Month: January 2005
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Great moments in morning television
This is what happens when you get up at 4 AM every day (courtesy of the Weekly Standard): Couric: I’m Katie Couric, here with Lester Holt, Ann Curry, and Al Roker… Curry: Also ahead, a controversial new book is out today that may be trying to rewrite American history. In it, sex researcher C.A. Tripp–it
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Laugher of the month
I’m a little late to this one, but I can’t let it go by. Nicolle Devenish, the new White House communications director, offered this bon mot to the New York Times a couple of weeks ago: Whether [improving relations between the administration and the media] can happen is an open question, since the relationship between
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What is Terry McAuliffe talking about?
More Democratic nonsense on Social Security — here’s Terry McAuliffe in an email to supporters today: We will fight President Bush and his Republican cronies as they try to: …Undermine Social Security for today’s seniors and future generations of retirees by privatizing the system. Of course, no one, including President Bush or leading Republicans, is
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Snow implies zero benefits in 2042
Treasury Secretary John Snow has published an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) in which he uses the exact same strategy I flagged earlier — implying that Social Security will stop paying out any benefits in 2042 when it exhausts the trust fund: The current system will pay out more in benefits than
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Reid’s conspiracy theory
Yesterday, a Washington Post story reported that House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) called President Bush’s Social Security plan “a dead horse,” spurring a great deal of controversy and media coverage. But he wasn’t done there. According to the Post, “Thomas said lawmakers should debate whether Social Security benefits should differ for men
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The end of Spinsanity
We’ve decided to stop updating Spinsanity. You can read the announcement here. If you’re a new reader, hope you’ll stay and check out the site. There are lots of posts below and more in the archives. The RSS feed is here. And of course, to be absolutely clear, the views expressed on this site are
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Another PR innovation
WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin notes that President Bush used a long opening statement to chew up a huge chunk of an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And I noticed Bush did the same thing to both the Washington Post and the Washington Times as well. To be sure, it’s good that Bush is doing a
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The ever-changing deficit reduction plan
Here’s the opening of Robert Samuelson’s new Washington Post column: Everyone is going to play numbers games to judge George W. Bush’s next economic policies. At the top of the list will be Bush’s pledge to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009. Although this promise seems simple, it isn’t. Let’s see. Chad Kolton,
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The zero benefits fraud
One of the key rhetorical moves in the current push for creating private accounts in Social Security is to suggest that the system will literally run out of money and stop paying benefits entirely in 2042. This is completely false. First, a couple of examples. Here’s President Bush speaking during a White House interview with
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The Armstrong Williams backstory
Most commentary I’ve seen on the Armstrong Williams controversy has been Crossfire-level at best – either it was an innocent mistake made by a PR firm, or a nefarious scheme to subvert democracy. But the best way to look at the story is as an example of how far the Bush administration will go in