Uncategorized
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Edwards’ faux consultation on ’08
At its worst, John Edwards’ shtick verges on hokey populism — he signs emails to supporters “Your friend, John” — so it’s disappointing but not surprising that he sent this patronizing email to his list last week: For the past two years, we’ve worked together to build an America that lives up to its promise
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The racist Washington Times editors
I knew that several Washington Times editors had close associations with white supremacist organizations and figures, but the open racism is apparently even worse than I thought — see
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Revisiting the old Iraq strategy
For a while, I’ve been wondering what happened to President Bush’s previous plans and timetables for Iraq. This administration has been masterful at goalpost-shifting without catching flak from the press. For instance, as we wrote in All the President’s Spin, Bush kept issuing new versions of his “plan” to cut the deficit in half (which
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WSJ pronounces recovery strong
According to the Wall Street Journal, it is “a canard” to claim that “workers are doing far more poorly than they did” in the 1990s expansion: The latest reports on wages and income have been rolling in, and with them we can discount one more canard about the current economic expansion–namely, that wages are stagnant
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Who leaked the Webb-Bush exchange?
In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Senator-elect James Webb attributed the release of his infamous exchange with President Bush to the White House: Q: You have seen President Bush, with whom you had a famously tense exchange at a White House reception shortly after the election. A: I think that was vastly overblown. Q: Bush,
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Hillary not looking so electable
[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.] With the 2008 presidential race barely underway, it’s striking that Edwards and Obama are already doing so well in key primary states and Hillary, the
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Schlussel questions Obama’s loyalty
I started tracking early attacks on Barack Obama last week when I pointed out that Rush Limbaugh was calling him “Odumbo.” Now, via Media Matters, the conservative pundit Debbie Schlussel is engaged in a far nastier line of attack, questioning Obama’s loyalty to this country: So, even if [Obama] identifies strongly as a Christian, and
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John Kerry’s case for flip-flopping
What do you do if you’re John Kerry and no one thinks you can win the 2008 presidential race? Apparently, you try to turn weakness into strength by reframing flip-flopping as open-mindedness — here’s what Kerry wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that ran under the snarky tagline “The case for flip-flopping” (via Power Line):
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Friedman whitewashes US Civil War
Thomas Friedman should stick to foreign affairs commentary — here’s his fairy tale history of the US Civil War from last week’s “Meet the Press”: We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human
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Escaping Iraq “the Chicago way”
Amidst all the depressing news from Iraq, the story of a government minister accused of corruption escaping from a Green Zone jail was particularly awful — no one even told us he was gone until the next day: Iraq’s former electricity minister, the most senior official arrested on corruption charges here, made a brazen escape