Month: August 2005
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The Times rakes Jeanine Pirro over the coals
Though she’s not well known statewide, Jeanine Pirro could potentially make Hillary Clinton work a little bit in her Senate re-election race. In principle, Pirro fits the perfect profile for a Hillary opponent — a moderate, pro-choice woman. This allows her to portray Hillary as too liberal and neutralizes any advantage Clinton might gain with
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Frist supports ’08 rival Allen
A brief note on the strange customs of legislator-to-legislator campaign donations. Peter Hardin has an article on Senator George Allen’s fundraising for his 2006 re-election campaign. Allen already has more than $5 million in the bank — and no opponent. That means that, like Hillary Clinton, he is likely to have millions of dollars left
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“He said”/”she said” goes op-ed
Via Kevin Drum, here’s an excellent post from my friend Chris Mooney on the way USA Today has taken the awful “he said”/”she said” approach to journalism (which we denounce in ATPS) and applied it to op-eds: Just because your editorial page takes a stance in favor of evolution, that doesn’t mean you have to
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The self-absorption of Charles Schumer
According to the New York Times, Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter wrote a letter to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts that “raises pointed questions about two recent court decisions invalidating legislation Congress passed under its authority to regulate interstate commerce.” Chuck Schumer’s reaction? To act like he made up the idea, and refer to himself
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NARAL tries to stir up Roberts fight
Let the interest group hysteria begin! NARAL, playing the role of the middle school crowd that taunts kids into fighting each other, has released a nasty ad that “accuses Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. of siding with violent extremists and a convicted clinic bomber while serving in the solicitor general’s office,” as the
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Andy Kindler saves the world
If you haven’t heard about him before, you should know about Andy Kindler, a comic the New York Times profiled last week who is near-legendary in the industry for mocking his colleagues: Among those things in past years have been a joke-by-joke deconstruction of a Robin Williams HBO special and an offer of $1 million
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The persecution complex of the right
Matthew Yglesias makes an apt point on Tapped last week about the new right-wing comic book series about a dystopian future of “ultra-liberalism,” which is part of a long series of persecution fantasies coming from the right: It’s rather odd to see persecution fantasies coming from the right at a moment when Republicans control the
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No solid evidence on Ohio fraud allegations
Kevin Drum flags Matt Taibbi overpromising and underdelivering on his allegations of vote fraud in Ohio. No surprise there. The Democrats even conceded that there was no evidence of fraud when releasing their report on irregularities in Ohio (which does show that we to improve access to the polls so that people don’t have to
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Are we in the midst of a major social revival?
Writing in the New York Times today, David Brooks notes that a series of social indicators that are all moving in a positive direction: The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt
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Bush suggests tax cuts increased revenue… again!
For the 500th time, President Bush’s tax cuts have not increased federal tax revenue — they’ve dramatically reduced it. (See my last post on this subject for details.) But Bush keeps suggesting that his tax cuts have made the deficit smaller. The latest example comes from his weekly radio address: The tax relief stimulated economic