Month: February 2007
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White House rewrites history on warming
My friend Chris Mooney, the author of The Republican War on Science, has posted an excellent takedown of a misleading Bush administration statement on global warming: There was an absolutely incredible letter from the White House yesterday concerning Bush’s record on climate change. It is signed by Office of Science and Technology Policy director John
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Kids love the House Clerk’s website!
Continuing my series on the wacky cartoon mascots of government websites for children, here’s my latest find — “A. Bill” from the House Clerk’s website for kids: A. Bill is a little bland for my taste — he doesn’t even compare to my personal favorite, Thermy the Thermometer: More generally, do you think any kid
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Cheap pander of the day: Ted Strickland
Here’s a great example of legislative grandstanding. When he was a member of the House, Ted Strickland introduced a bill that “[p]rohibits the importation for sale of foreign-made flags of the United States of America.” It’s not a tax or a quota; he would ban the importation of flags. You will never see a less
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The perils of small sample sizes
National Journal regularly conducts an “insiders poll” of elite pundits and/or elected officials, who are offered anonymity in exchange for (hopefully) honest responses. The aggregate results are typically reported by party. The results are generally not widely reported outside the Beltway, but the most recent insiders poll has made an unusually big splash. Here’s the
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No Bush mandate for tax cuts
In a recent post, Kevin Drum strangely grants the premise that George W. Bush had a mandate for tax cuts in 2000: The first is George Bush’s tax proposal of 2000, and it was right in the sweet spot: detailed enough to demonstrate he was serious about it but not so detailed that it drew
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John McCain trots out Trent Lott
Back in 2005, John McCain praised discredited Jim Crow nostalgist Trent Lott, saying “of all the majority leaders we’ve had in the United States Senate, I believe that Trent Lott was the finest leader we’ve had.” (McCain also endorsed George Wallace, Jr., who spoke four times to a racist hate group.) Today, Lott returned the
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Democrats using sunsets on student loan bill
NPR reports that Democrats are already abusing phony sunset provisions to game Congressional budget rules, a tactic that Republicans repeatedly abused over the last six years: For the past few years, Democrats in Congress have not had much power in the minority. In that time, Republicans have used a budgeting technique called a “sunset” —
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More Bush budget trickery
As with his various “plans” to cut the federal budget deficit in half, President Bush’s budget makes a series of implausible assumptions in order to project a return to surplus by 2012, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes: * The budget implicitly includes the assumption that the Alternative Minimum Tax will be
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Giuliani’s in for 2008
Rudy Giuliani has reportedly filed a “statement of candidacy” with the Federal Election Commission, meaning that he is joining John McCain among the contenders for the GOP nomination. So what do all the people who hyped the two of them as third party candidates say now? Obviously, if McCain and Giuliani thought they had a
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Mooney and Sokal on reality-based science
The tag team of NYU physicist Alan Sokal and my friend Chris Mooney have an excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today on attacks on science from the left and right: As these cases suggest, attacks on science by ideologues and special interests have a long history in this country. A stance of postmodernist