Month: October 2006
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Michael Barone’s pricing problems
Greg Mankiw quotes Michael Barone’s attack on John Edwards: His stump speech includes a line about a little girl whose parents couldn’t afford a winter coat. Give me a break. You can buy a little girl’s winter coat at Wal-Mart for $10. That’s the price of taking the little girl out to lunch at McDonald’s.
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New White House standard on WMD evidence
From Tim Russert’s interview with UN ambassador John Bolton on today’s “Meet the Press”: RUSSERT: Has North Korea’s nuclear capability increased during the Bush presidency? BOLTON: I think we have no way of being certain of that one way or the other. So the White House now has to be “certain” to make statements about
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Tide turning in Duke lacrosse case
Writing in New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen joins the emerging consensus that the Duke lacrosse case is a farce: [T]oday, the preponderance of facts indicate that there is an injustice—committed, as it turns out, against those perfect offenders. Yet at the epicenter of bien-pensant journalism, the New York Times, reporters and editors—although pointedly not the
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Kerry calls N.K. nuke “the Bush bomb”
On Friday, John Kerry made this statement in a speech to the New Hampshire Democratic Party: North Korea’s nuclear program was frozen under Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush turned his back on diplomacy, Kim Jong Il turned back to making bombs, and the world is less safe today because a madman has the Bush
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DFA uses flag-draped coffin image for GOTV?
Howard Dean’s former organization, Democracy for America, is distributing get-out-the-vote sticky notes based on designs proposed by members. One of them appears to feature a graphic of flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers above the slogan “Vote!” — at least, that’s what it looks like to me: Am I wrong here? If not, is it really
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Predicted Bush approval in November
Tradesports has an interesting contract on President Bush’s approval rating on November 7, 2006 — will it be greater than 30%? 32%? etc. — which I translated into the following graph using basic rules of probability: Bush’s current approval rating (38%) is near the value given the highest probability, but what’s going on with the
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John Kerry decries “swift-boating” a bit late
Unintentionally hilarious John Kerry graphic of the day — from an email (PDF) to supporters: He “won’t stand for the ‘swift-boating’ of any candidate”… except himself.
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Warner not running, Edwards gains
This is surprising: Former Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) announced this morning that he will not seek the presidency in 2008, saying he wants to spend more time with his family. He was trading at 15% yesterday on Tradesports: Clearly, the major beneficiary of this development is John Edwards, who is now the main
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Bush claims Democrats will surrender
In an email to GOP supporters (PDF), President Bush again suggests that Democrats want to surrender in the war on terror: [Election Day] is a choice between Republicans who understand the most important responsibility we have is to protect and defend the people of the United States. Or Democrats who will wave the white flag
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NYT rebuts Bush’s deficit claims
Surprisingly, the New York Times did an excellent job debunking President Bush’s misleading claim to have fulfilled his pledge to cut the deficit in half: The Treasury Department reported that its preliminary data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended Sept. 30, showed that the federal budget deficit was $248 billion, down from $319 billion