Uncategorized
-
CFIF gets religion on AIDS
Maybe Hillary Clinton’s decision to run for president has some advantages. The Center for Individual Freedom, a conservative group whose main contribution to the AIDS debate has been to oppose efforts to reduce patent protections for anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world, recently sent out an email (PDF) lobbying for the passage of the Ryan
-
Quoted on Fox/Clinton controversy
Eric Pfeiffer of the Washington Times interviewed me yesterday for a story on the continuing controversy over President Clinton’s “Fox News Sunday” interview with Chris Wallace: “I do think this is helpful to Democrats for Clinton to go after Fox directly. It’s a smart play,” said Brendan Nyhan, former co-editor of the nonpartisan online watchdog
-
Democracy for America’s Lakoff training
In the conclusion to All the President’s Spin, we discussed how the Center for American Progress, George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute, and the Frameworks Institute represented the vanguard of a group of liberals attempting to match the sophistication of the White House’s PR tactics. Sadly, the prominence of Lakoff and CAP has grown substantially since the
-
NYT finally covers Bush straw man rhetoric
The political reporters of the New York Times have consistenly failed to challenge the dissembling of the White House. Today, the Times finally ran a piece on President Bush’s constant use of straw man arguments, which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank covered in 2004 and the Associated Press reported back in March. And if you
-
Grover Norquist is a charming fellow
Grover Norquist, the influential conservative insider who runs Americans for Tax Reform, has never been one to take the high road. He’s compared bipartisanship to date rape, wants to make government small enough “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” and likened taxation of the rich to
-
World fails to clarify Allen story
On Friday, I questioned the prevailing interpretation of this passage from a World Magazine profile of George Allen by founder Joel Belz: Allen actually had a pretty credible defense for what he said. No one—including The Washington Post, which featured the story repeatedly for several weeks—ever demonstrated that “macaca” really has such murky racial connotations
-
George Allen smeared Gulf War dissent
The Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti has written a new George Allen profile that includes this disturbing anecdote about his first run for Congress: The Democrats nominated Kay Slaughter, a cousin of the retiring congressman. The most contentious issue in the special election was the Persian Gulf war, which Allen supported and Slaughter opposed. Allen ran
-
NYT on NY’s town and village court system
Today’s New York Times features an investigation of the state’s bizarre system of town and village courts: Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went
-
Hillary’s awful Iowa poll numbers
Via Power Line, the Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen reports just how unpopular Hillary Clinton is in Iowa: This survey is a further measure of just how unelectable Clinton may be. She loses Iowa, albeit by tiny margins, to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, two relatively unknown guys who lose
-
The “Clinton is crazed” talking point
FoxNews.com got caught promoting President Clinton as “crazed” in his interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” which aired today (text, video). And now others are picking up the talking point. Here’s National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on its blog The Corner: It was Bill Clinton’s Tom Cruise moment, though Cruise sounded saner talking