Brendan Nyhan

I gave up on the State of the Union long before Tim Kaine came on to give the Democratic rebuttal, but the word is out about his disturbing left eyebrow — take a look at this picture:

Kaine’s background and his recent victory in Virginia make him an interesting figure to deliver the Democratic response, but that eyebrow is too distracting for the party to ever put him on national television again. Call me shallow if you want, but it’s true. If you don’t believe me, watch the Real Player video from C-SPAN. Yikes.

(PS There are 880 hits for “tim kaine eyebrow” on Google already.)

Michael Beschloss touted the myth that State of the Union addresses boost the president’s poll numbers on “The Daily Show” last night, but it’s not true according to Gallup:

Historical Gallup findings dating back to President Jimmy Carter’s administration demonstrate that, despite the fanfare, presidents rarely are able to increase their approval ratings following a State of the Union address

Mystery Pollster has more…

During an interview with Michael Beschloss on last night’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart (who previously said he has the flu) admitted how good this administration has been for the bank accounts of liberal pundits:

STEWART: I watched the State of the Union address and I obviously had a fever and was vomiting.

BESCHLOSS: Has this been sort of a long-term effect —

STEWART: No, just one night.

BESCHLOSS: — of the Bush presidency on you?

STEWART: No, the long-term effect is I have a much nicer apartment.

(And yes, Stewart has a nice apartment.)

When the Wall Street editorial board is calling Republicans unpopular, you know they’re in trouble:

The question is, does the Congressional GOP think it really needs a major change? It’s easy to be complacent in this age of gerrymandered districts and “safe” seats. But Republicans might also want to consider that they now have worse approval ratings than the Democrats did in February of 1994–eight months before they were swept from power by the Gingrich-led GOP.

A National Public Radio story this morning discusses the boondoggle of useless kids’ disaster websites. The Department of Homeland Security is launching Ready Kids, a website helping kids prepare for disasters that features Rex, who NPR hilariously describes as a “flashlight-toting mountain lion”:

And it turns out that FEMA has a similar kids website called FEMA for KIDS that features Herman, the hermit spokescrab for disaster response:

Let me ask the obvious question: why? Do kids actually visit government-run disaster preparedness websites? And these ham-handed responses to create a wacky cartoon mascot remind me less of Smoky the Bear than Poochie, the rapping, surfing dog from “The Simpsons” who is added to “Itchy & Scratchy” in a cynical attempt to revitalize the show:

From the official SOTU transcript:

Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security —
(applause) — yet the rising cost of entitlements is a problem that is not
going away. (Applause.)

Per Josh Marshall’s request for video, it’s at 35:07 in the C-SPAN footage (Real Player – if the link above doesn’t work, click the link on the C-SPAN homepage).

Romenesko links today to my post bemoaning the hiring of Ted Koppel as a contributing columnist to the New York Times, as well as Jack Shafer’s critique of the predictably insipid mess:

It’s not Ted Koppel’s fault that the New York Times has made him a Times contributing columnist. As Koppel writes in yesterday’s (Jan. 29) debut column, “And Now, a Word from Our Demographic,” the invitation came from an “editor friend of mine,” so the fault belongs to whoever assigned, accepted, and edited or rewrote Koppel’s self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, late-to-the-party, and punishingly obvious 1,500-word piece about the state of television news. (It’s bad.) It’s not even Koppel’s fault if he thinks he’s any good at this columnist thing, when he isn’t. If we were to belittle every person who stretched his talents until they pop, we’d have little time for anything else.

So, my critique isn’t personal, it’s institutional. Based on what did the Times think Koppel could write a compelling newspaper column? Did they not see disaster in this piece?

In case you missed it, here’s the introduction to Koppel’s piece, which was so incoherent I could barely follow what he was talking about:

Not all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn’t enough of a cliché, this novel’s hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.

After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:

The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.

They wander the battlefields of other people’s wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.

The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.

A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life’s imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.

Where to begin?…

Let me proclaim Nyhan’s Law of Op-Ed Writing #1: Columns that include the question “Where to begin?” are bad. And of course, there’s Nyhan’s Law of Op-Ed Writing #2: Old ex-reporters make for awful columnists.

It’s enough to make me long for more phoned-in columns from Bob Herbert.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man many GOP insiders think will be their next presidential nominee, inspiring confidence with his grasp of current events:

Wall Street may be intensely interested in just about every word ever uttered by Mr. Bernanke, the former Princeton economist and chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers who is President Bush’s choice to succeed Alan Greenspan.

But in Washington, he is barely on some people’s radar screens. Indeed, here is what Senator George Allen of Virginia, who is considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said when asked his opinion of the Bernanke nomination.

“For what?”

Told that Mr. Bernanke was up for the Fed chairman’s job, Mr. Allen hedged a little, said he had not been focused on it, and wondered aloud when the hearings would be. Told that the Senate Banking Committee hearings had concluded in November, the senator responded: “You mean I missed them all? I paid no attention to them.”

Update 2/2: Apparently Allen overcame his ignorance about Bernanke — Jim Bunning was the only senator who opposed the nominee during a voice vote on Tuesday.

Yesterday’s January 31, 2006

Via Michael Tofias, here’s an amusing story on the battle to control politicians’ biographies on Wikipedia:

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the “world’s largest encyclopedia,” The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Matt Vogel, Meehan’s chief of staff, said he authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan’s campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan’s campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

…Wikipedia’s online honor system has made it ripe for abuse by vandals. Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor “smells of cow dung.” Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is “ineffective.” These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.

In November and December, The Sun has learned, users of the House’s IP address were temporarily blocked from changing content because of violations described by the site as a “deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia.”