Month: March 2007
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Joe Lieberman’s long lost twin
My friend Ben Fritz shares an excellent graphic from Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment news website he co-edits: You have to admit that the resemblance is uncanny…
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NYT gives Hillary the Gore treatment
It’s increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton is going to be covered like Al Gore. Meaningless anecdotes will be framed as revealing deep aspects of her character; everything she says is going to be portrayed as the result of political calculation; and every shift in tone or emphasis will be covered as an attempted reinvention of
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Giuliani’s controversial praise for Lincoln (!)
Today’s sign of doom for the republic — Phillip Klinkner at Polysigh notes that some attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference were upset about Rudy Giuliani’s praise of Abraham Lincoln: In interviews afterward, some attendees said Mr. Giuliani lost momentum when he heaped lavish praise on Abraham Lincoln. While many conservatives regard the Civil
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James Inhofe’s anti-global warming agitprop
I knew Senator Jim Inhofe is a kook on the issue of global warming, but this passage from Dana Milbank’s report on Inhofe’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference is especially absurd: Inhofe repeated his view that man-made global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” and he quarreled with
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Dan Froomkin on Tony Snow’s dissembling
WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin nailed the latest prevarications from White House spokesman Tony Snow in his column Friday: All modern White House press secretaries can reasonably be expected to spend a lot of their time trying to spin the facts to make their boss look good. But in his fervor to make his case, Snow sometimes
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TPM’s slide into Atrios-ism
More on the decline of Talking Points Memo — main page blogger David Kurtz approvingly quotes reader “RB” saying the following: Why doesn’t a progressive with an audience say something to the effect “This is who and what the once proud and honorable Republican Party has turned itself into. It is a party of hate,
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Democratic hypocrisy: Kosovo vs. Iraq
Chronicling political hypocrisy is almost too easy, but Q&O’s Bruce McQuain has a nice post showing how several prominent Democrats took diametrically opposed positions during the debates over Kosovo and Iraq. Back then, many of them argued against a resolution that would have required congressional authorization for President Clinton to send in ground troops, arguing
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Confusing rhetoric and ideology
Matthew Yglesias makes an excellent point about the way in which people confuse vulgar or strident rhetoric with extreme ideology: Joe Klein’s “you might be a left-wing extremist if…” list is quite revealing. A number of his items are somewhat strawmannish substantive positions. Many of them, however, rather plainly have nothing whatsoever to do with
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Sad times in Durham
My Duke Blue Devils were vanquished for the second time this year by a superior UNC team yesterday. So I must alert you to the blog of a fellow Triangle grad student, UNC’s Micah Weinberg, who challenged me to a friendly Tobacco Road wager on the outcome of the game. Next year we will have
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When Switzerland attacks!
Via another grad student in my department, here’s the headline of the year: Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: March 2, 2007 Filed at 8:43 a.m. ET ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) — What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got