Uncategorized
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No suicide by agent who checked in Atta
One of the incidents that led to me quitting blogging for The American Prospect was a dispute over a post on Atrios that used a suicide to score cheap political points. But it turns out that there was no suicide. To review, here’s a quick summary of the controversy from my Time.com column: Last Wednesday,
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Hotline analysis of national House vote
The subscription-only Hotline has a useful analysis of cumulative national and state-by-state vote totals by party for the House: We all know ’06 was bad for the GOP. But the breadth of the Dem victory shows up starkly in a new Hotline analysis of the cumulative nat’l vote for House candidates. — Dems won 54.1%
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Juvenile Democratic candidate narratives
Try to believe Newsweek pays Howard Fineman to write drivel like this (via Kevin Drum): You knew Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high school. At least I did. They were candidates in the student senate election. She was the worthy but puffed-up Miss Perfect, all poodle skirts and multicolored binders clutched to her chest.
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Revisiting Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
I want to briefly revisit the subject of Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. A few weeks ago, I criticized a New York Times article that presented a misleading characterization of Carter’s use of the term “apartheid” in the title. In that post, I didn’t comment directly the propriety of Carter’s use of
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Halloween comes late: Schumer in his boxers
It’s a good thing the snow here delayed delivery of my New York Times, or I would started my day with this mental image: Mr. Delahunt, a six-term congressman, is the least prominent of the four [members of Congress who live together] but perhaps the funniest. More to the point, he is the only one
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Headline of the year
From the Associated Press, my nominee for headline of the year: Escaped Chimp Gets Snack, Cleans Bathroom (AP) LITTLE ROCK, Ark. An escaped chimpanzee at the Little Rock Zoo raided a kitchen cupboard and did a little cleaning with a toilet brush before sedatives knocked her out on top of a refrigerator. The 120-pound primate,
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Clive Crook gets tax cut costs wrong
Writing in the Atlantic, Clive Crook claims that “All of the administration’s tax cuts account for only about a quarter of the deterioration in the ten-year projected budget balance since 2001. The rest is outlays—on defense, and on everything else.” But that’s not right — according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Bush’s
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Happy vs. serious John Edwards
The email template for messages to supporters from the John Edwards campaign includes a picture of the candidate at the top. What’s funny is that they have been changing the picture depending on the tone of the message — here’s happy John after he announced he was running: And here’s serious John criticizing President Bush’s
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How liberal is Barack Obama?
With Barack Obama’s announcement yesterday that he’s creating a presidential exploratory committee, I thought it was worth comparing his voting record in the Senate with those of his rivals, especially given the hype about him being more liberal than Hillary, who has been very cautious. In particular, Obama opposed authorizing the President to use force
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Bush: “I was the first to say” no WMD found
Spencer Ackerman points out that President Bush claimed with a straight face that “The minute we found out [Iraq] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so” during his recent 60 Minutes interview — unbelievable: PELLEY: You know better than I do that many Americans feel that your administration has