Month: July 2007
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NYT op-ed fails Civics 101
No one understands that it takes sixty votes to pass non-budget legislation in the Senate because of the filibuster. Apparently this ignorance extends to the editors of the New York Times op-ed page, who let Jean Edward Smith write the following in a piece about changing the number of seats on the Supreme Court: If
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The futility of speculating about motives
Matthew Yglesias makes a crucial point that all pundits should take to heart: I spent a lot of time puzzling over Bush’s sincerity or lack thereof with regard to his idealistic rhetoric before the war, and in retrospect it was all wasted time. It’s interesting to wonder how it’s possible — or if it’s possible
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The lame debate over Michael Moore’s “Sicko”
By Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan The mainstream media has started fact-checking Michael Moore one movie too late. As veteran fact-checkers of Michael Moore, we should be taking a victory lap in the wake of “Sicko.” The liberal icon’s latest film has been aggressively fact-checked by major outlets including CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, the Associated Press,
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Boehner: No free will on SCHIP
According to House Republican leader John A. Boehner, offering SCHIP coverage that is superior to available private insurance options amounts to “[d]ragging people out of private health insurance”: Top House Republicans objected to the House Democrats’ plan to finance their proposals, with increases in tobacco taxes and cuts in subsidies for private health plans serving
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How is Gonzales still Attorney General?
Among all the norms that the Bush administration has overturned, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s repeated refusal to answer a direct question in Senate testimony without invoking executive privilege or the Fifth Amendment might be the most outrageous yet. Josh Marshall has the story: In this exchange Sen. Schumer (D) asks Gonzales who sent him and
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Conservative editorials attacking Iraq dissent
In the wake of the attack on Hillary Clinton by Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, two major conservative editorial pages have published editorials suggesting that supporters of withdrawal from Iraq are treasonous and support genocide. First, the New York Post published an editorial titled “Comforting the enemy” that suggested Clinton’s focus is on “undermining [the]
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David Brooks omits context on economy
David Brooks is pulling out all the conservative pundit tricks in this passage from his column today: If you’ve paid attention to the presidential campaign, you’ve heard the neopopulist story line. C.E.O.’s are seeing their incomes skyrocket while the middle class gets squeezed. The tides of globalization work against average Americans while most of the
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A strangely inept Bush soundbite on SCHIP
President Bush’s soundbite on why he opposes SCHIP expansion is strangely inept: President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, which he describes as a step “down the path to government-run health care for every American.” It’s funny to denounce your opponents for taking
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Wacky Cindy Sheehan hijinks
Dana Milbank catalogues the wackiness of Cindy Sheehan. How outside the mainstream is Sheehan? Even left-wingers have ostracized her: The left-wing Daily Kos Web site banned her postings because of her challenge to Pelosi. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which has a large antiwar following, ran an article titled “The epic narcissism of Cindy Sheehan.” How strange
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Romney and the “Obama Osama” sign
Given the long history of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11, it’s not encouraging to see Mitt Romney posing with an “Obama Osama” sign (via TPM): The best part, though, is the Romney campaign’s claim that the sign was “an alliterative play on words” that wasn’t “equating or comparing anyone” (via Matthew Yglesias). Right. (Note: