I saw this spoken word show with Henry Rollins last night, where he talked for two hours solid without notes. And while he opened with solidarity for the uprisings in Egypt and the worker demonstrations in Wisconsin, he also was, to date, the only person I’ve heard, on media or off, comment on Candy Crowley’s [...]

Paul Ryan said earlier today on Morning Joe that Madison is like Cairo. He did this in the midst of a defense of Governor Scott Walker, who is the Hosni Mubarak of that scenario. So needless to say, the guy isn’t entirely bright, though he has an undeserved reputation for smarts in Washington. Here’s another [...]

The new documents showing that Joe Miller admitted to lying about using public computers to try and rig an effort to purge the head of the Alaska GOP while working in a government job has the potential to shake up the strange three-way race in that state. Miller wrote to Fairbanks North Star Borough Attorney [...]

A truly disturbing study from researchers at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, reveals that political partisans reacted to facts that contradicted their worldview by clinging closer to their worldview. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were [...]

Now that Rand Paul isn’t giving national interviews and discoursing about the limits to freedom of restaurant owners to throw black people out of their businesses, the traditional media has generally turned away. Locally in Kentucky, however, a major story is brewing about Paul’s previous profession, ophthalmology. The top papers in the state have questioned [...]

Generally, I think Americans are pretty forgiving, perhaps to a fault, and one misstatement of fact among many will not necessarily sway their opinion of a politician. But a consistent record of exaggerations, misstatements and outright lies can take their toll, and a tipping point hits, where the individual basically turns into an untrustworthy buffoon. [...]

Watch live streaming video from chicagosuntimeslive at livestream.com It’s getting comical enough for the NBC affiliate in Chicago to post a Mark Kirk apology timeline, and have enough different activities to fill it out. When a political candidate crosses over into a laughingstock, his or her career usually goes down the tubes. And at least [...]

If nothing else, Richard Blumenthal has kicked off a series of critical inquiries into the lazy, casual exaggerations that politicians try to pull off every day. Sometimes these rest on a mischaracterization of the remarks (Al Gore never said he invented the Internet), sometimes they just get right by a glazed-over press corps. But now, [...]

If you get past the shoddy journalism of the New York Times article that started it all, Richard Blumenthal was guilty of misspeaking once or twice among hundreds of times where he accurately described his service in the Marine reserves. I think that’s quantitatively and qualitatively different than Mark Kirk claiming to win a “Navy [...]

Mark Kirk, the Republican US Senate candidate in Illinois, has been a Navy reservist for many years, including a tour in Aviano, Italy during the Serbian conflict. He’s talked of collecting multiple awards for service, particularly the Intelligence Officer of the Year award, which has been at times a centerpiece of his political campaigns for [...]

Chris Bowers makes a solid point about Arlen Specter, which is probably what Democrats in the state are thinking at this point, too: Last night on Hardball, Arlen Specter said that he knew his days in the republican party were numbered after his stimulus vote: “When that vote came up on the stimulus, I knew [...]