Uncategorized
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Iraq’s cost: Off by a factor of 10
As Paul Krugman points out today, the administration forecast a war cost of $50-60 billion in 2002. Now military commanders are saying we won’t be able to leave until 2016. As Krugman notes, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts a vastly higher cost if US forces stay in Iraq that long (PDF). CBO estimates we have
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Bush to Putin: “Just wait” on Iraq democracy
Yesterday, President Bush held a joint conference with Vladimir Putin in which he made a widely mocked statement touting Iraqi democracy. But a revealing line was missing from early accounts. Here is the correct transcript of the exchange: PRESIDENT BUSH: It’s not the first time that Vladimir and I discussed our governing philosophies. I have
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Tax and revenue: Who’s reality-based?
The Washington Times touts the phony claims of the supply-siders about the latest budget figures: This week’s lower deficit figure has been a shot in the arm for tax cutters in Congress and has reignited the debate over supply-side economics and whether President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts helped or hurt the federal budget.
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A reply to Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen, a well-known professor of journalism at NYU and blogger, comments on my post about the contradiction between President Bush’s statements and the conclusions of his economists: Brendan: I certainly agree that to “make a claim about a new report that your experts contradict in the report is chutzpah indeed,” but I think you
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Andrew Sullivan’s change of heart
In the post-9/11 period and during the war in Iraq, Andrew Sullivan viciously attacked dissenters. But as my former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz points out, Sullivan has reversed his position and has now
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The idiotic Hotsoup.com
How to make a political scientist cringe: A bipartisan group of prominent political strategists on Tuesday announced an Internet information venture designed to interact with America’s opinion leaders and serve as an antidote to the right-left clash that typifies political discourse on the Web. The site, called Hotsoup.com, will debut in October and will be
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The latest treason-mongering
Via Josh Marshall, Rep. Pete Hoekstra suggested that leaks of classified anti-terrorist programs are the work of al Qaeda or countries that are sympathetic to its cause: “More frequently than what we would like, we find out that the intelligence community has been penetrated, not necessarily by al Qaeda, but by other nations or organizations.
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Bush vs. his economists III
President Bush claimed yesterday that recent revenue growth proves that cutting taxes reduces the deficit: Some in Washington say we had to choose between cutting taxes and cutting the deficit. You might remember those debates. You endured that rhetoric hour after hour on the floor of the Senate and the House. Today’s numbers show that
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The latest WSJ tax/income sophistry
Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial page trumpets the “the gusher of revenues flowing into the Treasury in the wake of the 2003 tax cuts” and claims that “millions of Americans [are] moving into higher tax brackets”: This would all seem to be good news, but some folks are never happy. The same crowd that
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How dangerous is it to be president?
Reading an academic article yesterday, I came across an interesting statistic that I hadn’t thought about before: 4 of our 43 presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), a rate of almost ten percent. And it turns out that fifteen presidents have been the subject of assassination attempts. So just how dangerous is being