Kate Sheppard

Conservative pundits have seized upon the latest Rasmussen poll, which found that the number of Americans who self-identify as Republicans increased by two points in December, to 34.2 percent, the highest percentage since January 2006. The number of self-identified Democrats fell to 36.3, down a point from the previous month. The poll report suggests that […]

The The Times is highlighting the fact that the caucus method of selecting candidates necessarily excludes large swaths of the population who can’t make it to their caucus on Thursday evening: people who work the night shift, people stationed overseas, the disabled, parents who can’t find babysitters. There’s no way to send in an absentee […]

Late yesterday evening, Huffington Post broke the news that Bill Kristol (recently canned departed from his post at Time magazine) will be joining the New York Times op-ed page for 2008. You know, since there just aren’t enough conservatives on the Times op-ed pages these days. And because the neocons just haven’t had a fair […]

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out a statement praising the EPA’s decision to block California from imposing tough fuel economy standards: “California claimed that ‘compelling and extraordinary’ circumstances entitled it to a waiver, but global warming is hardly ‘extraordinary’ in California ,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “It’s called global warming, not California […]

At what point do they give up? Marc Morano, communications director for Sen. James Inhofe is still tirelessly plugging away at global warming denialism a year after his boss was unseated as the head of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and they’re still using the EPW site to transmit blatantly false, misleading reports on […]

Tom Tancredo is expected to announce that he’s dropping out of the race today in Des Moines. December 20 seems an odd time to drop out; unless of course Tancredo’s campaign was never about actually running for president, and simply about bringing his rabidly anti-immigrant agenda some national attention. That’s why he says he’s isn’t […]

Another thing to look forward to if a progressive candidate is elected in 2008: taking back the EPA. Late yesterday evening, the EPA handed down a decision barring California and 16 other states from setting their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. California approved legislation in 2004 to force car companies to cut […]

Tom Friedman is cynical on progress at Bali last week. Whatever happened there wasn’t transformational, he says, but incremental. What was transformative at the event was that the rest of the world stood up and booed — actually booed, not just grumbled under their breaths — when the United States held out on signing. Their […]

Ezra points to a new study that finds that the cost of “healthy” foods has by about 20 percent over the past two years, while food prices overall rose by just 5 percent. But the page title of the ABC News piece — “Obesity Among Poor May Be Unavoidable” — is a bit misleading. As […]

Turns out C-SPAN is not just painfully mind-numbing, but it also leans decidedly right in its coverage of think tanks, according to a new evaluation by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The study finds that right-wing think tanks got 51 percent of C-SPAN’s total coverage in 2006, while left-of-center think tanks only got […]