Month: March 2007
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Return of bogus “average” tax cut stats
The emerging debate over the possible expiration of President Bush’s tax cuts means that the White House is trotting out its misleading arsenal of “average” tax cut statistics. The goal: To mislead the public about the benefits of the tax cuts by using unrepresentative averages that are skewed upward by the disproportionate benefits received by
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Bush repeats “largest tax increase” claim
Yesterday, I complained about the misleading GOP talking point that the Democratic budget proposes “the largest tax increase in American history,” as Rep. Paul Ryan put it. As I pointed out, President Bush and the Republicans wrote the expiration of the tax cuts into law. They created the “largest tax increase in American history,” not
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Is Bush bringing back the machine?
We often forget that the government of this country was run in a highly partisan manner until the early- to mid-twentieth century. Given the US attorney scandal, new disclosures of partisan activities at the General Services Administration, and this Los Angeles Times op-ed from Joseph D. Rich, a career attorney at DOJ (among other things),
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Misleading “largest tax increase” claim
Talking points that annoy me — the claim that Democrats allowing all or part of the Bush tax cuts to expire would represent the “largest tax increase in American history”: Almost all of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts are now set to expire at the end of 2010. Democrats have said they want to extend most
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Sampson proposed firing Fitzgerald
We could have had another Saturday Night Massacre: Mr. Sampson also acknowledged publicly for the first time that he proposed replacing Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, at a White House meeting in 2006. Mr. Fitzgerald was then prosecuting the case involving the leak of the identity of Valerie Wilson, the C.I.A.
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The Gore-ization of Obama?
I’m all for holding politicians accountable for their misstatements, but it looks like Barack Obama is going to get the Al Gore treatment of trivial nitpicking, as Bob Somerby notes — check out this Politico article: But in Obama’s case, the presidential campaign hazing is complicated by 442 pages of words from his own pen.
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Underpriced parking meters!
After Stanley Fish’s mystery novel column in the New York Times yesterday, I was all set to hate today’s op-ed about parking from Donald Shoup, a UCLA professor of urban planning. But Shoup makes a compelling economic argument for raising the rates on underpriced parking meters, which generate significant externalities (traffic and pollution) as people
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Creeping relativism at DOJ
It’s time for another edition of conservative postmodernism! According to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, the performance of US attorneys can only be measured in political terms: Sampson, in remarks obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, spoke dismissively of Democrats’ condemnation of what they call political pressure in the firings.
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Why the public is shifting in a liberal direction
Kevin Drum presents evidence from The Pew Research Center (PDF) showing the public identifying much more strongly with the Democratic Party (50%-35%), supporting increased spending on government programs, and becoming less supportive of social conservatism. Why did this happen? The best way to understand these shifts is with the concepts of “macropartisanship” and “public mood”
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John McCain gets hacked
Via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, Mike D. at Newsvine executes the greatest MySpace hack of all time: Read Mike D’s post for the details, but the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t steal other people’s bandwidth, especially if you’re running for president…