Uncategorized
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MoveOn.org nonsense on Social Security
MoveOn.org is back with its second misleading attack on President Bush’s proposal to create private accounts in Social Security (for part 1, see this post). The best part is that the group’s criticism of Bush’s plan ends up promoting the same confusion as the White House by suggesting that private accounts and calculating benefits using
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The 2009 bait and switch, contd.
In a briefing on the President’s budget last week, OMB director Josh Bolten played yet more games with the phony deficit reduction plan. Here’s Reuters: Joshua Bolten, the White House budget director, played down the impact of the private accounts on future budget deficits, saying it “is still consistent with the president’s goal to cut
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Why Super Bowl ads might not be such a bad deal
On Slate, Tim Noah claims that “buying commercial time on the Super Bowl is a waste of money!” His justification is that the cost per thousand viewers of the ads has tripled since 1970, a much greater increase than the price for ads on general network programming. As a result, it’s possible to reach up
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Martin O’Malley shames himself
Unacceptable – Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley compares Bush’s budget to the 9/11 attacks: “Back on September 11, terrorists attacked our metropolitan cores, two of America’s great cities. They did that because they knew that was where they could do the most damage and weaken us the most,” O’Malley said. “Years later, we are given a
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The worst “Bushism” yet?
At Spinsanity, we showed how Slate’s “Bushisms” and “Kerryisms” columns twisted the two men’s words to reinforce pre-established storylines. Now Eugene Volokh, the UCLA law professor/blogger who is one of the chief critics of “Bushisms”, has nailed what might be the worst one yet: Slate’s quote of Bush (subsequently deleted): “Listen, the other day I
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What is Robert Samuelson talking about?
Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson, fresh from forgetting the history of Bush’s budget plans, is back with another masterpiece: The unspeakable truth — unspeakable because hardly anyone speaks it — is that benefit cuts are inevitable, because the baby boom’s retirement costs will force them. The combined spending of Social Security and Medicare, according
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Cato and Bush keep using “privatization”/”private accounts”
Very interesting – I just received a fundraising letter from the Cato Institute, and they use the term “Social Security privatization” right on page 1 even though conservatives are waging a campaign against use of the term. Cato did change the name of their Social Security project from “Project on Social Security Privatization” to “Project
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The machine back at work
The Republican machine that savaged Tom Daschle from 2001 until his defeat in November has turned its attention to Harry Reid, the new Democratic leader in the Senate. Here’s the story from Roll Call (via Tapped): The Republican National Committee is set to begin a prolonged attack against newly installed Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid
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The not-so-responsible era
George W. Bush, 3/7/02: “America is ushering in a responsibility era; a culture regaining a sense of personal responsibility, where each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make in life.”
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“The new conservative political correctness”
E.J. Dionne notices the nasty new racial politics being practiced by conservatives: [I]ncreasingly, it is conservatives who are using political correctness to sidestep hard issues. Consider the bait-and-switch in the Gonzales case: Democrats thought it appropriate to use Gonzales’s nomination to launch a debate about torture policy. Gonzales is Latino. Therefore, Republicans insisted, Democrats who