Month: March 2005
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Things that make you go “whaa?”
I don’t want to turn this blog into a series of Seinfeld-esque observations on human behavior, but why is everyone walking around with their cell phone earpieces in even when they’re not on the phone? I see this a lot now, especially at airports. Maybe people want to look important, but to me they look
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Is Ari Fleischer dumb?
Jon Chait asks the question in the latest New Republic: I have always believed that Ari Fleischer is a duplicitous genius. During his tenure as White House press secretary, he elevated the mundane practice of misleading reporters and avoiding their questions into an art form… I’m not sure exactly what I expected from Fleischer’s new
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Balance gone wrong
C-SPAN has done a laudable job of keeping itself non-political over the years, but airing a Holocaust denier in the name of balance is perverse. We have to draw lines as a society, and that is one of them. I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.
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Transportation jargon gone wrong
It’s annoyed me for years when flight attendants talk about how to “deplane” the aircraft. Repeat after me: it’s not a word. You don’t “de-car” when you get out of your automobile. But things took a turn yesterday when I was riding Caltrain — they came on the intercom and told us how to “de-train.”
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Making All the President’s Spin look mild
It looks like the media is catching up to All the President’s Spin — Jay Rosen, an NYU prof, wrote a widely publicized post last month arguing that the Bush administration is trying to delegitimize the press, which is the thesis of Chapter 2 of the book. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been even more
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Byrd and MoveOn attack “nuclear option” as threat to free speech & Constitution
Senator Robert Byrd spoke at a MoveOn.org rally yesterday in Washington DC against the “nuclear option,” which would eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. Here’s a picture: The sign in front of him makes it pretty clear what they’re trying to do yet again — falsely claim that the “nuclear option” is an assault on
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Savings as a collective action problem
Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has nice analysis of the savings problem in the New York Times. As he tells it, the problem is that good schools are judged by a relative standard, and when every family is bidding against every family to live in areas with the best schools, it may be rational to
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Saletan catches more Social Security mumbo jumbo
Will Saletan takes apart the administration’s conflicting Social Security pitches to minority communities on Slate. Up is down! Here’s the payoff: In an op-ed written in Spanish and not made available in English on any federal Web site, the administration argues that Latinos, who live longer than whites do, should support Bush’s reform plan because
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Today’s press error roundup
Media Matters and Bob Somerby note that George Will made a screaming error in this passage from his Washington Post column on Sunday: Today the government is partially funded by that surplus of Social Security tax revenue over outlays, a fact disguised by politicians talking rot about Social Security being an “insurance” program with a
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Bush’s priorities vs. the nation’s
As I wrote below, the president has the institutional power to focus debate on one issue and ignore questions about the opportunity costs of devoting resources to addressing that issue. In 2001, for instance, tax cuts were a much lower priority than other issues for the public, but when asked whether they wanted tax cuts