Uncategorized
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Smears of Barack Obama’s loyalty 2006-
December 2006: Columnist Debbie Schlussel notes that Obama’s father was a Muslim and asks “Where will his loyalties be?” February 2008: Radio talk show host Bill Cunningham calls Obama “this Manchurian candidate” but says “I do not believe Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist or a Manchurian candidate.” April 2008: During an apperance on Glenn
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Margin of error alert: The Pelosi/Cheney poll
Drudge, ABC’s Jonathan Karl (guest-writing Mike Allen’s Playbook at Politico), FoxNews.com, and National Review’s Jim Geraghty all claim that a new Gallup poll shows that Dick Cheney is more popular than Nancy Pelosi: DRUDGE: “GALLUP: Cheney more popular than Pelosi!” KARL: “Liz will like this: Gallup puts former Vice President Cheney’s popularity slightly above Nancy
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Marshall’s Khmer Rouge analogy
Josh Marshall, who recently derided the failed GOP movement to call the Democrats the “Democrat Socialist” party, engaged in some absurd labeling of his own in a post mockingly titled “Khmer Rush Strikes Again.” The title compares Rush Limbaugh and his GOP supporters to the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that killed more than one million
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The threat of political meddling in GM
President Obama and his economic team are obviously deeply ambivalent about their decisions to acquire control of major corporations like GM. They have repeatedly insisted that they will limit their involvement in management decisions and seek to liquidate the government’s stakes in these companies as soon as possible. For instance, here’s what President Obama said
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Newt: Obama “defend[ing] terrorists”
Continuing his return to the ugly tactics he helped popularize in the 1980s and 1990s, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested on May 24’s “Meet the Press” that the Obama administration’s “highest priority” is to “find some way to defend terrorists”: MR. GREGORY: But, Senator Durbin, in this case you have not just Vice President
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Sessions on threat to the Court’s “heritage”
Memo to the Republican Party — when a senator with the ugly racial history of Jeff Sessions starts discussing the potential threat posed by Judge Sotomayor and others like her to the “heritage” of the Supreme Court, it makes me nervous. Here’s the quote: Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary
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The crude reasoning of Dick Cheney
Jon Chait points out the simplistic binary logic used by Dick Cheney in his recent speech on national security: Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.
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Keith Olbermann reads Dick Cheney’s mind
Bob Somerby (who continues to do yeoman’s work on the failures of MSNBC) catches Keith Olbermann engaging in some absurd faux mind-reading of Dick Cheney during an interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff: WILKERSON (5/21/09): So, he [Cheney] is frightened and he’s trying these very Orwellian tactics of using his own
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The casual dishonesty of Karl Rove
Not surprisingly, you can’t trust Karl Rove to use quotations in an honest manner. Here’s a passage from his latest Wall Street Journal column: On health care, Mr. Obama’s election ads decried “government-run health care” as “extreme,” saying it would lead to “higher costs.” Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a
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Newt Gingrich revives the GOPAC playbook
Newt Gingrich’s one-man assault on Nancy Pelosi’s speakership is destined to fail, but it is worth noting how he is reviving the PR tactics that he helped to popularize. When he was rising through the ranks of the House, Gingrich was known for his use of invective to demonize Democrats, which included comparing Speaker Jim