Brendan Nyhan

Overstating the media's importance

I'm sick of people elevating the media into the central force in American politics.

The Note, an idiotic arbiter of media conventional wisdom if there ever was one, suggests today that the impending departure of Associated Press chief political writer "will change the contours of the 2006 and 2008 elections in ways that can now be only dimly understood." No.

Jamison Foser, a columnist at Media Matters, recently wrote a column with a similar perspective, stating that "The defining issue of our time is the media.... The dominant political force of our time is the media." Again, no and no.

The media matters a great deal in shaping the public's perceptions about politics, as we argued at Spinsanity and in All the President's Spin. But a new AP political writer will not shape the 2006 and 2008 elections, nor is the media the "dominant political force of our time." The press does not have that sort of effect on macropolitical outcomes. In fact, we rarely observe significant shifts in public opinion in a political environment in which conflicting messages are in circulation -- it is hard for politicians or the media to move the numbers in this context. (See John Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion or Page and Shapiro's The Rational Public for more.)

A better way to understand the media is as a reflection of the larger society in which it exists. Journalists produce content that is heavily shaped by commercial incentives and the political balance of power. Because activists and journalists follow the output of the media on a daily basis, and because the media's output tracks the prevailing forces in society, it often seems like the media is the main causal force. But that is silliness. (If you want to understand the ebb and flow of American politics from a macro perspective, read The Macro Polity.)

Does this mean the press can't or shouldn't do better? Absolutely not. The press has a crucial responsibility in a democratic society. But we should not overestimate its influence. If only reporters knew some political science...

Update 5/31 7:23 PM: Wonkette mocks The Note for the statement I quoted above.

Dear ABC News Political Unit,

Have you guys been outside lately? Not necessarily today, but maybe at any point since you became a member of a “political unit?” And again, not even necessarily that far outside, not like out to the “heartland” or “outside the beltway” or something, just anywhere outside the ABC News offices? It doesn’t count if you went there with the rest of the ABC Political Unit, by the way.

Anyway, good luck, Ron. Your new job will surely alter the very fabric of time and space, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

New comment policy

Rather than manually approving every comment, which is time-consuming and slows down discussion, I have turned on a Typepad feature that requires commenters to verify that they aren't a spambot before their comments can be posted. I still reserve the right to delete comments that are off-topic, inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate. (Trackbacks will still be moderated.)

Democrats still have cultural problems

Josh Marshall is angry about Jeffrey Goldberg's story in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the state of the Democratic Party and so am I, but for very different reasons. Marshall thinks the article is cliche-ridden and out of touch with what's really going on in the party. Maybe so, but the message it drove home for me is that much of the party's base is still way out of step with mainstream cultural values.

Two passages stand out. First, Goldberg describes a New Mexico rally in honor of Howard Dean in which the secretary of state proudly refuses a veteran's request to display an intact flag above her house:

Dean was late arriving from the airport, so a succession of local Democratic politicians took to the stage to deliver excoriations of the Republicans... Many nodded in sympathy when the New Mexico secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, told a story about the flag that flies over her house. A neighbor -- a veteran, she noted -- pointed out one day that her flag was "torn and tattered" and asked her if she wanted him to mend it or replace it. She said no, and explained, "I keep it here because it's going to stay flying tattered and torn because that's how this war is going. It's going nowhere. And it will come down when this war is over."

Later, Goldberg describes the refusal by activists at a Center for American progress meeting to concede that too many abortions take place in this country:

Abortion-rights groups are uneasy when Democratic centrists urge them to shift the discussion from "a woman's right to choose" to the need to reduce the number of abortions. Recently, at a meeting held at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank founded by the former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, an abortion-rights activist named Rachel Laser, a former senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, was impatient with the refusal of others to view abortion as a moral issue as well as a personal one. "I said at the session that there are 1.3 million abortions in this country and that's too many, and it's too many for the majority of Americans," Laser, who runs Third Way's Culture Project, recalled. "Polls show that a majority of Americans think that abortion is morally wrong some or all of the time, and we have to address that."

After Laser spoke, the moderator asked the audience "by a show of hands, how many people here think that 1.3 million abortions is too many abortions?" As Laser remembers a moment, "It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands. I definitely touched a nerve. The fact is the majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of Americans also see something sad in what this procedure does."

Both of these anecdotes enrage me, and I'm a moderate Democrat. I can't imagine how they play with centrists or conservatives.

Update 5/31 8:27 PM EST: Via Marshall, here's a link to the Goldberg piece. Also, I edited the title of the post in response to a comment by Oliver.

Just to briefly elaborate on my reasoning, I'm not arguing in favor of my positions because they reflect mainstream values. I'm arguing in favor of them because I believe it's disrespectful to fly a tattered American flag above your house, and because I believe there are far too many abortions in this country. The first point is simply a matter of personal preference, but the second is subject to empirical analysis. And the statistics we have suggest that abortion rates in the US are high relative to other industrialized countries. We can do better.

Wall Street Journal agitprop on "Team B"

In an editorial about new CIA director General Michael Hayden today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board slips in some revisionist history on "Team B," the outside team brought in to provide an alternative analysis of the Soviet threat:

The CIA's Iraq mistakes have been amply documented. But the agency's career analysts also got their judgments of the Soviet Union's condition badly wrong. The Ford Administration had the foresight to bring in outside experts to do a so-called Team B analysis of the Soviet threat in the 1970s, and they got it right.

"[T]hey got it right"? Here's Fareed Zakaria's assessment of Team B's accuracy:

During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B--which included Paul Wolfowitz--produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.

In retrospect, Team B's conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber "probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984." In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.

The reality was that even the CIA’s own estimates--savaged as too low by Team B--were, in retrospect, gross exaggerations. In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that every year it had "substantially overestimated" the Soviet threat along all dimensions. For example, in 1975 the CIA forecast that within 10 years the Soviet Union would replace 90 percent of its long-range bombers and missiles. In fact, by 1985, the Soviet Union had been able to replace less than 60 percent of them.

Jonathan Chait on the Hillary backlash

Via Andrew Sullivan, Jon Chait has a perfect analysis of Hillary Clinton's problems in the LA Times:

It appears the grand Clinton strategy is backfiring. As a prospective national candidate, she has two great vulnerabilities. First, many voters think she's too liberal. Second, many voters also see her as cold, calculating and unlikable.

Her response to this was to position herself in the center, cozying up with her former GOP tormenters in the Senate, staking out hawkish positions and making an overture to cultural conservatives. The theory was that her centrist positions would endear her to moderates but that it wouldn't cost her on the left, because years of conservative vilification caused liberals to bond with her emotionally.

But instead of moderates focusing on her positions while liberals focus on her persona, the opposite seems to be happening. Moderates fear she remains too culturally divisive to win. And liberals can't stand her centrist positioning. It's the worst of all worlds.What Clinton seems not to get is that few people evaluate candidates as the sum of their positions. Voters just don't know enough about the issues to do it. (Nor, for that matter, do most political journalists.) Instead, they have a basic impression of the candidate's character, and the issues feed into that.

Mark Schmitt, an extremely smart liberal at the New America Foundation, coined a saying that captures the dynamic: "It's not what you say about the issues, it's what the issues say about you."

In other words, the literal popularity of an issue often matters less than the way that issue fits into a narrative of a politician's character. John McCain used his support for campaign finance reform to craft a narrative of himself as a brave truth-teller unafraid of special interests. George W. Bush in 2000 used a couple of issue positions relatively minuscule in scale (faith-based initiatives, education reform) to craft an image as a compassionate innovator.

Clinton's problem is that everything she does to staunch her perceived ideology problem compounds her perceived character problem. What she says about the issues may be popular, but what the issues say about her is that she's a shameless self-reinventor.

Gore is winning plaudits because he's in the opposite position. A couple of years ago he appeared to be veering too far left when he denounced the Iraq war and the administration's disregard for civil liberties. But now, almost no one can argue with those positions — certainly not any prospective Democratic voter. And his focus on global warming, which may not rank high on the list of voter concerns in Ohio, points to his genuine conviction on the issue. Gore cared about the environment before it was cool (or, as it were, warm.) The issue helps him more as a character issue than a substance one.

This is exactly right. But again, the race may turn on whether the Hillary juggernaut comes off the rails among Democratic elites.

Nancy Pelosi's lioness metaphor

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is popularizing a weird metaphor to make Democratic women seem tougher on national security.

In the latest New Yorker, Pelosi is quoted as follows:

I'm a mom. I have five children, and I have five grandchildren. I always say to people, 'Think lioness.' This is how Democrats are. You threaten our children -- and that's American -- you threaten our country, you're dead. You're dead." (italics in original)

It's not the first time she's used this formulation. Here's Pelosi using two animal metaphors during an interview with Jim Lehrer on March 30:

I'm a mother of five. I have five grandchildren. And I always say: Think of a lioness. Think of a mother bear. You come anywhere near our cubs, you're dead. And so, in terms of any threat to our country, people have to know we'll be there to preemptively strike.

In fact, a look at the Nexis database shows that Pelosi has been using the lioness metaphor since 2003. And the term is apparently spreading -- a Hillary Clinton supporter is portrayed in a new campaign video using the same metaphor, saying "I think of Hillary as a lioness protecting children."

I'm hopeful that voters are ready to trust female leaders on national security issues, but are lioness metaphors the answer? They just seem silly to me...

Update 6/1 8:41 AM: The Hillary video is now online.

George Allen's race problem is more than personal

Media Matters reports that MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews downplayed Senator George Allen's public and private displays of the Confederate flag on Wednesday, comparing them to a Democrat wearing a Che Guevara or Karl Marx shirt during their youth. But as the New Republic pointed out, "Allen has either displayed the flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000." I challenge Matthews (and anyone else) to name one prominent Democrat who was seen wearing a Che Guevara shirt in the last decade. It's an absurd comparison.

The problem with Ryan Lizza's New Republic piece on Allen is that it generally framed the Senator's racial insensitivity in terms of his personal history, allowing Matthews and various conservative pundits to downplay his actions as youthful rebellion.

But as Lizza and I document, Allen's nearly lifelong insensitivity about race in his personal life dovetails with his years-long exploitation of the issue of race as a professional politician:
-Allen's first statewide ad in Virginia portrayed the Confederate flag;
-Allen signed a Confederate History Month proclamation that called the Civil War "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights" and did not mention slavery;
-Allen opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act;
-Allen opposed creating a state holiday to honor Martin Luther King in Virginia;
-Allen voted against changing a racially offensive state song as a state delegate;
-Allen initially praised Trent Lott when he came under fire in 2002 for praising Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat presidential candidacy.

Is that history really comparable to wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt as a kid? I don't think so.

John McCain's solution to the crisis in Iraq

The John McCain press infatuation has got to stop. Check out this "straight talk," which was reported breathlessly by the New York Observer:

For all the national attention surrounding John McCain’s two highly anticipated, protest-ridden commencement speeches in New York last week, the Senator actually saved some of his best material for the crowd that gathered on Friday behind closed doors in the back of the Regency Hotel.  

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.  

"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

So honest! So bold! What an innovative diplomatic concept! If only John McCain were president, we'd have peace in Iraq!

Blech.

Update 5/24 3:33 PM: Among the many links to this post, Shakespeare's Sister definitely gets off the best line:

I have the best informants in all of the blogosphere, and one of them has gotten me a copy of McCain’s entire plan. If you thought "Phase One: Stop the Bullshit" was outstanding, wait until you get a load of "Phase Two: No, Seriously -- I Mean It."

Defense leaks about Duke lacrosse evidence

Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong turned over a mountain of evidence to the accused lacrosse players' defense team, and they promptly began leaking it to the media. Here's a roundup of the major claims that are being circulated, which should be interpreted cautiously given their source:

(1) The accuser allegedly claimed the other dancer witnessed the alleged attack, which the other dancer denies:

The defense sources also said Tuesday that, according to the records Nifong handed over last week, the woman at one point said that a second dancer also was in the bathroom where the incident allegedly occurred. But the sources said that when asked about this, the second dancer replied, "That's a crock."

(2) The accuser allegedly stated that no condoms were used, which makes the lack of DNA evidence more damning:

In other new information, the accuser told police her alleged attackers did not use condoms, the defense sources said.

Again, Nifong had no comment.

The question of whether the alleged rapists used condoms is an issue because the use of condoms could account for the lack of any DNA evidence linking the suspects to the accuser.

(3) The medical exam allegedly found no tearing or bleeding:

[T]hree defense sources, who asked not to be identified, said a forensic examination of the alleged victim found no tearing, bleeding or other injury associated with a sexual assault. Instead, the exam detected only swelling in the accuser's vagina and tenderness in her breasts and lower right body, the sources said.

However, a police search-warrant affidavit said the hospital exam had determined the woman suffered "injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted vaginally and anally."

(4) The accuser may not have been tested for drugs or alcohol:

Medical records of the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse rape case suggest she might not have been tested for drugs or alcohol, according to a defense filing Monday.

Several people described the accuser as being severely impaired the night of the alleged attack, with one of the first police officers to see her describing her a "passed out drunk." But some have suggested that she may have been given a so-called "date rape drug," and Newsweek magazine said District Attorney Mike Nifong had hinted at such a possibility.

Authorities have said a doctor and a specially trained nurse performed a physical exam on the accuser that found her condition to be consistent with having been sexually assaulted. But the nurse who filled out a report on that exam indicated no toxicology tests were performed, according to a defense motion filed Monday.

Several attorneys not connected with the case said Monday they were surprised by the apparent lack of a toxicology report.

If such data showed the exotic dancer was intoxicated on the night in question, it could be highly beneficial to the defense, lawyer Mark Edwards said.

"Either way -- whether it was a date-rape drug or voluntary intoxication -- it would affect the reliability of her identification," Edwards added. "It goes to the question of her credibility."

On the other hand, evidence of a date-rape drug in the dancer's body could have helped the prosecution by showing evil intentions on the part of someone, Edwards said.

"It would help to explain the apparent intoxication when police encountered this woman later," he said. "It also would show that there was likely a sexual assault or at least a plan to commit a sexual assault."

The bogus GOP "gas calculator"

Yesterday, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman sent an email to supporters (PDF) with the subject line "The Democrat Plan: $3.98 Gas, $955 More Per Year at the Pump." The email refers repeatedly to what "Democrats offer," "the Democrat's (sic) energy proposals," "how much more Democrats want you to pay at the pump," "how much more Democrats (sic) plan would cost you," "what a Democrat-controlled Congress would cost you," and "the Democrat plan for higher energy prices." The email features links to a website with a scare video and a "gas prices calculator" for the supposed Democratic plan.

But if you actually read the "research" supporting the GOP's claims, you'll discover that the Democratic "plan" consists of votes to increase the gas tax and create a BTU tax in 1993, plus their support of the Kyoto Treaty. That means the "plan" was cobbled together by RNC opposition researchers using two votes from 13 years ago. Even by DC standards, that's unconvincing. (To be sure, I support a much higher gas tax combined with an offsetting tax cut that would be administered by an independent agency. But unfortunately the recent increase in the price of gas has scared most Democrats away from this position.)

More importantly, our Constitution has a little feature called the separation of powers. In theory, at least, President Bush can veto bills passed by Congress. There's no way a Democratic Congress could pass a huge gas tax increase or get the Kyoto Treaty approved while he's in office.

All the President's Spin for $5

A friend reports that All the President's Spin was recently the "deal of the day" at the Barnes & Noble sales annex. They're selling it as a bargain book for $5 new, which is a good deal for a copy from a major seller (Amazon is currently selling the book for $10.78 new, and the third party sellers on the site have it for $.30 used or $1 for copies described as being in new condition).

Bush aide dissembles, smears war critics

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, White House aide Peter Wehner attacks a series of "antiwar myths" about the war in Iraq, many of which are straw men that he pummels ritualistically.

For instance, in a supposed refutation of the claim that the Bush administration promoted false intelligence about Iraq, he writes:

[N]o serious person would justify a war based on information he knows to be false and which would be shown to be false within months after the war concluded. It is not as if the WMD stockpile question was one that wasn't going to be answered for a century to come.

I agree. But there are few serious people in the highest ranks of the Bush administration. To take just one example, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other officials repeatedly asserted that truck trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons units despite numerous intelligence analyses to the contrary. The aluminum tubes story is similar. (And let's not forget all the other claims the Bush administration made after they were proven to be false.)

At another point, Wehner attacks the claim that "promoting democracy in the Middle East is a postwar rationalization":

"The president now says that the war is really about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. This effort at after-the-fact justification was only made necessary because the primary rationale was so sadly lacking in fact," according to Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, President Bush argued for democracy taking root in Iraq before the war began.

The key word here is "primary." The primary rationale was, of course, the supposed intersection of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, neither of which were substantiated. The fact that President Bush "argued for democracy" before the war does not make it his primary rationale. What Pelosi said is perfectly accurate. The primary rationale for the war shifted to democracy after the initial (primary) rationale collapsed.

Wehner concludes his opus by suggesting that critics of the war are soft on Saddam Hussein:

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

This loathsome tactic has become all too common in the debate over Iraq since 2002.

There are other, highly arguable claims in Wehner's piece, but the intent is clear -- to gloss over the Bush administration's failings and smear its critics at a time when the war in Iraq has become increasingly unpopular. Wehner is, after all, the director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.

White House twists Medicare RX numbers

Robert Pear's dissection of the Bush administration's abuse of statistics about the Medicare prescription drug bill takes me back to the old days:

In trying to shape public perceptions, the Bush administration has manipulated enrollment figures.

On April 20, the administration issued a news release saying, "30 Million Medicare Beneficiaries Now Receiving Prescription Drug Coverage." On May 10, it announced, "37 Million Medicare Beneficiaries Now Receiving Prescription Drug Coverage."

Only one million people had signed up in the three-week interval between those dates. Most of the apparent increase resulted from the administration's decision to include six million people who had not signed up for the Medicare drug benefit but had coverage from other sources.

Likewise, on May 10, the White House said, "Of the more than 42 million people eligible for Medicare, more than 31 million people with Medicare now have Part D-related prescription drug coverage."

But more than 10 percent of the people — 3.5 million of the 31 million beneficiaries — were getting drug coverage from programs unrelated to Medicare: the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and Tricare, the military health care plan.

I'm glad he ran the story, but why wasn't this news back when it happened?

Also, Pear's lede is an annoying example of "he said," "she said":

Republicans tend to overstate enrollment, which is widely viewed as a measure of the popularity and success of the program, known as Part D of Medicare.

Democrats stretch the facts, too. They suggest that hardly anyone is benefiting from the program, which they call costly, confusing and corrupt.

But the Times reporter provides no specific example of Democratic deception that is comparable to the misleading White House statistics quoted above.

Democratic politics is all about Hillary

The big Al Gore profile in New York magazine, which touts him as a 2008 candidate, features this blind quote which perfectly summarizes the state of play in the party right now:

[T]he Gore boomlet is also being driven by another force: the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s march to her party’s nomination. "Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences," observes a senior party player. "One: 'She is the presumptive front-runner.' Two: 'I don't much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God's sake!' And three: 'If she’s our nominee, we’re going to get killed.' It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it."

The second sentence is the key. If party elites are too scared to coordinate against Hillary, she will probably win the nomination. That's the lesson of research on the modern primary process being done by a team out of UCLA (PDF).

For all of Gore's weaknesses, which center on the media's hatred of him, I agree with the GOP strategist quoted in the article, who says "Gore has liabilities of his own," but "there's just no question that hers are much deeper than his."

Still, both Gore and Clinton have terrible favorability profiles even after years of positive press since 2000. Fox News puts Clinton at 50 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable and Gore at 41 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable. Those are awful numbers for a presidential race because it is much harder to move someone with an unfavorable opinion into the other column than to shape the perceptions of undecided voters. For those who missed it, here's my take on that problem:

Negative stereotypes of Hillary have deep roots, and many voters are likely to revert to them once she comes under serious attack. I worked for a Nevada Senate candidate in 2000 (Ed Bernstein) who had similar image problems to Hillary. He was well-known to most Nevadans and had a highly defined, polarizing personality. Over the course of the campaign, we built up his favorable/unfavorable ratings from 21/33 in late 1999 to 44/36 in Sept. 2000, and pulled within four points of our opponent in a DSCC poll. But when the Republicans unloaded a million dollars in negative ads on us, all that went out the window. Voters snapped back to their initial perceptions of Bernstein, his unfavorables spiked over 50 percent, the DSCC dropped us, and the race was over. Hillary is a better politician than Bernstein, but I think the dynamics are likely to be similar. As I've said before, a bad economy could put her over the top, but the combination of a polarizing persona and a liberal track record is likely to be devastating to her chances.

The Leopold/Truthout fiasco

I'm back from vacation and surprised anyone believed the alleged scoop about Karl Rove's indictment, which was posted on the left-wing website Truthout.org by disgraced journalist Jason Leopold. Predictably, it's been retracted, though Truthout's "partial apology" is a mishmash of cant:

On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 2006, TruthOut ran a story titled, "Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators." The story stated in part that top Bush aide Karl Rove had earlier that day been indicted on the charges set forth in the story's title.

The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story. While we paid very careful attention to the sourcing on this story, we erred in getting too far out in front of the news-cycle. In moving as quickly as we did, we caused more confusion than clarity. And that was a disservice to our readership and we regret it.

As such, we will be taking the wait-and-see approach for the time being. We will keep you posted.

Marc Ash, Executive Director - t r u t h o u t

Here's a hint to all you Rove indictment watchers out there: When someone posts claims that would be huge national news on a website that specializes in reprinting other publications' articles under the guise of "fair use," it means they're likely to be bogus.

But the whole fiasco did provide an occasion for Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's attorney, to get off a good line to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz at Leopold's expense (via Opinion Journal's Best of the Web):

Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's lawyer, says he spent most of the day on May 12 taking his cat to the veterinarian and having a technician fix his computer at home.

He was stunned, therefore, when journalists started calling to ask about an online report that he had spent half the day at his law office, negotiating with Patrick Fitzgerald -- and that the special prosecutor had secretly obtained an indictment of Rove.

The cat's medical tests, Luskin says, found that "the stools were free of harmful parasites, which is more than I can say for this case."

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, was genuinely moved by Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth:

I hope this doesn't sound too Arianna-like. But last night, I went to a screening of the Al Gore movie. And I found myself walking out in a strange mood. I had just seen a movie featuring a politician ... and there wasn't a trace of snark or cynicism coursing through my body. The film has genuine rhetorical power. It builds an incredibly frightening case without hints of fear-mongering or over-wrought moments. Because Gore is truly self-deprecating, the movie doesn't ever feel like an ego-trip--although it does occasionally look like a giant product placement for Apple. At any rate, I walked out of the movie and decided to sell my car and begin otherwise preparing for our planet's impending doom. I know this praise isn't so unexpected coming from TNR. But I think the movie has the potential to become a seminal political document--a cinematic Silent Spring. It will certainly change elite opinion.

And Ben Fritz, my friend and former Spinsanity co-editor, reports that everyone he knows who has seen it has said it is excellent.

Here's the film's website, which includes a list of cities where it will be playing. Go see it!

Third Duke lacrosse indictment

From the News & Observer:

A grand jury indicted Duke lacrosse player Dave Forker Evans, a senior and team captain from Bethesda, Md., for first degree rape, first degree sexual offense and kidnapping today.

His lawyer, Joseph B. Cheshire V, said he expected Evans to turn himself in at the jail at 2 p.m.

Evans, a co-captain, is one of three lacrosse players who lived at the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. An exotic dancer has charged that she was gang raped at the house at a party on March 13.

Earlier today, District Attorney Mike Nifong had harsh words for lawyers representing the team players.

In a private conversation that could be heard across the 6th floor, Nifong told lawyer Kerry Sutton that he was unhappy with a Friday press conference in which defense attorneys said a second round of DNA tests could not conclusively link any player to the March 13 incident.

We'll soon have the documents supporting the indictment, which should clarify how Nifong links Evans to the alleged crime.

Update 5/15 4:58 PM EST: Evans held a press conference to deny the charges before surrendering to police. In addition, Evans' lawyer is already hammering the mustache angle:

Evans' attorney, Joe Cheshire, also said Monday that the alleged victim identified Evans in a photo lineup with "90 percent certainty," but that she was not 100 percent sure because he did not have a mustache.

"Mr. Nifong knows David Evans has never had a mustache," Cheshire said. "We have pictures of David Evans the day before, the day after and almost every other day, along with scores and scores of people's testimony that he never had a mustache."

Duke lacrosse: Defense claims "no conclusive match"

ABC News reports that the defense is claiming that latest DNA tests in the Duke lacrosse case are not conclusive:

A lawyer for one of the players on the Duke University lacrosse team said the results of the second round of DNA testing in the investigation of rape allegations showed "no conclusive match" with any player on the team.

"Categorically, this report shows no conclusive match between any genetic material taken on or from the false accuser and any genetic material of any Duke lacrosse player," said Joe Chesire, an attorney for one of the team members not accused in the case, at a news conference hours after the results of the new testing were released.

A vaginal swab from the accuser did find genetic material from one "single male source," but that source was not any member of the lacrosse team, Chesire said.

The AP adds that "Cheshire said the testing did find some genetic material from several people on a plastic fingernail found in a bathroom trash can of the house where the team held the March 13 party," adding that the defense attorney "said some of that material had the 'same characteristics' - a link short of a conclusive match - to some of the players, but not the two who have charged with rape, kidnapping and sexual assault."

In short, Nifong appears to have a non-conclusive link to non-suspects on a fingernail in a trash can with lots of other items in it plus semen from someone who isn't a lacrosse player. That's not much.

Possible third Duke lacrosse indictment

ABC News is reporting that a third lacrosse player may be indicted based on a partial identification and a partial DNA match -- not exactly convincing evidence:

Prosecutors believe they have DNA evidence to tie a third Duke lacrosse player to the alleged attack of a 27-year-old exotic dancer, sources close to the investigation tell ABC News.

Sources say the third player is the same person who was identified with "90 percent" certainty by the alleged victim in a photo lineup. That lineup was conducted by police weeks after the March 13 off-campus lacrosse team party where the alleged incident took place.

After a first set of DNA tests failed to link two lacrosse players to the alleged crime, it was widely considered that DNA evidence would not be part of the case. New results from this second round of testing will help the prosecution's case, sources close to the investigation say.

The potential evidence -- a DNA sample found under a fake fingernail worn by the alleged victim and linked to the lacrosse player -- was recovered from the off-campus home where the alleged attack took place. The fingernail was found in a garbage can in the house, sources close to the investigation told ABC News.

Until the full results are released, it is not yet clear how useful the new tests will be to the prosecution. That complete report is expected to be returned on Monday -- the same day a grand jury is expected to meet and could indict the player whose DNA was allegedly found.

...Earlier in the case, Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong said he had hoped to indict a third player in the alleged crime but did not have enough evidence at the time.

"Investigation into the identity of the third assailant will continue in the hope that he can also be identified with certainty," Nifong said in media reports.

The Durham Herald Sun newspaper in North Carolina reported today that the tissue sample used for testing did not allow for a 100 percent match, but that it was "consistent" with the DNA of the third player. Because a complete DNA pattern was not obtained from the sample on the fingernail, it was impossible to match that sample with near certainty to the third player, the newspaper said.

That newspaper's reporting largely mirrors what sources close to the investigation have told ABC News. When pressed, however, those sources would not say there was a perfect match between the third player and the sample tested.

Defense sources said the results from an initial round of DNA testing had failed to produce any DNA evidence. They point out, to this day, that no DNA evidence matching the lacrosse players has been found on the alleged victim. They insist that results from this set of DNA tests are also inconclusive and that there is no match, and that to say otherwise is "very misleading."

They also say it would not be unusual to find players' DNA in the bathroom or garbage can of a house where some of them lived and many others spent time.

The defense will almost certainly argue that these new DNA results should not be permitted in court, because they are not a perfect match. In cases where DNA evidence is not a perfect match it is sometimes considered inadmissible as evidence.

Did Duke accuser change her allegation?

Yesterday, I posted about the stunning claim in a Duke report that the accuser in the lacrosse rape case initially said twenty men raped her. Since then, this claim has come into serious question.

In the initial Durham Herald Sun report from yesterday morning, City Manager Patrick Baker and District Attorney Mike Nifong deny the claim:

City Manager Patrick Baker cast doubt on the report, saying he hadn't previously heard that anyone in the Police Department questioned the woman's credibility.

"To the contrary, as I have stated in the past, the Durham Police Department immediately launched a full investigation into these allegations," Baker wrote in an e-mail. "I am at a loss for why we would go through such an extensive initial investigatory exercise and assign two investigators to work on this case if we thought the allegations were not credible or that the matter was going to blow over."

...District Attorney Mike Nifong said Monday he had not previously heard that the accuser allegedly changed the number of men she claimed attacked her.

"I hadn't heard anything about 20 as opposed to three," Nifong said upon learning of the new Duke report.

"It's not something I believe to be true," he added. "Other than that, I wouldn't specifically have any comment. I haven't seen the report and have no knowledge of it."

And today, reports in the News & Observer and the Herald Sun indicate that this information came from a shaky source -- a Duke police officer who overheard one side of a Durham police officer's cell phone conversation. It should therefore be regarded as totally unconfirmed. What a mess...

Report that Duke accuser claimed twenty men raped her

Somehow I failed to notice this explosive information from the latest report on the Duke lacrosse incident:

The day after the March 13 team party where a 27-year-old black woman claimed she was raped, Durham police told campus officers that "this will blow over," the report said. The woman initially told police she was raped by 20 white men, then said she was attacked by three, the report said.

Here are the exact words from page 2 of the report (PDF):

After the victim of the alleged assaults was taken to the Emergency Room of the Duke Hospital in the early morning hours of March 14, having earlier told Durham police that she was raped and sexually assaulted by approximately 20 white members of a Duke team (a charge later modified to allege an attack by three individuals in a bathroom), the official report of the Duke Police Department was submitted and reviewed by the Duke Police Director, Robert Dean, at 7:30 a.m. on March 14.

No wonder the Durham police questioned the accuser's credibility. Wouldn't you?

Update 5/10 8:25 AM EST: This information has been called into question -- please read my followup post. I've updated the title to reflect this new information.

Conservative bestseller contest winner: Godless

A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to name the next conservative bestseller. The key is to leverage some powerful pejorative term like fascism, treason, slander, etc.

It's time to announce a winner: Ann Coulter! She just announced that her latest book is titled Godless: The Church of Liberalism. How can my readers compete with the master?

Second prize goes to Seth Kramer for his creative suggestion of Child-eating Vampire Nazis: Why the Evil Liberal Menace Hate Our Troops. Maybe next time, Seth!

Durham police questioned accuser's credibility

Today a committee appointed by Duke President Richard Brodhead released a report (PDF) on the administration's response to the alleged lacrosse team rape. The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the administration failed to move quickly enough to address the situation -- in part because it took a shocking ten days for the administration that the accuser was black and two weeks to learn of the alleged racial slurs made by team members.

The report also confirms one rumor I had heard, stating definitively that the Durham police regarded the accuser as non-credible. It states the following on pages 4-5:

There are reports from several sources that members of the Durham police force initially (March 14) made comments to Duke police officers and others to the effect that the complainant "kept changing her story and was not credible;" that "if any charges were brought, they would be no more than misdemeanors;" and that "this will all blow over." When Dean Wasiolek called her colleagues to inform them of the incident, she also conveyed the police's assessment that the alleged victim was not credible. The discounting by police and others of the importance of the seriousness of the allegations may have reflected a belief that the matter would not be pressed because the charging party was not that important or reliable. When President Brodhead first learned of the allegations on March 20, he called Vice President Moneta, who told him that "the accusations were not credible and were unlikely to amount to anything."

Clearly, the administration miscalculated. Still, this raises a serious question: how did Mike Nifong, the district attorney, reach such a different judgment about the credibility of the accuser than the Durham police?

The "Bush is not a conservative" defense

I'm fascinated by Jonah Goldberg's move to try sever conservatism's fate from that of President Bush by arguing that the President is not a conservative:

[T]here is one area where we can make somewhat useful comparisons between Nixon and Bush: their status as liberal Republicans...

Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians' supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position. He favors instead strong government. He believes, as he said in 2003, that when "somebody hurts, government has got to move." His compassionate conservatism shares with Nixon's moderate Republicanism a core faith that not only can the government love you, but it should spend money to prove its love. Beyond that, there seems to be no core set of principles that define Bush's approach, and therefore, much like Nixon, no clearly communicable message that explains why he does things other than political calculation and expediency.

The idea, of course, is to not let Bush's failure damage conservatism as a political movement. As Glenn Greenwald points out, however, conservatives happily claimed Bush as one of their own when he was popular even though he displayed some big government tendencies. But now that he's unpopular, it's likely we'll see more "Bush is not a conservative" rhetoric.

This rhetorical tactic is fascinating because it inverts what Democrats did after the debacle of the 1980/1984/1988 elections. Democrats started denying they were liberals, whereas conservatives today are denying that Republicans are conservatives.

It also conveniently reverses the way conservatives interpreted President Clinton's ideology. Every move toward the center that Clinton made was interpreted as a sign of political expediency that just masked his underlying liberalism. By contrast, President Bush's moves toward the center (education, prescription drugs, immigration, refusing to propose major budget cuts) are interpreted as revealing his true liberal tendencies.

The other absurd aspect of this is Goldberg's suggestion that Bush is unpopular because he's too liberal:

Perhaps this unnoticed fact [Bush's alleged liberalism on domestic issues] explains part of Bush's falling poll numbers more than most observers are willing to admit. The modern conservative movement, from Goldwater to Reagan, was formed as a backlash against Nixonism. Today, Reaganite conservatives make up a majority of the Republican party. If Bush held the Reaganite line on liberty at home the way he does on liberty abroad, he'd be in a lot better shape. After all, if Bush's own base supported him at their natural level, his job-approval numbers wouldn't be stellar, but they wouldn't have his enemies cackling, either.

USA Today/Gallup happened to ask a poll question about precisely this issue, and the results indicate exactly the opposite. 45% of Americans think Bush is too conservative, 28% think he's just about right, and only 19% think he's too liberal. Part of the most recent decline in Bush's poll numbers is certainly due to growing conservative discontent, but that's only because there's no one else left to alienate -- liberals and moderates already disapprove of Bush in massive numbers (according to USA Today/Gallup, 52% of conservatives approve of Bush, compared with 28% of moderates and 7% of liberals). If the President moved meaningfully toward the center, he'd almost surely gain in popularity. Conversely, moving further to the right would likely hurt his overall political standing. It's hard to imagine that more hard-edged conservatism would leave Bush in "a lot better shape," as Goldberg claims.

USA Today/Gallup poll on Duke lacrosse

Did you know USA Today/Gallup polled the Duke lacrosse case? I didn't. Here's a summary of their findings from the poll, which was conducted April 28-30 with a nationally representative sample:

Women are significantly more likely than men to say the charges that two Duke University lacrosse players sexually assaulted a woman at a March 13 team party are true; women are less likely than men to believe that their accuser is being treated fairly. Overall, Americans are more likely to say the charges are true rather than not true, according to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, though a substantial percentage do not offer an opinion. More than half of Americans say that both the players and the woman are being treated fairly in this case. Six in 10 Americans say they are closely following the case, which represents a mid-range level of interest compared with other news stories measured over the last decade or so.

Read the whole thing for more details.

Two site search options: Google and Rollyo

Two months after being deleted from Google, I'm back in their index, although I only have about fifty pages indexed.

In other search-related news, I added a Rollyo site search box to the left sidebar. To search this site, just click on the pulldown menu that says "Select Search Engine" and choose "Search brendan-nyhan.com." It uses Yahoo Search to search the whole blog at once. Until Google re-indexes the whole site, that's your best option for finding posts on particular topics.

Local headline of the day

Breaking news from the News & Observer: "Colleges find drinking deeply rooted." Coming next week: "Area schools find homework deeply disliked."

Colbert-loving liberals and PC-hating conservatives

I continue to be struck by the unrelenting blogger love for Stephen Colbert's unfunny White House Correspondents' Dinner routine.

It's reminding me of the days during the mid-'90s when many conservatives felt silenced by "political correctness." They resented the fact that they felt like they had to self-censor themselves. So Rush Limbaugh or other commentators challenged the largely imaginary "PC police," they went crazy. It was almost cathartic to hear someone say publicly what they had thought -- but not said -- privately.

Liberals who felt silenced after 9/11 seem to be reacting the same way to public criticism of Bush. Regardless of whether it's actually funny or on target, they go crazy when someone goes after the President publicly. And if anyone doesn't like it, they're off the team.

More on George Allen from TNR's Ryan Lizza

Following up on his devastating story about George Allen's ugly racial history, Ryan Lizza slams Allen again:

Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there's the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a Confederate flag pin ("Pin Prick," May 8). Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears as a decoration in Allen's first statewide ad, even though he has long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992.

Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about Allen's high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so old. "[I]f we're going to scrutinize people's high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run," columnist Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993 campaign ad--as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping forward--his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive than tnr previously reported. According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.

In other words, what Allen supporters are trying to whitewash as youthful indiscretions actually mushroomed into a lifelong record of (a) embracing offensive racial symbols and (b) exploiting them politically. Sounds like a great president to me!

Durham DA Nifong re-elected

I'm sad to report that Mike Nifong, the district attorney who turned Durham into a media circus, has been elected to a full term in office:

District Attorney Mike Nifong kept his job as the county’s top prosecutor in a heated election that featured Nifong’s handling of the Duke lacrosse rape investigation as its central issue.

Nifong received 45.17 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff. He beat former prosecutor Freda Black, who had 41.53 percent and lawyer Keith Bishop, who earned 13.3 percent.

Talk about lucky: Nifong had a three-way primary and the opposition to him never fully coalesced around one candidate.

Bush 1999-2000 vs. Bush 2006

When President Bush came out against singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, I wondered if he had committed the same offense in the past. The answer, it turns out, is yes. Atrios points to this quote from Kevin Phillips' book American Dynasty:

When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, [Bush] would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parites, sometimes joining in singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, sometimes partying with a "Viva Bush" mariachi band flown in from Texas.

Update 5/2 5:37 PM: Via Atrios again, here's the original Think Progress item on Phillips' book and a new one reporting that Bush's first inaugural featured the Star-Spangled Banner in English and Spanish (commenter Sean points out that Think Progress has since retracted the second post).

Update 5/3 8:20 AM: The Washington Post reports that "[t]he State Department posts four Spanish versions of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on its Web site."

Bush vs. Nixon: Presidential approval

Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution plots their approval trajectories. It turns out that disapproval of Bush right now is almost as high as Nixon's when he resigned:

Stephen Colbert: Not that funny

I have to admit that, like Noam Scheiber and Bob Somerby, I didn't find Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner very funny. But a lot of people are obsessed with it and the media's failure to devote much coverage to it. Here's Scheiber's analysis:

My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left--until recently more common on the right--wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value. Jon Stewart often says he hates when his audience cheers; he wants them to laugh.

I agree. The Daily Show and Colbert are increasingly focused on telling jokes that make liberals feel good about themselves. The result is that the shows are both pretty mediocre right now.

The problem, which Scheiber doesn't fully acknowledge, is that the post-9/11 political atmosphere stifled a lot of dissent and made it cathartic for liberals when elites criticized Bush publicly. Bush reinforced this by hiding from the press and only speaking to screened audiences. The result is that there's still a lot of bottled-up resentment more than four years later. That's what made Colbert's routine such a big deal.

Evan Bayh: Abolish the Electoral College

I'm not a big Evan Bayh fan, but I'm excited he supports abolishing the Electoral College (via Drudge):

Q: "Why do you think we should abolish the Electoral College?"

BAYH: "I think our president should be chosen by the majority of the American people. That is ordinarily the case. But in 2000, as we all recall, we elected this president with fewer votes than the other candidate got. I just don't think in the modern era that is appropriate."

The problem, of course, is that passing a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College would be almost impossible. Hendrik Hertzberg recently promoted an interesting alternative being proposed by a group called National Popular Vote -- an inter-state pact to award electors to the winner of the popular vote:

Here’s how the plan would work. One by one, legislature by legislature, state law by state law, individual states would pledge themselves to an interstate compact under which they would agree to award their electoral votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote. The compact would take effect only when enough states had joined it to elect a President—that is, enough to cast a majority of the five hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes. (Theoretically, as few as eleven states could do the trick.) And then, presto! All of a sudden, the people of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia are empowered to elect their President the same way they elect their governors, mayors, senators, and congressmen..

There is very little doubt about the constitutional and legal feasibility of this plan. The power of state legislatures to direct the choice of their states’ electors, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, is essentially unlimited.

The idea is creative, but I'm sure legislators in individual states would try to break out of the compact to swing the outcome of the election. So here's a question for the lawyers out there: Can states irrevocably bind their hands in an interstate compact? National Popular Vote says yes:

The proposed compact has a “blackout” period (of approximately six months) on withdrawals. This “blackout” period starts on July 20 of a presidential election year and continues until a President or Vice President are qualified to serve the next term (normally on January 20 of the following year).

The purpose for the delay in the effective date of a withdrawal is to ensure that a withdrawal will not be undertaken—perhaps for partisan political purposes—in the midst of a presidential campaign or, even more egregiously, in the period between the popular voting in early November and the meeting of the Electoral College in mid-December.

An interstate compact has the specific advantage of making the obligations of the participating states into a legally enforceable contractual obligation. Of course, legal enforceability is most relevant in the event that the winner of the nationwide popular vote did not carry states having a majority of the electoral votes (as occurred, say, in 1824, 1876, 1892, and 2000). A state whose legislature and governor are controlled by a political party whose presidential candidate who did not win the nationwide popular vote could, in the absence of an enforceable restriction on withdrawal, abandon its obligations at the precise moment when they would matter. However, once a state enters into an interstate compact, a state is prevented from unilaterally nullifying the compact because the impairments clause of the U.S. Constitution. The impairment clause provides that “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” Instead, a party to a contract (i.e., an interstate compact) must withdraw from the agreement in accordance with the agreement’s provisions for withdrawal. Most interstate compacts contain provisions that delay the effective date of a state’s withdrawal by a certain amount of time that is appropriate given the nature of the compact. The proposed compact limits withdrawal during the sensitive six-month time window of the presidential election period.

The six-month “blackout” period covers the following six important events relating to presidential elections: (1) the national nominating conventions, (2) the fall general election campaign period, (3) election day on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, (4) the meeting of the Electoral College on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, (5) the counting of the electoral votes by Congress on January 6, and (6) the scheduled inauguration of the President and Vice President for the new term on January 20

If the lawyers buy this, I'm all for it.

(PS Bayh's father, Birch Bayh, is a member of the advisory committee of National Popular Vote.)

Defense motions in Duke lacrosse case

A defense lawyer in the Duke lacrosse case has requested the removal of District Attorney Mike Nifong, among other things, in motions filed today:

Kirk Osborn, the lawyer for one of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, filed legal motions this morning, including one that demanded that Durham's district attorney drop out of the case.

Osborn, who represents Reade Seligmann, said District Attorney Mike Nifong had made improper comments about the case and sought national publicity in order to win Tuesday's election.

Defense lawyers and legal experts have said Nifong might have crossed ethical lines in public comments about rape allegations involving Duke University lacrosse players, potentially prejudicing jurors.

For his part, Nifong says that he has done nothing wrong, though he has ceased talking with reporters about allegations made by an escort service dancer hired to perform at a March 13 team party.

Osborn's filings Monday included an affidavit from Seligmann giving his account of the night, records from automatic teller machines and Duke dormitory entrance logs, cell phone records and other evidence Osborn said gave Seligmann an alibi during the time the rape is said to have occured during the party.

The motions, filed in Durham Superior Court, ask:
-- For permission to retest all DNA evidence.
-- For Seligmann's $400,000 bond to be reduced to $40,000.
-- The state to preserve rape kit evidence so the defense can do its own tests.
-- A judge to throw out the accuser's photo line-up identifications of Seligmann and his co-defendant, Collin Finnerty. The defense says the procedures used by the Durham police were unfair and violated department policy.

Hopefully Durham voters will help take Nifong off the case by voting him out in the primary tomorrow. If there's one thing we should all be able to agree upon, it's that he's incompetent.

David Sirota: The liberal spin vanguard

In an essay about his new book Hostile Takeover, David Sirota compares American politics to The Matrix ("the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth") before unleashing a barrage of frenzied populism:

The fact is, most of that nonsensical political discourse is designed to hide the two fundamental truths that nobody wants to talk about, but everyone knows: that our "democracy" is really a legalized bribery, and that every outcome in this system of legalized bribery is one that exclusively serves the interests of Big Money.

"Legalized bribery"? "[E]xclusively serves the interests of Big Money"? We can have a serious discussion of the role of money in politics, but this kind of rhetoric makes Bill O'Reilly look subtle.

Later in the post, Sirota raises the quality of our nation's political discourse by suggesting former New Republic Peter Beinart wants to kill "dark-skinned people":

[The] "left" in the media is largely occupied by out of touch elitists a la Tom Friedman, Joe Klein and Peter Beinart – loafers on the Washington cocktail party circuit who want us to believe that the real problem facing America is that politicians aren't supportive enough of job outsourcing, are actually too populist, or are not sufficiently willing to indiscriminately bomb enough dark-skinned people throughout the world, respectively.

I haven't read Sirota's book yet, but if you're interested in the problems with his previous handiwork, make sure to check out my posts and Spinsanity's work on the Center on American Progress, where he used to serve as the Director of Strategic Communications. Sirota was also the "principal author" (PDF) of MoveOn's Daily Mislead, which we also criticized at Spinsanity. In short, he's a key figure in the emerging liberal PR machine that we warned about in the conclusion to All the President's Spin.

[Disclosure: I worked on Joe Hoeffel's Congressional campaign during the summer of 1998. Sirota joined the campaign as I was leaving to study in Australia during the fall semester. I don't know him personally.]

Negative reaction to $100 rebate plan

The Republican plan to refund $100 to taxpayers to compensate for higher gas taxes doesn't seem to be very popular:

Aides for several Republican senators reported a surge of calls and e-mail messages from constituents ridiculing the rebate as a paltry and transparent effort to pander to voters before the midterm elections in November.

"The conservatives think it is socialist bunk, and the liberals think it is conservative trickery," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, pointing out that the criticism was coming from across the ideological spectrum.

Angry constituents have asked, "Do you think we are prostitutes? Do you think you can buy us?" said another Republican senator's aide, who was granted anonymity to openly discuss the feedback because the senator had supported the plan.

Conservative talk radio hosts have been particularly vocal. "What kind of insult is this?" Rush Limbaugh asked on his radio program on Friday. "Instead of buying us off and treating us like we're a bunch of whores, just solve the problem." In commentary on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume called the idea "silly."

This reaction highlights a fundamental misunderstanding: most voters aren't narrowly self-interested in the sense that people tend to assume. My guess is that the public would prefer that politicians deal with the problem rather than get a $100 election-year pander. And libertarian conservatives have to be revolted at this kind of bread and circuses governance.

Update 5/1 10:31 AM: In comments, Tof offers a different interpretation that I considered but didn't post -- people may just be insulted by the size of the rebate. There's a model in economics called the ultimatum game in which one person gets to propose a division of a fixed amount of money to a second person, who can either take it, in which case they both get their proposed shares, or refuse, leaving both players with nothing. The second person "should" take whatever is offered since otherwise they will get zero, but experiments all over the world show that people who receive low offers frequently refuse them because they are perceived as unfair. The reaction to the $100 rebate may be analogous.

Watch Woody Wittman

If you haven't been following Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment news website co-edited by my friend and former Spinsanity colleague Ben Fritz, make sure to check out the weekly film reviews of their new critic Woody Wittman:

Woody is like The Today Show's Gene Shalit if he lived in his mother's basement. Or as Fishbowl LA put it, Woody "does for morning show movie critics what Borat has done for foreign correspondents." Check it out, and don't miss this week's review of "United 93," which Woody compares unfavorably to "Stepmom."

Life imitates The Simpsons: A Ford reality show

Ford is considering a reality show in which contestants compete to design a new model, with the winner's idea being built as a concept car:

Under one situation Ford is considering, aspiring car designers would compete against one another to design the next hot Ford vehicle.

The script would play out something like this: Each week a panel of judges would review designs, laud the most creative ones, criticize the least inspired ones and send the losers on their way.

For the top prize, Ford would build a concept version of the winning designer's car and display it at an auto show.

I hope they remember what happened to Powell Motors when they let Homer Simpson design "The Homer":