Vox

Last Friday your humble correspondent noted the absence of Sarah Kliff on the topic of ObamaCare and now he is unhumble enough to believe that this put pressure on her to return to that painful topic today at Vox after nearly a month of avoiding it. As you can read, poor Sarah seems to have gone from acting like a cheerleader aboard a sinking Titanic to taking on the role of radio reporter…

According to David Roberts, activist conservatives are “bending the political system to their will” not by scoring policy victories but by taking their cues from “fever dreams” (i.e., conspiracy theories). In a Thursday article, Roberts suggested two reasons why conservatives generally are more inclined than liberals to buy into CTs. One is that for conservatives, not trusting “the political…

For years, first at the Washington Post's Wonkblog and now at Vox, Sarah Kliff has been happily chirping away about the wonders of Obamacare. She has been perhaps its biggest cheerleader by far. And then the predictable collapse of its cooperatives hit and now poor Sarah has gone silent on the whole topic of Obamacare since November 19 when she sadly delivered apocalyptic news about the nation's…

Though a great many on the right don’t consider Donald Trump one of their own, he’s the Republican presidential frontrunner in large part because he’s exploited an ideological and media environment designed to increase the power of movement conservatives, contended Roberts in a Tuesday piece. According to Roberts, Trump appeals to “a faction of the electorate that has been primed to respond to…

Last week, ex-Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala snarked on CNN that during the most recent Republican presidential debate, the candidates mentioned Hillary Clinton so often that they came off as “creepy…in a stalker sort of way…Maybe it's affectionate…Maybe they’re like junior high schoolboys.” Vox's David Roberts has joined Begala in likening the GOP contenders to middle- or high-schoolers, but…

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio put media bias on the front burner at CNBC’s Republican presidential debate, but conservatives and liberals differed sharply on whether what was in the pot smelled appetizing. Several lefty bloggers turned up their noses at the idea that in last night’s event and in general, the media favor Democrats.

How inflated is Venezuelan currency? So inflated that even thieves in Venezuela are refusing to steal it.  This has been reported in several media outlets such as the New York Times and Vox but a certain word is very noticebably absent in both reports. It is the S-word that dare not speak its name. One big reason it is taboo in liberal circles to associate that word with economic failure is that…

The antics of the former major-league baseball player Manny Ramirez were frequently described as “just Manny being Manny.” Yglesias suggests that Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised use of a private email server was just Hillary being Hillary, and that that’s a good thing. In a Tuesday article, Yglesias wrote that “from her adventures in cattle trading to chairing a policymaking committee in her…

How many times have we heard that Donald Trump has peaked since he declared his candidacy for president in June? A half dozen times? More? And each time Peak Trump was announced by pundits, it was inevitably followed by yet another surge in the polls. This is probably why in recent weeks, media prognosticators seem to have shied from declaring Peak Trump since it is always followed by you-know-…

Among the insights: Fiorina "has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination"; a discussion of childhood vaccines showed that the party is "fervid, claustrophobic, recklessly insinuating, and, at the same time, utterly timid when it comes to extremism in its own ranks”; and the GOP as a whole is "wedded to the tenets of [George W.]…

In a Tuesday post, David Roberts opined that “nativist conservatives” won’t accept that America shares responsibility for climate change, or for any other “ills in the world,” because they believe that the very idea is “unpatriotic.” “Conservative psychology is averse to ambiguity and nuance,” asserted Roberts, “so for ideological conservatives America is either God's chosen country, a force for…

Tales of people awakening in hotel bathtubs to find their kidneys had been removed were an Internet staple in the 1990s. Taub, who's expecting her first child, argues that those bogus stories have something in common with unwanted pregnancies, given that pregnancy is a “category of living organ donation.” “The idea of forcing someone into an organ transplant is indeed so appalling that it is the…

Two liberal media groups are joining forces. CNBC reported on Aug. 13, that NBCUniversal has invested $200 million in the privately-owned digital media company Vox Media. Vox Media Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff told Squawk Box that the money would be going into building Vox brands, advertising capabilities, technology and infrastructure.

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.” “One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a…