Uncategorized
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Arbitrary $1 trillion threshold for health care
I understand that people are concerned about the potential costs of health care reform, but it’s immensely frustrating how Senate Finance chair Max Baucus and other prominent figures in Washington have become fixated on the idea that the reform bill shouldn’t cost more than $1 trillion. I haven’t heard a principled reason why that number
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Sean Hannity: Unbiased economic observer
Sean Hannity, June 18, 2009 (via Media Matters): CAROLINE HELDEN, PROFESSOR, OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE: [President Obama] inherited a terrible political and economic situation from the previous administration. HANNITY: Blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to hear this anymore. HELDEN: He had incredibly high approval ratings, Kennedy-esque approval ratings, and now they’re starting to come back to
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Another reason not to read Gail Collins
During a “conversation” with David Brooks on nytimes.com, Times columnist Gail Collins kicked things off by describing Brooks as “the go-to guy on how America lives.” Noooooooo! Michael Bérubé, who flagged this gem, offers the only appropriate response: This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never
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McCaughey back with more misinformation
Déjà vu alert: Betsy McCaughey is pushing misinformation about health care legislation in Congress again. Back in 1994, McCaughey wrote a New Republic article that popularized the false claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration’s proposed system of managed competition. The premise was that she had
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The tabloidization of TPM
Back in 2002 or so, it would have been hard to imagine that Josh Marshall would be posting pictures of the house of the GOP staffer who had an affair with Republican senator John Ensign under the headline “Chez Hampton: Swank Vegas Digs of Former Ensign Love Triangle Staffers.” (A later post added reader comments
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Health care reporting failures begin
We’re just getting started on the health care debate, and political journalists’ lack of substantive knowledge and devotion to “he said”/”she said” reporting is already resulting in misleading coverage: -Media Matters flags a Politico story that quotes Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) saying “‘Washington takeover’ are two words we’ve been hearing a lot from the Obama
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The wit and wisdom of Larry Summers
From a Paul Krugman blog post about a new model he’s working on: In his new book The Myth of the Rational Market Justin Fox traces the lineage of the noise-trade assumption to an unpublished paper by Larry Summers that began, THERE ARE IDIOTS.
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Panetta smears Cheney as hoping for attack
It was wrong for Republicans to say Democrats hoped the nation would lose the war in Iraq under President Bush, and it’s wrong for CIA director Leon Panetta to mind-read Dick Cheney as wishing for a terrorist attack under President Obama: The Central Intelligence Agency typically fights distant enemies, but on May 21st its leaders
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Fox polls on Obama’s smoking
Fox is known for its use of loaded and/or wacky polling questions, but the latest one is just bizarre — they polled on whether people think President Obama is “sneaking cigarettes at the White House” (PDF): 53. Barack Obama says he quit smoking cigarettes. Do you think Obama is still sneaking cigarettes at the White
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Are bipartisan policies more sustainable?
A number of elites have recently claimed that President Obama needs Republican support in order to ensure that his proposed health care reforms are sustainable: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR): “The president is very much aware that to bring about enduring change — health care reform that lasts, gets implemented, wins the support of the American