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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
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Strangest campaign delay ever
The New York Times blog The Caucus reports on a bizarre delay in an Obama rally in Iowa: It turns out that Mr. Obama apparently was flying in from Chicago, and blustery winds in Cedar Rapids delayed his plane. But that explanation was of little solace to Mr. Lammer, who seemed far angrier than his
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Bill defends Hillary on driver’s license issue
Yesterday, Bill Clinton finally entered the fray directly on behalf of his wife: “We listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff,” Mr. Clinton said, “and when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he’d done in his life. When that scandalous Swift boat ad
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John Edwards vs. the Constitution
When is a reporter going to point out that John Edwards is making a campaign promise that is probably unconstitutional? To appeal to Democrats infuriated by Washington, Mr. Edwards is employing unusual approaches. While he was the first candidate to present a health care plan, he no longer dwells on details of his proposal. Instead,
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Russert misleads on Thompson & WMD
During yesterday’s interview with GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, NBC “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert repeated the myth that Thompson claimed Iraq had WMD immediately before the US invasion. Here’s what Russert said: RUSSERT: You were in Iowa, and you’re talking about Saddam Hussein, and you said, it was, “He was certain former Iraqi
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Deborah Solomon’s new disclosure
Clark Hoyt gets results! A few weeks ago the New York Times public editor revealed that Deborah Solomon’s impossibly witty (and harsh) interviews in the Times Magazine are the result of heavy edits that have included changing the order and wording of the questions. And in yesterday’s Times Magazine, Solomon’s interview of former UN ambassador
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The Cleland ad myth
The 2002 Saxby Chambliss ad criticizing Max Cleland has been become a standard talking point in liberal critiques of post-9/11 GOP demagoguery. The latest figure to exaggerate its viciousness is former American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky, who wrote the following in a review of Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal: Difficult as it is