Uncategorized
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What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (Newspaper editorials edition)
Eric Alterman is dead-on about this: Michael Kinsley begins his column, here, “In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal.” Hey Michael, name one “nearly insane far-left” newspaper editorial page in the United States or has it escaped your notice
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Larry Bartels on democratic accountability
Larry Bartels is a professor of political science at Princeton who recently came and gave a talk here at Duke. He’s working on a very interesting series of papers that are definitely worth a read. “Partisan Politics and the U.S. Income Distribution (PDF) shows that, since World War II, Democratic presidents have consistently produced greater
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Chait and Weisberg on the new conservatism
Jon Chait and Jacob Weisberg have a nice pair of articles on the hollowness of the so-called conservatism practiced under President Bush and the current Republican leadership in Congress. Here’s Chait: The failure of intellectuals on the right to adequately define big-government conservatism reflects their failure to grasp the ways that DeLay and Abramoff became
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Will Hillary escape a pledge not to run for president?
A few weeks I asked why Hillary Clinton is running for re-election to the Senate. I think she’s going to get boxed in to making a pledge not to run for president in 2008 that could not be broken without serious damage to her credibility. Well, it turns out that the media is already polling
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What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (George Bush edition)
Michael Kinsley is a brilliant political commentator, but his tired obsession with being counter-intuitive, which dominated his tenure at The New Republic and has since ruined Slate (see here and here), has again reared its ugly head. His latest column, which I was alerted to by Bob Somerby, makes the counterintuitive case for Bush’s honesty
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How to make a political scientist cry — Scott Rasmussen’s “Hillary Meter”
Here’s the New York Post on pollster Scott Rasmussen’s effort to put the pseudo-science in political science: One of the nation’s top pollsters has created a new “Hillary Meter” to measure Sen. Clinton’s move to the political center for a 2008 White House run – it shows she’s made progress but has a long way
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Richard Cohen fails Social Security 101
How hard is it to understand Social Security? This is Cohen’s full time job. Come on! I’ll let Matthew Yglesias do the honors on TPM: Richard Cohen works up some excellent righteous indignation over the Republican Party’s irrational aversion to taxes, but he seems to have a bad case of Washington Post editorial page disease.
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George Will, naif
George Will is supposed to be a conservative who is skeptical of government power and bureaucratic mandates. So why is he endorsing this stupid initiative? Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for
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The Post realizes there is no mandate — when will Bush?
The Washington Post discovers that the narrowest presidential reelection since Woodrow Wilson was not, in fact, a mandate: As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the
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CBPP on Bush press conference
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a nice summary of the President’s deceptive statements during his press conference: 1. Obscuring the fact that those electing private accounts would have to pay back Social Security through reductions in their Social Security benefits… 2. Not explaining that under the option he touted to allow