Uncategorized
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Best floor speech ever
A fellow graduate student passed on this great moment in Congressional history — a floor speech titled “Notre Dame will rise again” from November 21, 1993: Mr. KING. Mr. Speaker, with all the events of the last week, NAFTA, the Brady bill, D.C. statehood, allegations of stolen elections, I think it is important we focus
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Whitehouse.gov search scrubbing?
Compare and contrast (via Real Climate by way of DeLong): Search results for “global warming” for the Whitehouse.gov site in Google: 438. Search results for “global warming” in the Whitehouse.gov search engine: 1.
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Tony Snow: Dissent encourages attack
White House spokesman Tony Snow is hard at work smearing the anti-“surge” resolutions as potentially encouraging another 9/11 (and thereby setting up a future narrative blaming any future attack on current opposition to the war): The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said Mr. Bush “will continue to exercise his responsibilities as commander in chief” even
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Ari Fleischer spins from the witness box
For those of you who haven’t seen it, Ari Fleischer’s testimony in the Scooter Libby case is hilarious. As context, start with Jonathan Chait’s classic account of Fleischer’s tactics: [W]hat Fleischer does, for the most part, is not really spin. It’s a system of disinformation–blunter, more aggressive, and, in its own way, more impressive than
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The latest hype of third parties and “right-left synthesis”
Shorter New America Foundation event: “Will A New Right-Left Synthesis Transform American Politics?”. Answer: No. In related news, conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie is hyping a third party challenge to Rudy Giuliani if he is the Republican nominee, though Viguerie warns that voting for a third-party candidate would tip the election to the Democrats.
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Kyl and Cornyn attack dissent in resolution debate
During the debate over President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq, two Republican senators are the latest members of their party to suggest that dissent encourages the enemy and hurts the troops. John Cornyn said, “To offer nonbinding resolutions which encourage our enemies and undermine our allies and deflate the morale of our
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The lurid Hillary fantasies of Dick Morris
According to Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff, former Clinton strategist turned professional Clinton hater Dick Morris, who is working on an anti-Hillary documentary, is already making bizarre claims about what she’ll do as president: Morris believes that Hillary’s presidency will be dominated by a left-wing social and domestic agenda, and a Nixon-like assault on her political
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Tracking the Obama madrassa smear
Media Matters has a nice piece up tracking the dissemination of the Obama madrassa smear. As we showed at Spinsanity with our coverage of the the Ken Lay/Lincoln Bedroom myth and the NEA/9-11 myth, these things are hard to stop once they start spreading. PS You know a hit piece on a black liberal is
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Revisiting a poll on inequality
Last week, I complained about a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Prof. Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University (subscription required) that framed social and economic mobility as a “he said”/”she said” issue rather than considering any empirical evidence. Here’s the key passage from his piece: Consider the evidence. While 92% of conservatives believe that hard
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Mike Gallagher: Wishing for another attack
Here’s one of the more vile statements I’ve seen recently. Atrios flags conservative pundit Mike Gallagher — the sixth most popular radio host in the country — wishing for another 9/11 in order to silence left-wing dissent: Seeing Jane Fonda Saturday was enough to make me wish the unthinkable: it will take another terror attack