Month: April 2007
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NYT adopts White House spin on Iraq bill
Here’s a great example of a reporter buying into one side’s framing of a debate. In yesterday’s New York Times, Jim Rutenberg defines the battle over attaching a withdrawal timeline to the Iraq emergency funding bill as “a fight over support for the troops”: But as the president has vacationed here, his administration has been
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Rudy Giuliani: Middle East expert
Sunni, Shiite — what’s the difference? Rudy Giuliani doesn’t know. Check out his sophisticated understanding of religion and politics in the Middle East (via Isaac Chotiner at The Plank: As for Iran, Mr. Giuliani said that “in the long term,” it might be “more dangerous than Iraq.” He then casually lumped Iran with Al Qaeda.
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Unger Report: Couric’s “sources”
NPR commentator Brian Unger deconstructs Katie Couric’s interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards, showing how Couric relies on vague constructions such as “some people” and “others” as the source for her questions. It’s a classic pathology of “objective” journalism — journalists have to pretend not to have their own voice, and thus have to provide
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Is Edwards moving up?
The subscription-only Hotline newsletter says John Edwards is surging: Who said there’s no room in the WH ’08 Dem race for Obama and Edwards? That CW, according to the latest Hotline/Diageo poll, is wrong. Over the past month, Edwards’s favorability bumped up 15 percentage points. While Clinton and Obama are still at the top of
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Revisiting the experience question
I’ve been questioning the conventional wisdom that Hillary is the most “experienced” candidate in the Democratic presidential primary for a while now (see here, here, and here). She has a long history of involvement in politics and policy, but her experience as an elected official is not any more extensive than that of Barack Obama
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Infinite regress blog-style
Talk about meta-culture: Over at his other digs Scott responds to Ann Althouse’s YouTube video of herself watching American Idol, by Youtubing a video of himself watching Ann Althouse watching American Idol. Ladies and gentlemen; place your bets on how close we can get to infinite regress before it’s all over … This takes me
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Now hiring: Government Accountability Office
President Bush may have a lackluster economic record, but he’s creating jobs at the Government Accountability Office! (PDF) The US Govt. Accountability Office, an agency of Congress, expects to hire a large number of entry-level analysts over the coming year. These positions are designed for recently minted MAs and PhDs with solid analytical and methodological
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Rudy and McCain get supply-side religion
Sadly, Rudy Giuliani is following John McCain down the supply side rabbit hole. Last week, as Matthew Yglesias notes, Giuliani told supply-side guru Larry Kudlow that tax cuts increase revenue: KUDLOW: “I want to ask you, do you regard yourself as a free market capitalist? Do you regard yourself as a supply-sider?” GIULIANI: “I regard
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Bush stops saying “Democrat”?
In his report on President Bush’s press conference today, New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg writes that President Bush “seemed to consciously back away from describing his opponents as ‘the Democrat Party’”: But even as he engaged in openly partisan battle, Mr. Bush at one point seemed to consciously back away from describing his opponents
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Larry Kudlow’s counterfactual reasoning
Via Matthew Yglesias, here’s Larry Kudlow’s latest hand-waving defense of supply-side economics: Tax revenues have been surging from personal incomes, capital gains, and dividends. Now, the Congressional Budget Office would try to argue that these revenues are lower than would have been the case if taxes had not been cut. But who’s to say? Economic