Twitter roundup

	Brendan Nyhan Feb 22, 2011 at 3:31pm From my Twitter feed (2/15-2/22)
	BrendanNyhan Feb 22, 2011 at 3:02pm "The claim that Obama repeatedly has apologized for the United States is not borne out by the facts" http://j.mp/hRNoOd
	Fact Checker - Obama's 'Apology Tour' GOP presidential candidates say that President Obama keeps apologizing for America and does not value American greatness. But the evidence is slim.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 22, 2011 at 2:45pm No obvious relationship between union membership and state budget deficits http://j.mp/hNPrSs
	The Monkey Cage: The Relationship between Union Membership and State Budget Deficits
	BrendanNyhan Feb 22, 2011 at 2:37pm More evidence elite colleges don't raise earnings - can't be said enough, especially to kids who need massive loans to go http://j.mp/dFHo8k
	Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges - NYTimes.com A large new study looks at whether elite colleges give their graduates an earnings advantage -- and finds that, for most students, the answer is no.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 22, 2011 at 12:58pm The partisan divide in police procedural viewing http://j.mp/eamgZF
	YouGov - If you have fired a gun, ride a motorcycle, own power-tools, or watch NCIS you might be a Republican YouGov is a research and consulting organization, pioneering the use of the Internet to collect high quality in-depth data for market research, organizational research and stakeholder ...
	BrendanNyhan Feb 21, 2011 at 5:20pm Attention profs: New issue of CQ Researcher on "Lies and Politics" -- would be great for teaching http://j.mp/fmxWi8 (gated PDF)
	The CQ Researcher Online
	BrendanNyhan Feb 21, 2011 at 1:59pm #analogyfail "[A] teacher...declared that people of Confederate heritage 'have been forced to go to the back of the bus'" http://j.mp/hlyMGH
	Marking Davis’s Confederate Inauguration - NYTimes.com In Montgomery, Ala., this weekend, people marked the 150th anniversary of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration.
	resnikoff Feb 20, 2011 at 3:05pm Liz Cheney thinks that if Obama had voiced support for the Green Revolution we'd have "a very different Iran today." #greenlanternmagic
	BrendanNyhan Feb 21, 2011 at 12:33am RT @sethmnookin: Doonesbury issues a Jenny McCarthy smackdown: http://t.co/kCMQQf4
	“You’d expect better from a Playmate”: Doonesbury issues a Jenny McCarthy smackdown
	BrendanNyhan Feb 18, 2011 at 4:58pm Palin backpedals: "Obviously what I meant in there, death panels was in quotation marks" http://j.mp/hAITat
	Live-blogging Palin's speech - Politico Staff - POLITICO.com "His spending plan does add to the national debt. ... That is the wrong road to be on. That is not what’s going to cure the economic ills in our country.”
	BrendanNyhan Feb 18, 2011 at 4:30pm More budget spin - Obama claims budget "freezes spending for 5 yrs...not going to spend any more money than...taking in": http://j.mp/fWaSR4
	President Obama Continues Claim that "We're Not Going to Spend Any More Money Than We're Taking In" - Political Punch ABC News' Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller report: In an interview with ABC News’ Cincinnati affiliate WCPO-TV WednesdayIn an , President Obama said that his “budget freezes spending for five years...
	BrendanNyhan Feb 18, 2011 at 4:24pm Deserves credit - note difference from Boehner et al. RT @daveweigel Jeff Flake resolutely denounces birtherism. http://slate.me/g949eN
	Weigel : Jeff Flake: Barack Obama "Was Born in the United States" See? This isn't very hard . Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., now a U.S. Senate candidate, asked about Public Policy Polling's birther poll by CNN's Kiran Chetry: CHETRY: You basically have a combined 7...
	BrendanNyhan Feb 18, 2011 at 4:20pm Good @GlennKesslerWP fact-checking of budget spin by President Obama http://j.mp/f7FE5P and Paul Ryan http://j.mp/ep5RqV
	Fact Checker - Obama's misleading language on debt reduction in the 2012 budget President Obama claimed his budget "will not be adding more to the national debt." That's only true if you exclude hundreds of billions of dollars in interest expenses.
	Fact Checker - Ryan's claims of trillions in new spending in the 2012 federal budget House Republicans claim that Obama is adding $8.7 trillion in new spending in his budget. The Fact Checker examines the data -- and finds them wanting.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 17, 2011 at 3:13pm GW's Sarah Binder offers a more detailed take on the Obama administration's judicial nomination problems http://j.mp/dU6QOo
	The Monkey Cage: Taking Seats on that Empty Bench
	ttagaris Feb 17, 2011 at 1:17pm Fail. RT @GStephanopoulos: Is @MicheleBachmann a @LadyGaga fan? I asked her this morning. http://abcn.ws/epMt5F
	Rep. Michele Bachmann – Lady Gaga? - George Stephanopoulos' Bottom Line It’s big day at
	jbarro Feb 16, 2011 at 8:50pm I think the Times has been re-running the same Bob Herbert column twice weekly since '97 and nobody has noticed http://econ.st/eTIsdL
	Phoning it in: The magic of Bob Herbert | The Economist
	BrendanNyhan Feb 17, 2011 at 2:24pm Exactly - why he's still underrated. RT @davidfrum The secret of John Thune's appeal: he's the most generic GOP candidate http://j.mp/eJGjEl
	Thune: The Generic GOP Candidate | FrumForum Democrats have done well by nominating personable politicians with scanty records. With John Thune, that trick might work for Republicans too.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 3:29pm .@fivethirtyeight argues GOP field weak relative to '00-'08 (http://j.mp/hzQEC6), but '92/'96 show early polls overrated: http://j.mp/gLacBr
	Should Republicans Fret Over Their Presidential Field? - NYTimes.com The potential Republican presidential candidates have high negative ratings, but that does not mean all hope is lost.
	Are the Republican presidential candidates weak? - Brendan Nyhan I've previously downplayed concerns that the GOP field is weak since challengers to an incumbent president usually seem flawed at this point in the election cycle. Yesterday, however, Nate Silve...
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 4:31pm @fivethirtyeight Right, we disagree on whether GOP field's poll #s affect Obama's chance of winning close race. Other than Palin, I say no.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 4:33pm @fivethirtyeight I think favorability ratings are highly endogenous for most candidates and will be driven to where we expect given economy.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 6:58pm Sure, but relevance of amateurs in Cong. elecs. to pres. is unclear MT @fivethirtyeight Cong. elecs. much more robust data set than pres.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 6:18pm For pros vs. amateurs in Cong. elecs. MT @fivethirtyeight There is reasonably convincing evidence cand. quality matters http://j.mp/hUaiur
	http://j.mp/hUaiur
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 6:19pm Does candidate quality matter in pres. races? Not clear there's enough variation to know. Only good pols are nominated + economy dominates.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 7:01pm Also, estimating causal effect of candidate quality at any level is tricky since entry decisions are themselves driven by fundamentals.
	BrendanNyhan Feb 15, 2011 at 4:35pm .@daveweigel: "Poll: Most Republicans Doubt Obama's Citizenship, As Birtherism Becomes a Screen for Ideology" http://j.mp/gv2rRc
	Weigel : Poll: Most Republicans Doubt Obama's Citizenship, As Birtherism Becomes a Screen for Ideology The non-partisan-but-usually-hired-by-Democrats firm Public Policy Polling is out with more data on what Republicans -- well, 400 "Republican primary voters nationwide" -- think about Barack Oba...

Comments

[Rob]

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. Last week President Obama stated in his press conference and repeated the next day in an interview that his proposed budget doesn't spend any more money than we're taking in. Brendan very charitably characterizes that as "spin." A more apt description would be a barefaced lie. Spin is "We're focused like a laser beam on the economy." A conscious misstatement of a fact is a lie. (Similarly, "If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance" wasn't spin, it was a plain misrepresentation.)

Obama seems to justify his arithmetic by ignoring the interest the Federal Government will have to pay on its massive debt, most of which debt will have been incurred under the Obama Administration itself. Abraham Lincoln apocryphally is said to have asked, "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" Lincoln said the answer was not five but four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. (It appears Lincoln's reference was actually to a calf.) Calling the interest on the debt not a part of the budget doesn't make it not a part of the budget.

And treating the President's false statement as merely spin is itself spin.

[MartyB]

RE: Props for givng props to Palin, although her point seemed obvious to many of us from the beginning so I am not sure if it's really "back-pedaling" as much as "explaining a metaphor".

[MartyB]

RE: "The claim that Obama repeatedly has apologized for the United States is not borne out by the facts"

If I understand the logic of this piece, it is a "fact" Obama wasn't apologizing because either he didn't use the word "apology" or in the writer's opinion, Obama didn't sound apologetic on the items he cites.

ROTFL.

[David in Cal]

"Fact-checker" Glenn Kessler asserts that Obama didn't apologize because Obama didn't "use a word at all similar to 'apologize'" -- because "nothing akin to the word 'apology' is ever used by Obama."

However, the word apology or something similar is not required for a statement to constitute an apology. Look at Def. 1 for the word "apology":
1. a written or spoken expression of one's regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, or wronged another

E.g., Obama said,

America "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" toward Europe.

That comment expresses regret, remorse and sorrow for the US's (alleged) behavior toward Europe. Thus, the President was indeed apologizing for America. Most of the other Obama quotes in that article also expressed regret for words or actions by the US. By definition, those Obama quotes are accurately described as apologizing for America.

Kessler also argues that Bush, like Obama, also apologized for American slavery. At most, that would prove that Bush also apologized for America. It wouldn't prove that Obama didn't apologize for America.

If Kessler's implicit argument is that Obama didn't apologize for America any more than Bush did, then Kessler ought to have compared a comprehensive list of what the two Presidents said. Finding one statement in common certainly doesn't prove that their entire foreign speech contents were identical.

It's sad to see Kessler (and WaPo) spinning like this, particularly when acting in the role of a supposedly unbiased "fact-checker".

[David in Cal]

Contra the Monkey Cage, there is an obvious relationship between union membership and state budget deficits. One simply needs to look at a given state over time.

E.g., California didn't allow state workers' unions before Jerry Brown's first Governorship, Deficits before then were minimal or non-existant. I suspect most other states with unionized workers also had far smaller deficits before the state workers were unionized. BTW the same is true in my locality of Menlo Park, CA, and, I suspect, in many localities. throughout the country.

[David in Cal]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't understand why George Stephanopoulos linked Michelle Bachman and Lady Bachman in that headline, nor why Brendan thought it was worth posting. Bachman never mentioned Lady Gaga, except to respond to a question by saying that she knows little about Lady Gaga.

Stephanopoulos was a high-level Democratic operative. He's now hosting a supposedly non-partisan TV show. This seems to me analogous to Karl Rove or Ann Coulter hosting GMA.

Bachman made salient points about government spending, the deficit, the complexity of the income tax code. etc. So, why is Stephanopoulos's headline about Lady Gaga? I suspect that this is an attempt by a Democratic partisan to belittle or smear Bachman by linking her to this entertainer, even though there's no actual connection.

[David in Cal]

Props to Brendan for emphasizing that borrowing large amounts of money to go to a top college may be a poor financial decision.

David Weigel advances a couple of reasons for the prevalence of birtherism. One he leaves out is distrust of the media. In particular, a belief among conservatives that the media tilts liberal.

I apologize for the typo in the comment above. The early reference to "Lady Bachman" should be "Lady Gaga."