Month: July 2007
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Yglesias: Bush “wants” sick kids to die
I’m sick of pundits flippantly accusing their opponents of wanting some potential bad outcome that could result from a policy position, as Matthew Yglesias does in this post (and yes, I recognize that it’s supposed to be funny or ironic): George Bush Wants Kids to Get Sick and Die Just kidding. He’d like kids to
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John McCain’s glamorous (losing) campaign
Predictably, the wheels are falling off of John McCain’s campaign (Intrade currently puts his probability of winning the GOP nomination at 4.3%), but at least he’s going out in style: In April, McCainiacs gathered at the Tabú Ultra Lounge in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. His finance reports say that he paid the club
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Return of the Obama inexperience meme
The meme that Barack Obama is inexperienced has come back with a vengeance. Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch asserted recently that Obama “has a record of inexperience no other serious contender could match”: Consider a candidate like Barack Obama, who—well, there is no candidate like Barack Obama, who entered the race with a record
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Bush’s misleading Al Qaeda/Iraq rhetoric
Slowly, press outlets are starting to push back against President Bush’s frequent misleading references to Al Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq. The critical coverage began with McClatchy reporter Jonathan Landay, who wrote this on June 28: Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida “the
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Josh Marshall’s evidentiary decline
Josh Marshall has recently fallen into the bad habit of asserting things he can’t prove, including baseless or unsupported assertions like this one (my emphasis in bold): A very revealing moment. For the first time the president was asked, now that all the legal stuff is over and there’s nothing more pending, whether he was
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Greg Mankiw and tax cut rhetoric
I’m quoted in a Harvard Crimson story on Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor and former Bush administration economist: N. Gregory Mankiw is not unfamiliar with the demands that come with being one of the foremost economists in the country. After all, the Beren Professor of Economics survived a stint in the very public domain
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AP’s illogic on Al Qaeda report
Why does the AP suggest that Al Qaeda’s rebuilt operational capacity “could bolster the president’s hand at a moment when support on Capitol Hill for the war is eroding and the administration is struggling to defend its decision for a military buildup in Iraq”? The report is titled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West”
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Moore: “Everything…in ‘Fahrenheit’ was true”
After a mild fact-checking piece on “Sicko” by CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, Michael Moore went on a long rant yesterday in which he claimed that “everything I said in ‘Fahrenheit [9/11]’ was true” (transcript, video): And for me to come on here and have to listen to that kind of crap. I mean, seriously, I haven’t
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Why we need a Federal Reserve for gas taxes
Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board expresses the common concern that a gas tax increase would not be offset by corresponding tax cuts, but would instead be consumed by increased government spending: Speaking for ourselves, we don’t favor a carbon tax. In theory, such a tax might make sense if it were offset by
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NYT: How can anyone oppose more SCHIP?
New York Times reporter Robert Pear does solid work on the health care beat, but this passage betrays his sympathies in the debate over expanding government financing of health care insurance for children: The fight over a popular health insurance program for children is intensifying, with President Bush now leading efforts to block a major