Month: March 2005
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More WMD fraud
Rep. Chris Cox isn’t the only one claiming that WMDs were in Iraq before we invaded. The liberal group Media Matters documented Rush Limbaugh doing the same thing on Monday: LIMBAUGH: The New York Times’ big story yesterday, it’s all about how these serious weapons in Iraq were looted after we invaded Baghdad. And, of
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Dean portrays filibuster as “free speech”
In an email to supporters tonight, DNC chair Howard Dean echoed Robert Byrd’s tactic (debunked here) of portraying the “nuclear option,” which would prevent filibusters on judicial appointees, as a matter of free speech: Today Harry Reid and the Democratic Senators asked us, the American people, to help them preserve the right of our elected
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Scalia’s disturbing view of government authority
Brad DeLong flags an important post by Michigan political science/law professor Dan Herzog on Left2Right in which Herzog catches Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia making the following astonishing claim: JUSTICE SCALIA: And when somebody goes by that monument, I don’t think they’re studying each one of the commandments. It’s a symbol of the fact that
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The sound of one Rove crying
Despite the bluster and threats of public reprisal against Democrats, the reality is that private accounts are dead. The media is pretending that the issue is still alive, but the new Washington Post numbers tell the tale better than I can (full poll results): Three months after President Bush launched his drive to restructure Social
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Gale Norton repeats bogus ANWR statistic
In an op-ed supporting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that ran in the New York Times Monday, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton deployed one of the Bush administration’s trademarks — misleading statistics: If approved by Congress, the overall “footprint” of the equipment and facilities needed to develop the 1002 area [ANWR] would
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More from the “Any minute now” brigade
Via Josh Marshall, more bluster on the supposedly imminent surge of support for private accounts: “Once Americans understand the choices they have — that they will own their personal retirement accounts and will be able to pass them on to loved ones, they will flock to personal retirement accounts,” said Rep. Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin
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O’Rourke’s unfair shot at Kerry
The latest issue of the Weekly Standard has an article by the “humorist” P.J. O’Rourke that begins “John Kerry effectively ended his political career on February 28, 2005…” That’s a big claim, but O’Rourke doesn’t back it up. Here’s his account of the allegedly unforgiveable comments Kerry made during a discussion of the 2004 campaign:
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Continetti on the myth of the “investor class”
In the midst of an interesting critique of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti offers the best debunking I’ve seen yet of the much-hyped “investor class” thesis that stock ownership will magically turn people into Republicans: Conservatives used to cast a wary eye on class politics. But that was
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Social Security buffoonery continues
Media Matters catches Fred Barnes in a profound display of ignorance about Social Security. During a discussion with Brit Hume on the March 9 edition of Fox News’ “Special Report,” Barnes didn’t appear to understand that private accounts do not improve the solvency of Social Security. The reason is obvious: every dollar diverted into private
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PR and opportunity costs
One of the things that’s struck me about the Social Security debate is how badly our political system deals with the question of opportunity costs. The idea is simple — money and influence are finite. When we devote resources to proposal A, we can’t use those resources to address priorities B-Z. But government is terrible