Month: December 2005
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Thomas Frank answers Larry Bartels
Last month, I linked to a paper (PDF) by Princeton’s Larry Bartels taking issue with Thomas Frank’s bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas? I focus on four specific questions inspired by [author Thomas] Frank’s account: Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic party? Has the white working class become more conservative? Do working class
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David Brooks on the rule of law
Matthew Yglesias writes up something I noticed this morning: [T]here’s something a bit odd about this David Brooks column, which seems to concede that the President’s wiretap scheme was illegal, but then slides glossily past the point to discuss other issues. Now, obviously, a columnist has a right to focus on whatever he wants to
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The robotic Scott McClellan
The Washington Post’s Mark Leibovich highlights the disturbing and robotic message discipline of White House spokesman Scott McClellan (via Mark Dubois, a fellow grad student here at Duke): On the Thursday morning after his reelection in November 2004, President Bush bounded unexpectedly into the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where about 15 members of
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NSA dissembles about wiretaps
Today’s New York Times reports the National Security Agency was following President Bush’s lead by dissembling about the need for a court order to wiretap Americans: Testifying before a Senate committee last April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the National Security Agency, emphasized how scrupulously the agency was protecting Americans from its electronic
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The problems with the Groseclose/Milyo study of media bias
UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and Missouri economist Jeff Milyo have published a study (PDF) alleging liberal media bias that is receiving a lot of attention, including a link on Drudge. But you should be wary of trusting its conclusions for reasons that I tried to explain to Groseclose after he presented the paper at
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Sen. John Cornyn: “None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead”
With leadership like this, we might as well give up now (via the Progress Report): “None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee. Russ Feingold’s response was more than appropriate: Sen. Russ Feingold
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What is Ronald Kessler talking about?
In another Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Ronald Kessler engages in some deeply fallacious reasoning (subscription required): The fact that Mr. Bush bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lays out procedures for intercepting communications in terrorist cases, raises legitimate concerns. But it should be of more concern that al Qaeda and related terrorist
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What are Stephen Moore and Lincoln Anderson talking about?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the improving fortune’s of America’s middle class (subscription required), Stephen Moore and Lincoln Anderson write: The middle class has not been “shrinking” or losing ground, it has been getting richer. For example, the Census data indicate that the income cutoff to be considered “middle class” has risen steadily.
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Let the parsing begin: McClellan on “nothing has changed”
As I predicted yesterday, Scott McClellan tried to defend President Bush’s most damning previous statement about wiretapping by parsing what the President said as only referring to the Patriot Act. Here’s the transcript from his press briefing: Q Scott, in April of 2004, President Bush delivered remarks on the Patriot Act, and he said at
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Bush 2004-2005: “[A] wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed.”
Inspired by this Atrios post, here’s a chronology of technically true but misleading statements by President Bush and his administration that imply court orders are required for all government wiretaps: President Bush — April 19, 2004: For years, law enforcement used so-called roving wire taps to investigate organized crime. You see, what that meant is