Month: May 2005
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Howard Dean: A little too much “straight talk”
Martha Burk notes the apparent influence of George Lakoff on Howard Dean’s language during last week’s “Meet the Press.” But she doesn’t discuss my favorite part — Dean’s unintentionally revealing slip: Absolutely. I’m not advocating we change our position. I believe that a woman has a right to make up her own mind about what
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The media notices that Bush is unpopular
Finally, the big picture starts to dawn on the DC establishment: Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of “political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained. In the past
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Krugman v. Okrent – round 2
After Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times, took a substance-free cheap shot at Paul Krugman in his final column, Krugman fired back with a letter denouncing Okrent. Now they’re battling it out on the new public editor’s website. Not sure I have the time or desire to wade through all the
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Ron Brownstein’s belated disclosure
This blog gets results! I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago noting the apparent conflict of interest in LA Times columnist Ron Brownstein writing an article touting John McCain’s chances as a third-party presidential candidate in 2008 shortly before marrying McCain’s communication director. The post, which was linked on the media insider site
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The implausible scheming behind Hillary ’08
A Washington Post article by John F. Harris details Hillary’s planned presidential PR offensive: Although focused principally on her Senate reelection campaign next year, her advisers are informally — and in some cases not so informally — planning for a White House run. A presidential campaign, Clinton’s advisers acknowledge, would raise anew many of the
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Mickey Kaus revives the McCain third party meme
Nooooo — it’s back! Following in Ron Brownstein’s footsteps, Mickey Kaus has revived the silly claim that John McCain has a real chance as a third party nominee in 2008: WSJ’s Brendan Miniter argues that Republicans shouldn’t move to the center by embracing McCain and McCainism, because “[c]onservatives can and do win elections for the
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A good Factcheck.org catch
I’ve given Factcheck.org a hard time lately, so I wanted to link to a new piece that does a good job debunking a bad statistic I had assumed was correct. Here’s the summary: Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took
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E.J. Dionne on conservative postmodernism
E.J. Dionne gets it right about the deep ambivalence of the conservative movement toward truth and factual accuracy, which are selectively invoked as absolute standards for the media when it’s strategically useful but completely set aside when it comes to claims from the White House: Conservative academics have long attacked “postmodernist” philosophies for questioning whether
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Ann Hulbert on creating a Crossfire generation
You would think that the last thing college-bound students need is training in narrow-minded thinking. But according to a perceptive article by Ann Hulbert in the New York Times Magazine, that’s exactly what the new SAT persuasive essay is doing — with potentially disastrous effects for kids who have grown up watching partisan foodfights on
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Matt Taibbi on fire
Via Jay Rosen, here’s New York Press writer Matt Taibbi laying waste to Newsweek and the newsmagazine genre: It was humorous to see how quickly Newsweek lost its cachet with Middle America. So long as it went about its usual revolting Neanderthal literary mission — wrapping 4000 words of inane speculations about the historical Jesus