Month: August 2005
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Intelligent design: Truth in advertising
I haven’t read all of the recent coverage of “intelligent design” in the news, which I understand has been hit-and-miss due to reporters’ insistence on treating both sides of a controversy as equally valid, but here are two signs of progress. A week ago on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” host Susan Stamberg referred to “the teaching
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More smearing of dissent from the Bush administration
Via (ugh) the Progress Report and E&P, here’s presidential spokesman Trent Duffy suggesting that critics of the war in Iraq don’t want to win the war on terror: Q: Is the White House concerned about the protests that are planned in Salt Lake City today? MR. DUFFY: The President addressed that directly. He can understand
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A fun fact about 2008
Here’s a fun fact that my father-in-law on Monday thinks hasn’t gotten enough attention — assuming Dick Cheney doesn’t run for president, 2008 will be the first election since 1952 in which neither an incumbent or vice president is running on either side. 2004: George W. Bush (incumbent) 2000: Al Gore (VP) 1996: Bill Clinton
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How weak is Mitt Romney in MA?
The same poll that shows John Kerry losing to Hillary Clinton in a Massachusetts presidential primary also reveals that Governor Mitt Romney, a supposed 2008 contender for the GOP nomination, badly trails the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate: As Romney weighs whether to forgo a reelection bid to prepare a run for president in 2008, the
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Good for Bob Costas
If only TV hosts had the guts to do this more often… The longtime NBC sports and talk show host [Costas], who signed on this year to be an occasional substitute for Larry King on CNN, resisted a request last Thursday to be the host of a King program devoted to interviewing guests about the
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George Allen shows his gravitas
TNR’s Michael Crowley, who is guest-blogging for Josh Marshall, catches George Allen using a silly metaphor: When Republican senator/presidential hopeful George Allen was on ABC’s This Week today praising the Bush administration for its training of Iraqi security forces, George Stephanopoulos suggested that the Post’s story has some pretty troubling implications for that utterly essential
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John Kerry is not a popular guy, part 2
More from the John Kerry is not popular files: a Boston Globe poll in Massachusetts finds that Hillary Clinton leads Kerry 33%-21% in a 2008 trail heat among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in his own state. Ouch.
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Matt Bai buys into the Internet politics bubble
Logical fallacies in action: We have lots of choices now, so political parties will wither on the vine! That sounds pretty silly, but it’s the suggestion that Matt Bai makes in his New York Times Magazine piece on the death of the 527 group called America Coming Together (ACT): ACT represented the first serious challenge
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More attacks on dissent against Sheehan
The smearing of Cindy Sheehan as a traitor continues, as Media Matters documents here and here. Some of the worst offenders: Michael Barone: “Today, we have many in the press — not most, I think, but some at least — who do not want us to win this war and think that we don’t deserve
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The battle of grieving parents over Iraq
The Wall Street Journal ran the inevitable op-ed from a grieving parent whose child was killed in Iraq, which begins, “I lost a son in Iraq and Cindy Sheehan does not speak for me.” This was inevitable because Sheehan and others like her are being treated like martyrs. Maureen Dowd wrote that “the moral authority