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Dick Cheney on the rule of law: Up is down
Andrew Sullivan nails my reaction to Dick Cheney’s nonsense: Try reconciling what we know for a fact about what the administration has done and the words uttered by the vice-president yesterday: I was in Washington in the 1970s, at a time when there was great and legitimate concern about civil liberties and about potential abuses
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What is Howard Fineman talking about?
Via Dan Drezner, Newsweek conventional wisdom machine Howard Fineman has published a typically insipid column on MSNBC.com on “winners” and “losers” from the Jack Abramoff plea agreement. His prediction of a reformist third party winning the 2008 election “going away” is especially absurd: WINNERSThird-party reform movement: If Sen. John McCain doesn’t win the Republican presidential
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The Hotline on McCain, the GOP and the South
The insider political newsletter The Hotline has a new blog called Hotline On Call that features an excellent post asking how Senator John McCain will handle the tricky issue of race in the GOP primaries — a timely question given his recent praise for Trent Lott and George Wallace, Jr. Near the end, the Hotline
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Bush parses his “Nothing has changed” statement
While I was out of town, President Bush finally addressed the worst example from his long list of statements in 2004-2005 implying that all wiretaps require a court order. On April 20, 2004, he said: Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government
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WSJ touts flawed poll showing popular support for NSA program
This time, our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page are touting a poorly worded poll on the NSA’s warrant-free domestic surveillance program: Even more unserious has been the political posturing and mock horror that followed this month’s revelations of the National Security Agency’s warrantless phone intercepts. It’s refreshing to know that 64% of
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Dateline Hollywood satire reported as fact
Via Mickey Kaus and Steve Bartin, here’s a story of how awful people are at getting their facts right. On December 18, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by a local rabbi that made this claim: We’ve all heard about the rise of the evangelical movement and about some of the excesses of its
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More bogus Wall Street Journal job statistics
The always reliable Wall Street Journal editorial page touts yet another misleading statistic: Remember the 2004 debate over the “jobless recovery” and “outsourcing”? Here’s the reality: The great American jobs machine has averaged a net increase of nearly 200,000 new jobs a month this year. Some 4.5 million more Americans are working today than in
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Spencer Ackerman and the ACLU on the wiretap debate
Spencer Ackerman has a useful article on TNR Online debunking the Bush administration’s deceptive claims about its lawless wiretapping program: If there’s one point the administration and its allies have labored to emphasize, it’s that the program only spied on people clearly connected to terrorism. In a press conference last week, President Bush insisted that
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The bin Laden satellite phone myth
President Bush’s claim that Osama bin Laden stopped using his satellite phone after a 1998 leak published in the Washington Times appears to be nonsense, as Jack Shafer and Glenn Kessler report. NPR’s On the Media ran a good segment on the issue over the weekend (Real Audio).
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Lessons for Kaus II: Parties elect presidentts
Mickey Kaus can’t let go of the idea that it’s easier to run for president as an independent rather than win a party nomination. Here’s what he wrote this time: Maybe she [Hillary Clinton] just can’t win in the Democratic primaries and needs to run as an independent! Of course, I’ve said the same thing