Month: December 2006
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Bloomberg third-party hype escalating
Writing in the New York Sun, Jim Geraghty is the latest figure to feed the hype around a third-party presidential run by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. The article begins with a remarkably credulous take: The 2004 presidential race lacked a feature present in every campaign since 1992: a significant showing by a third-party
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How mean are American high schools?
Check out this striking passage from an article in the current issue of The New Yorker (not online) — the social culture in suburban high schools is so brutal that Somali refugees think they’re awful places: Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt
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Rumsfeld’s false modesty?
Anyone else notice an interesting juxtaposition on the New York Times front page yesterday? It featured a picture of Donald Rumsfeld’s farewell speech in which he suggesting he was moved and a headline for an article about China directly below that included the phrase “false modesty.” Maybe just a coincidence, but I was amused…
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A non-“balanced” analysis of ISG report
Most news coverage of the Iraq Study Group report has been annoyingly reverential. To point out the obvious, the fact that the group is bipartisan does not give it a monopoly on wisdom. Its work must ultimately be judged by the content of its recommendations, not the process by which it was written. (Related question:
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NYT screws up impeachment process
It’s shocking how many people still don’t understand the impeachment process only a few years after we went through it with President Clinton. The New York Times was forced to run a correction of a correction today after botching its explanation of the removal of Alcee Hastings from the federal bench — here are the
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NY Post “Surrender Monkeys” cover
Via Drudge, a classy New York Post cover headline that equates the Iraq Study Group’s cautious plan for a phased withdrawal from Iraq with surrender: It’s no “Headless body in topless bar”, but ridiculous nonetheless.
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Dick Morris is a joke: Third party edition
Since resigning in embarrassment from the Clinton White House, Dick Morris has become a national joke. This passage from an American Spectator article makes me cringe — it combines Morris’s unrealistic third-party boosterism with his desperation to get quoted: The Lieberman victory bode well for a third party, triangulation master Dick Morris said in an
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The problem with Mitt Romney’s advisers
Writing on Tapped a few days ago, Ezra Klein gave credit to Mitt Romney for signing up Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, two top-ranked economists, as his economic advisers: I don’t know how this process works, but Mitt Romney has named his two primary economic advisors for the 2008 campaign, and, to his credit, they’re
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Nancy Pelosi’s second PAC
Ethan Wallison, a former Roll Call reporter, describes an astonishingly stupid move by Nancy Pelosi’s political team when he covered her in Congress: At one point, it seems to have occurred to Pelosi and her associates that she could double the amount of money she raised – and thus double the amount she gave –
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Bush’s love of “Democrat Party”
Even as he praised the bipartisanship of the Iraq Study Group report today, President Bush seemed to derisively refer to his opponents as the “Democrat Party” — here’s the CQ transcript: The country, in my judgment, is tired of pure political bickering that happens in Washington. And they understand that on this important issue of