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While John and his commenters argue about the political consequences of that Romney fundraising video, I wanted to briefly remark on the substance of his remarks. Romney said: [Obama] starts off with a huge number. These are the people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message […]

I’d like to see Paul Krugman’s evidence for this claim: What really happened in the final months of [the 2000] election? The answer — not a popular one with journalists, but very obviously true to anyone who lived through it — was that the press took sides. Reporters liked Bush and didn’t like Gore, and […]

The Harvard-affiliated historian writes: It’s a paradox. The economy is in the doldrums. Yet the incumbent is ahead in the polls. According to a huge body of research by political scientists, this is not supposed to happen. On the other side of the Atlantic, it hardly ever does. But in America today, the law of […]

I don’t think Ferguson is just about the money. By now, he must have enough to buy all the BMWs he could possibly want. To say that Ferguson needs another 50K is like saying that I need to publish in another scientific journal. No, I think what Ferguson is looking for (as am I, in […]

From sociologist Lane Kenworthy. This is good stuff; there was a lot there that I didn’t know before.

I received the following email: I just moved to NY from Texas last month to attend graduate school **, and I was wondering if it would be better to register to vote for the fall election here locally, or if I should ask for an absentee ballot from ** County back home in Texas. I’m […]

Eduardo Porter in the New York Times talks with some experts who have written things such as that “most companies do not get any return from their lobbying expenditures” and that “campaign finance had a tiny effect.” Porter’s article is good: although he quotes some research that claims campaign spending has little effect, he also […]

Featuring a guest appearance by Laurence “ten-strike” Tribe!

I’m used to hearing the argument that, sure, cigarettes are addictive, but everyone has known forever that smoking caused cancer, and that cigarette manufacturers could hardly be blamed for supplying a consumer good that many people wanted. So I was surprised to learn the following, from historian Robert Proctor: It’s interesting to see that, at […]

For our purposes, I’ll define a hack as someone who writes something he or she does not believe (or who carefully looks the other way to avoid encountering any facts that might get in the way). The purest example of a hack I can think of is John Gribbin, a physics Ph.D. who many years […]