Month: May 2009
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Sessions on threat to the Court’s “heritage”
Memo to the Republican Party — when a senator with the ugly racial history of Jeff Sessions starts discussing the potential threat posed by Judge Sotomayor and others like her to the “heritage” of the Supreme Court, it makes me nervous. Here’s the quote: Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary
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The crude reasoning of Dick Cheney
Jon Chait points out the simplistic binary logic used by Dick Cheney in his recent speech on national security: Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.
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Keith Olbermann reads Dick Cheney’s mind
Bob Somerby (who continues to do yeoman’s work on the failures of MSNBC) catches Keith Olbermann engaging in some absurd faux mind-reading of Dick Cheney during an interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff: WILKERSON (5/21/09): So, he [Cheney] is frightened and he’s trying these very Orwellian tactics of using his own
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The casual dishonesty of Karl Rove
Not surprisingly, you can’t trust Karl Rove to use quotations in an honest manner. Here’s a passage from his latest Wall Street Journal column: On health care, Mr. Obama’s election ads decried “government-run health care” as “extreme,” saying it would lead to “higher costs.” Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a
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Newt Gingrich revives the GOPAC playbook
Newt Gingrich’s one-man assault on Nancy Pelosi’s speakership is destined to fail, but it is worth noting how he is reviving the PR tactics that he helped to popularize. When he was rising through the ranks of the House, Gingrich was known for his use of invective to demonize Democrats, which included comparing Speaker Jim
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New policy mood data from Jim Stimson
UNC’s Jim Stimson just updated his estimate of policy mood — a measure of public demand for more government across a range of issues that I frequently highlight here. Here’s a graph showing his current estimates of yearly mood for 1952-2008 where higher values indicate greater liberalism: The new data indicate that demand for more
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Do military MDs need to study philosophy?
NPR’s Alix Spiegel recently interviewed military psychologist Bryce Lefever, who used to work in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which trained US military personnel to resist brutal interrogation techniques including waterboarding. Toward the end of the interview, Lefever argued that the “real ethical consideration” governing interrogation practices is to do “the most
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The GOP’s Keep America Scared Act
Has any recent party-endorsed legislation been promoted as disingenuously as “The Keep Terrorists Out of America Act”? The PR campaign for the bill falsely suggests that the Obama administration is going to turn dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility loose on U.S. soil. For instance, a National Republican Senatorial Committee web
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Heritage’s comparative effectiveness dystopia
Matthew Yglesias flags a bizarre argument by the Heritage Foundation’s Dan Holler against comparative effectiveness research on health care: Second, the administration is pushing for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to be primarily organized by the government. The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created
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Limbaugh claims Obama supports reparations
Think Progress buries the lede in a post about how Rush Limbaugh echoed the absurd accusation of Rep. Pete Sessions that President Obama is intentionally increasing unemployement. In the same quotation from his show, Limbaugh states that Obama supports “forced reparations” — a phrase which suggests that the nation’s first black president supports reparations to