Month: June 2009
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The tabloidization of TPM
Back in 2002 or so, it would have been hard to imagine that Josh Marshall would be posting pictures of the house of the GOP staffer who had an affair with Republican senator John Ensign under the headline “Chez Hampton: Swank Vegas Digs of Former Ensign Love Triangle Staffers.” (A later post added reader comments
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Health care reporting failures begin
We’re just getting started on the health care debate, and political journalists’ lack of substantive knowledge and devotion to “he said”/”she said” reporting is already resulting in misleading coverage: -Media Matters flags a Politico story that quotes Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) saying “‘Washington takeover’ are two words we’ve been hearing a lot from the Obama
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The wit and wisdom of Larry Summers
From a Paul Krugman blog post about a new model he’s working on: In his new book The Myth of the Rational Market Justin Fox traces the lineage of the noise-trade assumption to an unpublished paper by Larry Summers that began, THERE ARE IDIOTS.
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Panetta smears Cheney as hoping for attack
It was wrong for Republicans to say Democrats hoped the nation would lose the war in Iraq under President Bush, and it’s wrong for CIA director Leon Panetta to mind-read Dick Cheney as wishing for a terrorist attack under President Obama: The Central Intelligence Agency typically fights distant enemies, but on May 21st its leaders
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Fox polls on Obama’s smoking
Fox is known for its use of loaded and/or wacky polling questions, but the latest one is just bizarre — they polled on whether people think President Obama is “sneaking cigarettes at the White House” (PDF): 53. Barack Obama says he quit smoking cigarettes. Do you think Obama is still sneaking cigarettes at the White
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Are bipartisan policies more sustainable?
A number of elites have recently claimed that President Obama needs Republican support in order to ensure that his proposed health care reforms are sustainable: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR): “The president is very much aware that to bring about enduring change — health care reform that lasts, gets implemented, wins the support of the American
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Court invites meddling in judicial elections
The perverse consequences of judicial elections mount. The Supreme Court has ruled that “[e]lected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench.” That may not sound so bad, but the decision appears to create an ill-defined standard of “disproportionate influence” that could actually encourage
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Overreacting to Holocaust Museum shooting
At the gym yesterday I saw this inane exchange between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Brian Todd about security at the Holocaust Museum: TODD: …CNN’s security analyst, Mike Brooks, says his law enforcement colleagues in Washington are telling him this space — in here and in there, where you can enter again unchecked before you hit
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Gaffney suggests Obama is a Muslim
The misperception that Barack Obama is a Muslim will not go away. Frank Gaffney, the right-wing apparatchik last seen suggesting that President Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was “code” telling “our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them,” has written an entire column for the Washington Times arguing
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The puzzling conservative GM boycott
I don’t understand the idea of a conservative boycott of GM. To the extent that it works, it will increase the odds that the firm will need more government cash and decrease the likelihood of the government quickly selling its stake back into the private sector — precisely the opposite of what conservatives would presumably