Twitter roundup

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[David in Cal]

Note that Daum's article about Romney's dog slams Gail Collins, although not by name:

Many versions of the story imply that the dog was not in a crate but rather tethered to the luggage rack in the manner of a silent movie damsel tied to railroad tracks.

[David in Cal]

What Michelle Malkin said about Brendan was:

Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May — while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill — that “one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals.” Conveniently, he defines scandal as a “widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.”

So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal — never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder’s watch — there is no scandal!

Self-serving much?

As I read it, Malkin didn't quite assert that Brendan had said there had been "no administrative wrongdoing." I think she made a different mistake: interpreting Brendan's words as normative, when they were actually descriptive. Brendan never claimed to have the power to define what pundits and historians will consider a "scandal". Instead, he came up with a conventient, objective test to determine whether something would go down as a "scandal".

IMHO Brendan's description is accurate. The mainstream media do have the power to decide what's a "scandal". I think they use this power in a politically biased way, but that's not Brendan's fault.

[David in Cal]

IMHO John Sides, Kevin Collins and Daniel Drezner make too big a deal of an opponent of NSF funding for political science nevertheless referring to a political science study. To find some value in a particular study is quite different from saying that the field should be federally supported. Students pay big tuition. Political science research could be done even without federal support.

Furthermore, political science isn't "science" as that term is generally understood. It's politics, studied using scientific methods.

I don't think colleges consider political science to be a science. I doubt that many colleges would accept a political science course as fulfilling a student's science requirement.

I think most Americans would be surprised to see the NSF funding political science. I think most Americans envision the NSF as funding "real science" -- physics, chemistry, biology, etc.