Month: April 2005
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Ana Marie Cox on Ari Fleischer’s Taking Heat
I was annoyed to
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Allan B. Hubbard thinks we are stupid
Allan B. Hubbard, the director of the National Economic Council at the White House, has published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that once again pretends there’s no “clawback” for money diverted into private accounts: First, voluntary personal retirement accounts help younger workers build nest eggs for their retirement that they own and
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Scandal at Duke!
Politics in a microcosm — here’s a hilarious account of the current war between the proto-politicians in the Duke undergrad student body that reads like a dispatch from Washington: The Duke Student Government presidential race was thrown into flux early this morning when the DSG Judiciary ruled that part of the Election Commission’s weekend rulings
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Dog bites man: Ari Fleischer dissembles
The reviews are in, and guess what? Ari Fleischer’s book Taking Heat is full of misleading claims and factual assertions — just like its author. Here’s Salon’s Eric Boehlert: Elsewhere in “Taking Heat,” Fleischer, who chastises the press corps for not checking its facts, writes matter-of-factly that the bungled CBS report on “60 Minutes Wednesday”
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Linda Greenhouse and “pro-worker”
This New York Times
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The DLC on Bill Kristol, Terri Schiavo and the “nuclear option” clown show
It’s time for another dispatch from the “nuclear option” clown show — this time it’s Bill Kristol advocating using the Schiavo case as a lever for ramming through Bush’s judicial nominees on party line votes: [Our families] deserve a judiciary that is respectful of democratic self-government and committed to a genuine constitutionalism. The Bush administration
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Bush’s strawman tactics, continued
WashingtonPost.com’s indispensable Dan Froomkin catches President Bush using one of his trademark rhetorical tactics: Here’s the President of the United States using a straw-man argument to implicitly accuse opponents of his plan of being racist. In Louisville, he said: “Oh, I know they say certain people aren’t capable of investing, you know, the investor class.
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Nuclear option spin roundup
Continuing my obession with documenting idiotic spin in the debate over the “nuclear option,” which would eliminate Senate filibusters of judicial nominations, here’s the latest: 1) People for the American Way sent out an email (PDF) claiming that the “nuclear option” is “an unprecedented political coup that would thrust the country closer to one-party rule”:
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Judith Shklar on hypocrisy
Reading the charges and counter-charges of hypocrisy in the Schiavo case from both sides, I was struck by the relevance of a 1984 book I recently read for a political theory class here: Ordinary Vices by the late political theorist Judith Shklar. She has a chapter on hypocrisy that I think is exceptionally useful for
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Institutional priorities of the 21st century university
The political science building is old and overcrowded and we have to fight to be able to hire new professors, but Duke has money for the more important things… like iPods and plasma TVs. Yes, welcome to the priorities of the 21st century university. The student newspaper here, The Chronicle, recently reported on the free