Month: May 2005
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A peek into the paranoid liberal psyche
“Avedon,” a guest blogger at Eschaton, displays the classic reasoning of the conspiracy-minded: One reason I don’t think it’s at all paranoid to suspect that the Republicans have deliberately taken over the voting system in order to cheat is that they keep doing things that don’t otherwise make sense. There’s a rather long list of
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Joe Klein takes a stand against Clinton/Bush dominance
Time’s Joe Klein joins my call to oppose any Clinton or Bush running for president in 2008: What’s more, I suspect there would be innate and appropriate populist resistance to this slouch toward monarchial democracy [if Hillary runs for president in 2008]. There is something fundamentally un-American — and very European — about the Clintons
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The David Brooks/John Tierney echo chamber
Media Matters nails a couple of uncanny similarities in David Brooks’ and John Tierney’s columns: Brooks on President Bush’s Social Security proposal, May 8: Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator. … Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff. Tierney on President
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When inappropriate metaphors attack! (Sarah Vowell edition)
Via Wonkette, here’s Sarah Vowell on why she didn’t turn down her role in The Incredibles: [Pixar is] the best at what they do, the most universally culturally revered. It’s like if Nelson Mandela showed up asking for your help to fight racism. Maybe fighting racism isn’t normally your thing. Maybe you’re more of an
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What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (Newspaper editorials edition)
Eric Alterman is dead-on about this: Michael Kinsley begins his column, here, “In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal.” Hey Michael, name one “nearly insane far-left” newspaper editorial page in the United States or has it escaped your notice
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Larry Bartels on democratic accountability
Larry Bartels is a professor of political science at Princeton who recently came and gave a talk here at Duke. He’s working on a very interesting series of papers that are definitely worth a read. “Partisan Politics and the U.S. Income Distribution (PDF) shows that, since World War II, Democratic presidents have consistently produced greater
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Chait and Weisberg on the new conservatism
Jon Chait and Jacob Weisberg have a nice pair of articles on the hollowness of the so-called conservatism practiced under President Bush and the current Republican leadership in Congress. Here’s Chait: The failure of intellectuals on the right to adequately define big-government conservatism reflects their failure to grasp the ways that DeLay and Abramoff became
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Will Hillary escape a pledge not to run for president?
A few weeks I asked why Hillary Clinton is running for re-election to the Senate. I think she’s going to get boxed in to making a pledge not to run for president in 2008 that could not be broken without serious damage to her credibility. Well, it turns out that the media is already polling
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What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (George Bush edition)
Michael Kinsley is a brilliant political commentator, but his tired obsession with being counter-intuitive, which dominated his tenure at The New Republic and has since ruined Slate (see here and here), has again reared its ugly head. His latest column, which I was alerted to by Bob Somerby, makes the counterintuitive case for Bush’s honesty
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How to make a political scientist cry — Scott Rasmussen’s “Hillary Meter”
Here’s the New York Post on pollster Scott Rasmussen’s effort to put the pseudo-science in political science: One of the nation’s top pollsters has created a new “Hillary Meter” to measure Sen. Clinton’s move to the political center for a 2008 White House run – it shows she’s made progress but has a long way