shouting loudly

Paul Dawson, one of my favorite political science professors at Oberlin, used to talk a lot about “sacred cows” in the context of politics.  “You’ve got to be careful when you stumble upon someone’s sacred cow issue.  You’ll know that it’s a sacred cow when they start to gore you.” Nate Silver, it seems, has [...]

You’ve probably seen or heard something about Carly Fiorina’s “demonsheep” commercial.  Here it is, in case you haven’t: The payoff from this 3:21 second campaign “commercial” comes at the end, when a person in a homemade sheep outfit with laser-demon-eyes appears behind a tree, supposedly indicating a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It’s hilariously amateurish, and [...]

I’ve been revising my “MoveOn Effect” presentation recently for a couple of upcoming talks (Brown University on Tuesday the 17th, Columbia University on Tuesday the 24th.  Lurkers welcome at both!)  For those who don’t know, the “MoveOn Effect” isn’t so much about MoveOn-as-organization than it is about changes in the political economy of advocacy group [...]

Yes. [side note: I almost feel bad writing this post, since it'll be placed above Paul Falzone's  piece on Digital Distraction, which is much better than this will be.  Welcome Paul, may all your blog posts know comments...] The Club for Growth has long been a force in Republican electoral politics.  Their niche consists of [...]

To the fine, fine editors of this blog and to their (our?) 3.5 readers, I extend my greetings and thanks. There is no lack of ways to spend your time in the candy coated hallways of the World Wide Web, and it will be my honor to be reliably unreliable in enticing you to spend [...]

I’m excited by Barnes & Noble’s Nook, its entry into the eReader market. I can’t wait for somebody to do for journal article PDFs what the Rio did for MP3s. It’s unclear if the Nook will do this (word is that the Kindle DX is a disappointment on this count–a pity at almost $500), but [...]

[edited to remove a few sloppy suppositions.] Blog research in political science is still pretty much in its infant stages.  There are maybe one or two dozen people who work on these topics, and most of us are (like myself) very early in our careers.  The lack of a vibrant research community means there aren’t [...]

Okay, I need to double-dip on this issue of the conservative twitter-revolution.  But first, let me give some of the topline results from my upcoming MPSA paper, on the political blogosphere in the 2008 election. The paper analyzes a new dataset that I’ve developed over the past year, the Blogosphere Authority Index.  Everything I’ve published [...]

As the WikiLeaks site describes it, here’s some change you can download. I’ll let them explain: February 8, 2009 EDITORIAL Change you can download. Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. A full listing of reports is available here. The 6,780 reports, current as of [...]

Check this out. Apparently Gates was giving a talk about malaria at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference and, after mentioning that Malaria was spread by mosquitoes, opened a jar onstage and said “I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.” For serious.  Bill Gates [...]