Month: May 2005
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Richard Cohen fails Social Security 101
How hard is it to understand Social Security? This is Cohen’s full time job. Come on! I’ll let Matthew Yglesias do the honors on TPM: Richard Cohen works up some excellent righteous indignation over the Republican Party’s irrational aversion to taxes, but he seems to have a bad case of Washington Post editorial page disease.
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George Will, naif
George Will is supposed to be a conservative who is skeptical of government power and bureaucratic mandates. So why is he endorsing this stupid initiative? Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for
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The Post realizes there is no mandate — when will Bush?
The Washington Post discovers that the narrowest presidential reelection since Woodrow Wilson was not, in fact, a mandate: As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the
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CBPP on Bush press conference
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a nice summary of the President’s deceptive statements during his press conference: 1. Obscuring the fact that those electing private accounts would have to pay back Social Security through reductions in their Social Security benefits… 2. Not explaining that under the option he touted to allow
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Pat Robertson on judges and Al Qaeda
I’m sure others have linked to this, but I can’t let it go by without noting it for the record: Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists, the Rev. Pat Robertson claimed yesterday. “Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s
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From the up is down file: Bush vs. Myers on military capacity
President Bush at his press conference: Q: Do you feel, as you are confronting these problems, the number of troops you’ve left tied up in Iraq is limiting your options to go beyond the diplomatic solutions that you described for North Korea and Iran? THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate that question. The person to ask
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News I missed: Moore to make Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel
Bad news for those who care about truth in documentary filmmaking: Michael Moore plans a follow-up to “Fahrenheit 9/11,” his hit documentary that assails President Bush over the handling of the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism, according to a Hollywood trade paper. Moore told Daily Variety that he and Harvey Weinstein, the
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The boundaries of elite debate on Social Security
Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post on Talking Points Memo taking issue with a Washington Post editorial claiming that “For the past three months Democrats have declined to engage in a debate over Social Security”: Now I’m not sure where Fred Hiatt lives, but here on the planet earth Democrats have very much been engaged
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Quoted in the Duke student newspaper
From an article in The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, about academic blogging here: Brendan Nyhan, a second year graduate student in the political science department, has been an avid blogger for years. He has been writing his own blog since October. Although he has considered how maintaining a blog might affect the possibility of getting