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Anthony Lane goes nuts on Yoda
Courtesy of my fellow Duke grad student Gerry DiGiusto, perhaps the greatest angry paragraph in the history of movie reviewing: No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful
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Nuclear option clown show: Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum distinguishes himself once again: Santorum said the suggestion that Republicans were trying to break the rules was “remarkable hubris.” “The audacity of some members to stand up and say ‘How dare you break this rule’ — it’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying ‘I’m in Paris, how dare you invade me.
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White House attacks on the press: Newsweek edition
I want to briefly address the Newsweek Koran-flushing controversy. First, a review. The story was a disaster from a journalistic perspective. We still don’t know whether a military interrogator actually flushed a Koran down a toilet or not — only that such an incident will not be described in a forthcoming military report. Nor do
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The nuclear option clown show continues
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank on the restraint and decorum displayed yesterday in the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body”: The Senate chaplain started yesterday’s judicial showdown with a prayer for “patience and peace” and “unity where there is division.” Thirty-three minutes later, the majority leader just about accused the minority of attempted murder. The Republican leader,
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The old David Brooks on column writing
David Brooks foreshadows his life as a circus animal in 2001’s Bobos in Paradise: If our intellectual is successful, she will be offered a column. This seems like the pinnacle, but while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery — compelled like circus animals to be
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Robert Pape on suicide bombing
Dan Drezner’s post reminds me to plug Robert Pape’s op-ed in today’s New York Times. It’s always good — and all too rare — to see political scientists contributing to the national debate. Here’s the key graf: Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the
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The nuclear option is worse than I realized
Via Andrew Sullivan and Tapped, here’s Norm Ornstein (PhD in political science) with the best explanation I’ve seen of what’s wrong with the nuclear option from a parliamentary rules standpoint (see also Josh Marshall). I don’t buy all the silly arguments about the end of dissent that I’ve been mocking for weeks. But the way
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Loose cannon watch: Howard Dean (part II)
A few days ago, Howard Dean called Tom DeLay a criminal even though no charges have even been filed. And he’s not backing down: Howard Dean, national chairman of the Democratic Party, said Tuesday that he thinks House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has committed crimes that could put the Republican in jail. …”There’s corruption at
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What is Alan Reynolds talking about? (Inequality edition)
Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute’s Alan Reynolds attacks the ongoing New York Times series on inequality: To deny progress, the Times series claims that “for most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90’s.”
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Big talk from Harvey Rosen
Harvey Rosen, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today that “Policy makers now need to … take the much bigger step of permanently fixing Social Security’s funding imbalance.” So why does the President’s plan close only 30 percent of the program’s 75-year deficit? Call