Uncategorized
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When regional summits attack
For an administration that micromanages its photo opportunities, going to Vietnam right now has to hurt: Thirty-eight years later, at age 60, Mr. Bush finally arrived in Vietnam Friday morning. His motorcade sped into the city past roads that Americans once bombed, at the start of a 72-hour visit linked to an annual Asian summit
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The Murtha/Hastings bribery double whammy
It’s increasingly clear that the Hoyer-Murtha leadership race is hurting the Democrats by diverting attention from the party’s election victories and creating strife within the caucus. But I think most observers still haven’t grasped just how damaging it will be to the party if John Murtha is chosen as majority leader and Alcee Hastings is
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David Sirota gets carried away
Liberal hubris alert! David Sirota, a disreputable lefty pundit, gets carried away in an online column for The Nation, suggesting that it was “a mandate election” that may be known as “the Great Democratic Realignment”: There is one more election that will happen in this, the year that history may one day call the Great
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Beck and NY Post demand proof of loyalty
Media Matters has documented two outrageous attacks on dissent in which a conservative talk show host and the New York Post editorial board demand that Democrats prove their allegiance to this country. In the first, the group points out that CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck recently hit Keith Ellison, a newly-elected Muslim member of
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Does media cater to consumer bias?
If you ever doubted the impact of economic motivations on press behavior, the spectacle of ABC’s Mark Halperin groveling for conservative support before the election should have cured you. Here’s what Halperin said on “The O’Reilly Factor”: “[A]s an economic model, if you want to thrive like Fox News Channel, you want to have a
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Presidential rhetoric over time
Via Crooked Timber, here’s a neat tool — the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud, which shows “the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006.” You can adjust a slider to move through time and see
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Slate’s Will Saletan on Iraq and welfare reform
I’m not a big fan of Slate’s trademark “everything you know is wrong” pieces, but Will Saletan’s article on how conservatives have failed to apply the lessons of welfare reform to Iraq is very clever: [A]nti-communism abroad was only one of Reagan’s theories. Another was anti-socialism at home. A government that spends tens of billions
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Hillary’s absurd spending in NY
Today’s New York Times features a graphic that illustrates just how disproportionate Hillary Clinton’s spending was in her Senate race: If the Democrats hadn’t taken back the House and Senate, people would be asking why Hillary didn’t give more of that money to other candidates. She certainly didn’t need it. Update 11/15 5:31 AM: Kevin
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Karl Rove on THE math
Karl Rove’s pre-election exchange with NPR’s Robert Siegel is hilarious: SIEGEL: We’re in the home stretch, though, and many would consider you on the optimistic end of realism about – ROVE: Not that you would be exhibiting a bias … SIEGEL: I’m looking at all the same polls that you’re looking at every day. ROVE:
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NYT’s Jennifer Steinhauer on California
Fresh from caricaturing Nancy Pelosi with the misleading claim that she “favors… schools without prayer and death with taxes,” New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer gives California the same treatment in today’s edition, referring to it as a place where “American values are said to go to die” and as having an