Month: November 2007
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John Edwards, health care scrooge
John Edwards has followed up on his silly and probably unconstitutional promise to cut off health insurance for members of Congress if they don’t pass universal health care by promising to do the same for members of his cabinet: In his speech at Iowa’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner tonight, John Edwards vowed that if his administration doesn’t
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Krugman and Brooks are both right
There’s a simple answer to the David Brooks/Paul Krugman fight. Brooks seems to be correct in pointing out that the frequently circulated tale of Ronald Reagan appealing to racism during a campaign visit to Philadelphia, MS — which appears in Krugman’s new book — has been exaggerated. Krugman’s response is to provide a laundry list
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The downside of the “lie” label
Ezra Klein praises a Washington Post article on Rudy Giuliani’s health care dissembling: This is the headline and first paragraph of an article in The Washington Post: Giuliani Is Still Standing By Questionable Figures The former New York mayor would have us believe that he was off by one percentage point at most in calculating
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Dems screw up Cheney impeachment vote
How not to run Congress 101: Maybe now we know what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) meant when she said impeachment was “off the table.” Lawmakers’ voting cards on the issue were literally just that — off the table — during Tuesday’s brouhaha when Republicans briefly hijacked control of the chamber with a procedural maneuver
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Linda Hirshman chooses the wrong analogy
Via Jonah Goldberg, did you know that Linda Hirshman compared boycotting Fox News and NBC to standing up to the Nazis back in January? Last summer the Nevada Democrats pulled out of a debate sponsored by Fox News. Loaded, racist and all the rest, the Dems decided it was incoherent for them to pretend Fox
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More GOP “surrender” rhetoric
Roy Blount is the latest prominent Republican to suggest that Democrats want to “surrender” in Iraq — a word with implications of treason: On the Iraq war, the Democrats prepared to offer the administration $50 billion but with strings attached, including a goal to withdraw troops by December 2008. Republicans quickly accused them of threatening
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Hillary’s waitress cares about issues
Amidst the silly flap over whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign left a tip at a restaurant in Iowa, it’s great to see one of the waitresses who served the candidate keeping her head about what’s really important: Ms. Esterday said she did not understand what all the commotion was about. “You people are really nuts,” she
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Karl Rove revives phony tax cut claim
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Karl Rove revives the phony claim that President Bush’s tax cut reduced taxes on businesses by $4,000: Let’s also be clear about what it means to roll back the president’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, as the Democrats want to do. Every income-tax payer will pay more as all
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McClatchy illustrates waterboarding
The media do a terrible job explaining what exactly waterboarding is. My 2005 posts titled “What is waterboarding?” (here and here) still get a lot of hits from Google. The question then was whether waterboarding involved actual submersion under water or pouring water over the face to simulate submersion. In the US case, at least,
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Clinton’s speech distorted
This is what I get for trusting news reports on Bill Clinton’s comments about Hillary. Yesterday I quoted from a New York Times article that suggested Bill had compared criticism of Hillary to the “Swift boat” ads against John Kerry. However, Greg Sargent and Media Matters make a convincing case that what Bill said was