate vote percentages with data that can be quantified. The ‘Bread and Peace’ model of Douglass Hibbs that I have written about recently is one such model that uses disposable income and wartime casualties as the independent variables. Of course, there exist a whole range of independent variables that one can choose to use in one’s regression calculations and they each predict different outcomes. [Read more…]
One of the benefits of the Todd Akin fiasco is that it has stripped away the mask of reasonable affability that Mike Huckabee has managed to wear for so long and revealed him for what he truly is, an extreme religious dogmatist who values being anti-gay and anti-abortion above all else. [Read more…]
While Mitt Romney’s tax returns have faded from the news for the moment, you can be sure that they will re-emerge as an issue. The Obama campaign had been hitting Romney hard on taxes with ads such as this one. [Read more…]
Todd Akin’s bizarre theory of rape and pregnancy has been getting brutal reviews. Perhaps the most succinct is that of Dr. Michael Greene, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, who said, “There are no words for this — it is just nuts.” [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the extensive back and forth that is taking place about the Julian Assange case, looking at the legal and political aspects of the case that have been presented, along with ways on how this could be resolved with both Assange and his accusers being treated fairly and justice served. He also examines the deep hostility of major elements of the media towards Assange and Wikileaks which has extended to those who have been concerned about the attacks on Wikileaks. [Read more…]
Yesterday, I wrote about a report put out by The Chronicle of Philanthropy disaggregating the amount of charitable giving according to various criteria. In its discussion of the report, NPR said that poor people tended to give a larger proportion of their income to charity, and tried to explain why this might be so. [Read more…]
Watch Todd Akin ask for forgiveness for his comments about rape. Most of it was based on the premise of a poor choice of words rather than a fundamentally erroneous idea, because he says “I used the wrong words in the wrong way and for that I apologize…. The mistake I made was in the words I said, not in the heart I hold.” [Read more…]