Headline of Bill O’Reilly’s column in Sunday’s Boston Herald op-ed page:
Palin’s back and bigger then ever
It was corrected on the Herald website, but still . . .
The same edition of the Herald featured a piece about the Scott Brown/Martha Coakley bakeoff with this bit of dulcet prose:
The candidates held no punches in a day of fast-paced campaigning before high-spirited crowds.
Don’t you mean pulled no punches?
Grammar, children. Grammar.
Campaign Outsider 
No, “held.” Those punch bowls are too heavy to hold for long.
I can see a subtle semantic difference between “holding” a punch (not punching when given the opening) and “pulling” a punch (not punching with the as much force as can be delivered.) A boxing metaphor used on an election, is concerned with which blows a candidate tries to land. Its hard to measure the force applied to it.
For the than/then error, It seems another example of the make-the-red-squiggles-go-away style of editing.