Uncategorized
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The Edwards primary strategy
Everyone thinks John Edwards is hurt by Barack Obama becoming the “fresh face” in the Democratic presidential primary race. It’s also true that he can’t compete with Obama and Hillary on a number of dimensions — they’re celebrities who would make history if they became president, and both are brilliant at a level that he,
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Post commits
journalismjournamalismIn a story on the Washington Post website, William Branigin manages the rare feat of casting appropriate doubt on the President’s misleading tax and budget claims: Democrats have long derided Bush’s deficit-cutting boasts, saying he routinely ignores the huge debt that the federal government has accumulated since he was inaugurated in January 2001. From a
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Bush: “Political statements” bad (from Dems)
The AP highlights another passage from President Bush’s Wall Street Journal op-ed today: President Bush, facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the first time, is urging lawmakers to work with his administration and warning that “political statements” in the form of legislation would result in a stalemate. Bush, of course, has never pushed legislation with no
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Bush misleads again on federal revenues
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, President Bush falsely suggests that his tax cuts have increased federal revenue yet again: It is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues. Because revenues have grown and we’ve done a better job of holding the line on domestic spending,
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Journalists as children’s characters
A New York Observer article on the future of the public editor position at the New York Times includes
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Ted Rall calls me a neocon
The lefty cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall called me a “Bush apologist” back in 2002 for debunking his conspiracy theories about the war in Afghanistan. Now he’s claiming he was right all along in a diatribe where he absurdly labels me a “neoconservative Republican”: Now that only 9% of Americans believe the war in Iraq
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Spencer Ackerman goes too far
After my experience with The American Prospect, I’m sympathetic to Spencer Ackerman, who was fired by The New Republic after coming into conflict with TNR’s maddening pro-Iraq war politics. (Unfortunately, he signed on with TAP afterward, which is far more dogmatic than TNR.) But Ackerman takes his newfound freedom from editorial constraint too far in
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Bush praises Bush via Ford
Peggy Noonan captures the dynamic of the posthumous praise of Gerald Ford pretty well in this passage: It is not clear who will speak at his funeral, but it is now unfortunately common practice for politicians to see every eulogy as an opportunity. Invited to reflect on biography, they tend to smuggle in as much
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New York Times sneers at “wingnuts”
I’m skeptical of simplistic theories of liberal media bias. It’s true that coverage of social conservatives is often unfair or condescending. However, it’s also true that elite news reporters skew conservative on economic issues. Similarly, I think journalists’ devotion to the cult of objectivity and focus on coverage of personalities and politics instead of substance
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Could Colin Powell have won the presidency?
Writing in the New York Times, guest columnist Orlando Patterson (a Harvard sociologist) claims without much justification that Colin Powell “stood a good chance of winning the presidency on the Republican ticket had he run”: A black man has led the world’s most powerful military machine and stood a good chance of winning the presidency