Uncategorized
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Limbaugh infantilizes Obama
Following up on his comments during the campaign, Rush Limbaugh is invoking ugly cultural stereotypes that infantilize black men in his comments about President Obama, who Limbaugh has repeatedly described as a “boy” and as a “man-child”: Limbaugh calls Obama “this little boy, this little man-child president.” While discussing what he characterized as Obama’s “attacks”
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Obama didn’t politicize “swine flu”
My UM RWJ colleague Hans Noel alerts me to the bizarre claim by the Daily Beast’s Kent Sepkowitz that President Obama politicized the H1N1 “swine flu”: Now that Obama has formally declared swine flu a national emergency, he has moved the virus from the realm of public health into the too familiar and greedy world
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Marshall promotes Vitter slur
The decline of Talking Points Memo continues with a post in which Josh Marshall strips a phrase out of context to try to link Sen. David Vitter to rape and sexual assault: Ouch Dem challenger, Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA) says “we can only guess” David Vitter’s reasons for opposing the anti-rape amendment. In fairness, Vitter’s
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Campaigns and chicken suits
I love that Jon Corzine is being followed around by a guy in a chicken suit during his gubernatorial reelection campaign in New Jersey: Some guy in a chicken suit walked alongside the governor the entire way, saying nothing. Corzine seemed not to notice. Finally, driven by curiosity, I asked the chicken what he was
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Gingrich’s presidential posturing
Department of unlikely scenarios: Said Gingrich: “Callista and I are going to think about this in February 2011. And we are going to reach out to all of our friends around the country. And we’ll decide, if there’s a requirement as citizens that we run, I suspect we probably will. And if there’s not a
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Joe Klein suggests Fox is “seditious”
After 9/11, conservatives repeatedly attacked dissent against President Bush as treasonous. Now one center-left commentator is taking a similar approach. In a Friday column criticizing the administration’s offensive against Fox News, Time’s Joe Klein suggested that some Fox News content “borders on sedition” and consists of “seditious lies”: Let me be precise here: Fox News
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Jacob Weisberg v. Fox News
Jacob Weisberg’s attack on the slant of Fox News strikes me as a defense of a dying paradigm: That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox’s model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that
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PPP poll on Obama’s love of country
A national survey by Public Policy Polling found that 48% of Republicans (and 26% of Americans generally) endorsed the unsupported smear that President Obama doesn’t love America (27% of Republicans said Obama does love America and 25% were not sure). Those numbers are even worse than the myth that Obama wasn’t born in this country,
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Communist kitsch alert
Sunday’s LA Times story on the commercial exploitation of Mao Tse-tung in his hometown was weird enough (Mao snow globes!), but today’s NY Times brings news of my favorite bit of Communist kitsch ever: the “Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail”,* which the Times describes as “a series of eight courses whose label is as good
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The Petraeus for president boomlet
Bloggers have done a good job of listing the reasons the David Petraeus for president boomlet is silly and unlikely to succeed. The central problem is that potential biography candidates like Colin Powell in 1996, Wes Clark in 2004, or Petraeus haven’t ever run for political office. I don’t think most people realize how difficult