My friend Ben Fritz, who co-edited Spinsanity with me and Bryan Keefer, has a good post up on his blog about two creative ideas to promote national service. First, Philip Longman wrote a fascinating article in the Washington Monthly about innovation in medical care at the Veterans Administration. It’s so good, Longman argues, that we

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I called Rep. Chris Cox’s office this morning to ask if he had been accurately quoted in the Salon article I posted on over the weekend, which includes this passage: Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took

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It’s been clear for months that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and had a very limited WMD program before the war. Yet in late October 27% of Americans falsely believed that Iraq had WMD before the war and an additional 22% believed it had a major WMD program (PIPA poll [PDF] –

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Dan Drezner and Kevin Drum are mulling a question that I had a couple days ago — are blogs really bringing down high-profile targets like Trent Lott, Howell Raines and Eason Jordan, or is it something else? The answer, I think, is that the role of the blogosphere is being dramatically overhyped. Here’s why. Within

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David Horowitz, that shoddy right-wing provocateur, has debuted his latest project, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which is tagged as “A guide to the political left.” I learned about it from an ad in The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, which simply included the URL and promised to reveal who really controls the Democratic Party. The site claims that it

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The Armstrong Williams fiasco has drawn important attention to inappropriate government payments to journalists. But Bruce Bartlett notes that very little has been said about reporters, anchors and commentators who routinely accept massive corporate speaking fees: [M]ainstream journalists who routinely speak before corporations, trade associations and interest groups hoping to influence news coverage practice the

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Paul Krugman makes two important points today. First, the evidence that Alan Greenspan is a partisan is just undeniable. After pressuring the Clinton administration to focus on debt reduction, he endorsed Bush’s tax cuts and then backed private accounts in Social Security this week even though the President has presided over a massive deterioration in

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Is President Bush suggesting that he wants to phase out traditional Social Security entirely? From the New York Times today: In the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bush suggested that he foresees the plan to divert 4 percent of earnings into private accounts as a first step toward a longer range transformation of Social Security. “The

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It’s worth reviewing where we are in the Social Security debate. President Bush has proposed a big initiative at great political risk to himself, confident that he can sway public opinion in his favor as he did with Iraq. But he’s about to find out that domestic politics plays by a different set of rules.

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With Spinsanity shut down, I try to avoid reading as much political vitriol, but here’s a list of three people who need to be called out. First, New York state Republican chairman Stephen Minarik said after Howard Dean’s election as DNC chair that “now [Democrats] can be accurately called the party of Barbara Boxer, Lynne

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