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Scandal at Duke!
Politics in a microcosm — here’s a hilarious account of the current war between the proto-politicians in the Duke undergrad student body that reads like a dispatch from Washington: The Duke Student Government presidential race was thrown into flux early this morning when the DSG Judiciary ruled that part of the Election Commission’s weekend rulings
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Dog bites man: Ari Fleischer dissembles
The reviews are in, and guess what? Ari Fleischer’s book Taking Heat is full of misleading claims and factual assertions — just like its author. Here’s Salon’s Eric Boehlert: Elsewhere in “Taking Heat,” Fleischer, who chastises the press corps for not checking its facts, writes matter-of-factly that the bungled CBS report on “60 Minutes Wednesday”
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Linda Greenhouse and “pro-worker”
This New York Times
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The DLC on Bill Kristol, Terri Schiavo and the “nuclear option” clown show
It’s time for another dispatch from the “nuclear option” clown show — this time it’s Bill Kristol advocating using the Schiavo case as a lever for ramming through Bush’s judicial nominees on party line votes: [Our families] deserve a judiciary that is respectful of democratic self-government and committed to a genuine constitutionalism. The Bush administration
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Bush’s strawman tactics, continued
WashingtonPost.com’s indispensable Dan Froomkin catches President Bush using one of his trademark rhetorical tactics: Here’s the President of the United States using a straw-man argument to implicitly accuse opponents of his plan of being racist. In Louisville, he said: “Oh, I know they say certain people aren’t capable of investing, you know, the investor class.
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Nuclear option spin roundup
Continuing my obession with documenting idiotic spin in the debate over the “nuclear option,” which would eliminate Senate filibusters of judicial nominations, here’s the latest: 1) People for the American Way sent out an email (PDF) claiming that the “nuclear option” is “an unprecedented political coup that would thrust the country closer to one-party rule”:
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Judith Shklar on hypocrisy
Reading the charges and counter-charges of hypocrisy in the Schiavo case from both sides, I was struck by the relevance of a 1984 book I recently read for a political theory class here: Ordinary Vices by the late political theorist Judith Shklar. She has a chapter on hypocrisy that I think is exceptionally useful for
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Institutional priorities of the 21st century university
The political science building is old and overcrowded and we have to fight to be able to hire new professors, but Duke has money for the more important things… like iPods and plasma TVs. Yes, welcome to the priorities of the 21st century university. The student newspaper here, The Chronicle, recently reported on the free
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Give back my data!
Some of my personal information was apparently stolen from UC-Berkeley — along with that of about 100,000 other people: A thief recently walked into a University of California, Berkeley office and swiped a computer laptop containing personal information about nearly 100,000 alumni, graduate students and past applicants, highlighting a continued lack of security that has
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What is the Wall Street Journal talking about?
In an editorial about labor threats to pull their penson funds from investment firms that support privatization, the Wall Street Journal offers this inane criticism: The problems with all this are many, starting with a rich irony: Unions are using the clout they’ve acquired from investing in the stock market to oppose a plan to