Month: August 2007
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Penn claims Hillary’s unfavorables will drop
The AP’s Ron Fournier examines Democratic worries about having Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket in 2008: Looking past the presidential nomination fight, Democratic leaders quietly fret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top of their 2008 ticket could hurt candidates at the bottom. They say the former first lady may be
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Kos’s “strong Democrat” fallacy on MTP
During a debate with DLC chairman Harold Ford Jr. on Meet the Press this morning, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas made this fallacious argument for why candidates for their party should act like “proud Democrats”: MR. MOULITSAS: No, no, no. You’re talking about bringing the, you know, appealing to the vast majority of the American
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Reid: Bush “letting” Osama “roam free”
Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader, recently suggested that President Bush is “letting Osama bin Laden roam free”: Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, issued a statement criticizing Mr. Bush’s agenda. “Whether it is privatizing Social Security, giving massive tax breaks to oil companies while consumers pay more at the pump or
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Would Jesus vote for Mitt Romney?
Marc Ambinder flags an anti-Romney pamphlet handed out in Iowa that features a bizarre hypothetical: Would Jesus Christ vote for Mitt Romney? …We strongly believe that Jesus Christ, if he were alive in the flesh and voted, would never vote for Mitt Romney under any circumstances. Forget WWJD. I’m going to start marketing WWJVFITASP —
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Failures of nerve in fact-checking
It’s great to see the New York Times at least suggest that Rudy Giuliani’s claim to have been “at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers” is bunk, but the headline (“Giuliani Missteps in Imagery of Sept. 11”) sucks. Note how it reframes the issue in terms of tactics rather
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Giuliani: Overhyped on crime and terrorism
If you haven’t seen it yet, the Village Voice article on Rudy Giuliani’s phony claims about 9/11 is a must-read. We already knew that his “broken windows” strategy was probably not responsible for the drop in crime in New York City. And now it turns out that his reputation for effectively fighting and responding to
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The paradox of enemy combatants
Wesley K. Clark and Kal Raustiala note an inherent contradiction in treating terrorists as “enemy combatants”: Labeling terrorists as combatants also leads to this paradox: while the deliberate killing of civilians is never permitted in war, it is legal to target a military installation or asset. Thus the attack by Al Qaeda on the destroyer
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New Pew poll on media perceptions
Some disturbing statistics from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press — 36% of Americans believe the press hurts democracy, including 48% of Republicans and 57% of those Republicans who get their news from Fox. The data suggest that opposition to the press spikes among members of the president’s party during high-profile
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Stu Bykofsky: Authoritarian
You will almost never see an article as blatantly authoritarian as this column by Stu Bykofsky in the Philly Daily News: One month from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America. What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing? A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically –
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Oklahoma’s GWOT plates
A Sooner friend alerted me that Oklahoma is now offering special “Global War on Terrorism” plates featuring an image of the World Trade Center: It’s always great to see public agencies parroting Bush administration propaganda.