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The implausible scheming behind Hillary ’08
A Washington Post article by John F. Harris details Hillary’s planned presidential PR offensive: Although focused principally on her Senate reelection campaign next year, her advisers are informally — and in some cases not so informally — planning for a White House run. A presidential campaign, Clinton’s advisers acknowledge, would raise anew many of the
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Mickey Kaus revives the McCain third party meme
Nooooo — it’s back! Following in Ron Brownstein’s footsteps, Mickey Kaus has revived the silly claim that John McCain has a real chance as a third party nominee in 2008: WSJ’s Brendan Miniter argues that Republicans shouldn’t move to the center by embracing McCain and McCainism, because “[c]onservatives can and do win elections for the
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A good Factcheck.org catch
I’ve given Factcheck.org a hard time lately, so I wanted to link to a new piece that does a good job debunking a bad statistic I had assumed was correct. Here’s the summary: Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took
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E.J. Dionne on conservative postmodernism
E.J. Dionne gets it right about the deep ambivalence of the conservative movement toward truth and factual accuracy, which are selectively invoked as absolute standards for the media when it’s strategically useful but completely set aside when it comes to claims from the White House: Conservative academics have long attacked “postmodernist” philosophies for questioning whether
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Ann Hulbert on creating a Crossfire generation
You would think that the last thing college-bound students need is training in narrow-minded thinking. But according to a perceptive article by Ann Hulbert in the New York Times Magazine, that’s exactly what the new SAT persuasive essay is doing — with potentially disastrous effects for kids who have grown up watching partisan foodfights on
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Matt Taibbi on fire
Via Jay Rosen, here’s New York Press writer Matt Taibbi laying waste to Newsweek and the newsmagazine genre: It was humorous to see how quickly Newsweek lost its cachet with Middle America. So long as it went about its usual revolting Neanderthal literary mission — wrapping 4000 words of inane speculations about the historical Jesus
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A Sullivan reader fights back
An economist writes in to Andrew Sullivan to dispute his ridiculous characterization of Daniel Okrent’s criticism of Paul Krugman as “damning”: You are dead wrong (as well as sloppy and lazy) in your portrayal of Okrent and Mankiw’s statements about Paul Krugman. (For the record, I know both Paul and Greg, although not well.) The
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WSJ plays the “pro-Al Qaeda” card
A Wall Street Journal editorial condemning Amnesty International’s description of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp as the “gulag of our time” ends with this: It’s old news that Amnesty International is a highly politicized pressure group, but these latest accusations amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda. A “human rights” group that can’t distinguish between Stalin’s death
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Scary local news
From The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper: Three crosses were burned in separate locations in Durham late Wednesday evening, Durham Police Department officers reported. Ku Klux Klan fliers were also found at one location, police told The Associated Press. DPD Lieutenant Kevin Cates classified the cross burnings as a “hate crime.” “It is too early into
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Spencer Bachus, Bill O’Reilly and the anti-dissent brigade
In the long tradition of conservative attacks on dissent since 9/11, Rep. Spencer Bachus has likened some fairly innocuous comments by Bill Maher to treason (via Josh Marshall — see also the Bachus press release): Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., takes issue with remarks on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, first aired May 13, in