I’ll cop to sharing some of Yglesias’ irritation at the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor, and if Republicans are managing to get a rise out of my pallid ass, I can only imagine the kind of damage they’re doing to their brand among, you know, real Latinos.  For one, it is basically impossible for me to […]

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Dave Weigel takes a crowbar to a profoundly dumb Byron York column breaking down President Obama’s approval ratings by race. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with asking whether support for a politician or policy is broad-based, or whether the aggregate numbers are masking wildly disparate reactions from different subgroups. We sometimes slip into the habit […]

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Ygz is glad to see that polls show African Americans’ views of the state  of race relations hving improved dramatically in recent months, but surprised to see that fully 44 percent of black respondents believed that blacks and whites now enjoy equal opportunity in the United States—despite ample evidence that, presidential elections notwithstanding, this is […]

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Politico‘s Ben Smith writes about the lingering faction of Birthers still agitating to see Barack Obama’s original birth certificate, despite the total paucity of credible evidence suggesting any reason to doubt that he was, in fact, born in Hawaii. The focus of the story is conservatives’ fear of being associated with these folks: “At some […]

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Figure I should cross-link this post at Ars, since my modal political geek reader probably cares more than my modal tech geek reader about my picking a fight with Michael Lind.

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It’s been referenced a fair amount already these past few years, but this is an excellent time to reread Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

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I’ve been watching, with a certain morbid fascination, the ongoing saga of the “Michelle Obama tapes” hoax. For those just tuning in, this began two weeks ago, when an obscure WordPress blog calling itself “African Press International” claimed that the would-be first lady had called them up to deliver a daffy self-destructive rant—in rather conspicuously […]

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I’d meant to write about this back around the time of the last debate, but I’m always puzzled by those little focus groups of the volk the networks put together to watch the presidential contenders spar. They invariably go around beforehand and ask these self-described undecided voters what they’re waiting to hear over the course […]

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The comments section at RedState is starting to look an awful lot like the old Ron Paul Forums around the time a few sober Paulistas began suggesting that it looked like maybe, possibly, Ron wouldn’t actually be the Republican nominee, and that it might be wise to think about the next step for those who […]

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Things like this, from one of Ross’ readers, make me want to tear my hair out: The problem is that I really do think the George Wills and the Brooks and even (a little) David Frum, would exclude such people [as Sarah Palin] from high office because they have never seen a copy of Foreign […]

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