Brendan Nyhan

Month: June 2005

  • More nasty tactics from the Wall Street Journal

    James Taranto of OpinionJournal.com, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website, follows up Friday’s bogus comparison between Harry Reid and North Korea with one purporting to link Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter: CNN reports from Damascus on a remarkably candid speech by Syria’s dictator: Bashar Assad has said the media and technological revolution

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  • Tomorrow’s anti-Hillary agitprop today (part II)

    I had a feeling that the first claim reported from the new anti-Hillary book was false. Media Matters beat me to checking it and, shockingly enough, it’s not true: One easily checked claim about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) — which an e-mail newsletter from the right-wing website NewsMax.com hyped as a major revelation from

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  • Linked in Wonkette

    First Wonkette, then the world! Intern Fred Becker has posted this on the famous DC gossip blog (note the link): While LA Times columnist Ron Brownstein is off gazing into his new wife’s navel on their Paris honeymoon, his colleagues back in Washington seem to be rooting around in their own bellies over a ponderous

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  • Bush: Deception through monotony

    Matthew Yglesias makes a prescient point about the President’s endless Social Security roadshow:

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  • Another anti-democratic attack on dissent

    Sigh. In a New York Times story today about George Voinovich, the Ohio Republican who helped cut a deal on judicial nominees, a conservative reverend is quoted endorsing the anti-democratic principle that opposing the President undermines the war on terror: In a news conference on Tuesday, the president affirmed his commitment on both fronts, mocking

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  • Third party fantasia continued: Philadelphia Inquirer edition

    Is Mickey Kaus running the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board? Ron Brownstein? In a May 25 editorial, the Inky drops hints about a centrist third party — the Brownstein/Kaus meme — and adds Kaus’s assertion that John McCain would have won the presidency last year as a third-party candidate: In a real cliffhanger, 14 U.S. senators,

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  • Bush’s supposedly “specific” 2004 agenda

    Josh Marshall flags Janet Hook’s article in the Los Angeles Times claiming President Bush ran on a “specific agenda” in 2004: Many of the assets Bush brings to his second term distinguish him from other two-term presidents. Unlike President Reagan’s broad-brush “Morning in America” campaign for reelection in 1984, for example, Bush ran in 2004

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  • Fake spam names

    The creativity of the non-English-speaking spam wizards is truly amazing. Scanning my spam folder in Yahoo Mail, I see emails from “Dispatching R. Brimmed,” “Pharmacist T. Hairpieces,” “Hallucinatory R. Heartwarming,” “Irregularities V. Mono,” and my personal favorite, “Antifreeze B. Chi.” At least they amuse me when they’re wasting my time…

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  • James Taranto raises the level of discourse

    The nasty tactic of comparing domestic political opponents to terrorists, Saddam Hussein, and other hated figures in order to create a negative association between them has cropped up again and again since 9/11. We wrote about it constantly on Spinsanity. Now here’s OpinionJournal.com’s James Taranto doing it again: [Howard] Dean isn’t the only Democratic leader

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