Month: February 2007
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Steve Benen: Obama not inexperienced
Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report has joined me in questioning the conventional wisdom that Obama is less experienced than Hillary: And one last word about experience. Clearly, in his third year in the U.S. Senate, Obama enters the presidential race with the least federal experience among the leading Democrats. But I have a hunch
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WSJ dissembles on health care
The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who shares my obsession with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, destroys a cartoonishly dishonest editorial on health care: Pointing out intellectual dishonesty on The Wall Street Journal editorial page has a certain tiresome dog-bites-man quality to it. I generally restrain myself to only the most hilarious and/or flagrant examples.
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NYT distorts Summers remarks again
Back in December, I complained about a New York Times story that mischaracterized a controversial statement by former Harvard president Larry Summers : Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are
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Russert busted on the stand
The way that Tim Russert’s trademark tactic was used against him in the Scooter Libby trial is pretty amusing: Mr. Wells, using the technique that Mr. Russert is known for as moderator of “Meet the Press,” then put up on video screens throughout the courtroom Mr. Russert’s words in an affidavit he filed later. In
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Is your car out of the closet?
Most random Google ad ever — just saw this on Tom Maguire’s blog: On the Internet, there is a site for everything.
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1996 exit poll on Powell vs. Clinton
In a New York Times op-ed, former CBS News political director Martin Plissner claims that a 1996 exit poll shows that Americans are ready to vote for a black presidential candidate: On Nov. 5, 1996, Voter News Service — the organization hired by the TV networks to do exit polling — asked people at the
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Weisberg: Third-party candidate “less likely”
Writing in Slate, Jacob Weisberg is notably more skeptical about a third-party presidential bid than his elite pundit colleagues: It is a rather obvious point that leaving the country’s biggest problems to fester can’t be good policy. What is less obvious is that it may not be good politics either. A two-party system is a
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Fox: CNBC not friendly enough to business
You just can’t make this stuff up. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are basing their new business news channel on the premise that the cheerleaders at CNBC aren’t friendly enough to corporations: No one has ever accused CNBC, the cable TV home of Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow and Maria Bartiromo, of being antibusiness. Until now.
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There was no golden age of civility
People often forget how nasty politics used to be, especially before the Progressive Era. Here’s part of amusingly vicious article from the May 6, 1896 edition of the New York Times that I came across in my research: Now that is bad press.
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Why don’t senators win the presidency?
The odds are good that the next president will be a senator, which raises an obvious but important question: why are Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy the only two presidents who won election as sitting senators? The most complete treatment I’ve seen of the subject is Barry Burden’s 2002 Political Science Quarterly article (PDF),