Deracialization and Barack Obama

While I've been busy moving my stuff to Texas, Barack Obama has been inadvertently injecting race into the presidential contest with his statement that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." While the historically-inclined might have criticized his remark for lumping Alexander Hamilton in with the motley crew of ex-presidents represented among the now-circulating ...

Blog Polarization and Self-Segregation

Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides have collaborated on a paper, still in late draft stages, entitled "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics." A PDF of the working copy is available here. Henry reports that, [B]log readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people ...

Obama, the South, and the Black Vote

Thomas Schaller,  the author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, argues that the notion that Barack Obama has a good chance of winning Southern states because he'll energize black turnout is based on fallacious reasoning. The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern ...

Dumbing the Presidency

David Broder uses Elvin Lm's book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency to argue not only that presidential speeches have steadily dumbed down over the years, which we might have guessed, but that this dumbs down public policy, too. In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the ...

Reggie Love: Barack Obama’s Body Man

Reggie Love was a standout wide receiver and basketball player at Duke that the Dallas Cowboys, for some odd reason, unsuccessfully tried to turn into a pro linebacker. Love was occasionally flat on his back in his college days. He's landed on his feet, working as the body man for the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. Ashley Parker has ...

Schlafly Honor Protested

Washington University in St. Louis' awarding of an honorary doctorate to Phyllis Schlafly was met by protest from several students, faculty members, and invited guests. Margaret Bush Wilson, a retired civil rights attorney, volunteered to introduce Schlafly as faculty and students were calling on the university to rescind the degree. Wilson said after the ceremony that while she does not agree ...

Do Liberal Professors Indoctrinate Students?

A new study finds that, while college professors are overwhelmingly liberal, that fact does not have much impact on the politics of their students. A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study ...

Obama and Wright: Kristol Compounds Kessler’s Error

Ronald Kessler reported in a Sunday evening column for Newsmax that Barack Obama attended a controversial Jeremiah Wright sermon. The Obama campaign has told members of the press that Senator Obama was not in church on the day cited, July 22, because he had a speech he gave in Miami at 1:30 PM. Our writer, Jim Davis, says he attended ...

Sending Your Kid to College: The Wrong Questions to Ask

Dennis Prager, who apparently hasn't been on a college campus in a few decades, compiles a handy dandy list of questions to ask in selecting a college for your kids. 1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible? If so, ...

Unbearable Whiteness of Blogging

The Unfogged gang has three posts in as many days about a wildly popular new blog about which I was previously unaware called Stuff White People Like. It's the kind of blog only white people could like: a blog about white people written by white people for other white people that makes fun of white people. ...