Month: June 2009
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Grover Norquist on Sanford and Ensign
You stay classy, Grover Norquist: “I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign
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NY Daily News publishes McCaughey op-ed
For all the reasons I previously outlined, the New York Daily News should not have published Betsy McCaughey’s misleading op-ed on the health care debate. She is not an expert and has no credibility.
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Michael Steele: Policy wonk
GOP chairman Michael Steele has stumbled upon the solution to one of most vexing domestic policy issues of our time — the ever-increasing cost of health care: So if it’s a cost problem, it’s easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the
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Overstating GOP’s Obama misperceptions
Brad DeLong approvingly quotes a reader making the following claim about misperceptions among Republicans: 12% of the country still thinks Obama is a Muslim. 8% thinks he faked his birth certificate. The new Washpost/ABC poll says that 22% of the electorate id’s itself as GOP. Thus it is a fair inference that roughly half of
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Silver’s flawed analysis of health care $
As I wrote back in May, Nate Silver is obviously a smart and energetic blogger, but he just isn’t a social scientist. That’s why it’s frustrating when his quickie statistical analyses draw more attention than the relevant political science scholarship (of which Silver frequently seems unaware). For instance, Silver published an analysis today that claims
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Maureen Dowd self-parody alert
Bob Somerby flags Maureen Dowd’s bizarre interpretation of why the video clip of President Obama killing a fly during an interview was replayed so frequently: The moment may have resonated so much because some Americans fear that President Obama is too prone to negotiation, comity and splitting the difference, that he could have been tougher
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Arbitrary $1 trillion threshold for health care
I understand that people are concerned about the potential costs of health care reform, but it’s immensely frustrating how Senate Finance chair Max Baucus and other prominent figures in Washington have become fixated on the idea that the reform bill shouldn’t cost more than $1 trillion. I haven’t heard a principled reason why that number
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Sean Hannity: Unbiased economic observer
Sean Hannity, June 18, 2009 (via Media Matters): CAROLINE HELDEN, PROFESSOR, OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE: [President Obama] inherited a terrible political and economic situation from the previous administration. HANNITY: Blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to hear this anymore. HELDEN: He had incredibly high approval ratings, Kennedy-esque approval ratings, and now they’re starting to come back to
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Another reason not to read Gail Collins
During a “conversation” with David Brooks on nytimes.com, Times columnist Gail Collins kicked things off by describing Brooks as “the go-to guy on how America lives.” Noooooooo! Michael Bérubé, who flagged this gem, offers the only appropriate response: This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never
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McCaughey back with more misinformation
Déjà vu alert: Betsy McCaughey is pushing misinformation about health care legislation in Congress again. Back in 1994, McCaughey wrote a New Republic article that popularized the false claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration’s proposed system of managed competition. The premise was that she had