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January 30, 2006

12:19
10:53
The Senate "gang of 14" whose entire reason to be is to explicitly endorse the expressed right of Bill Frist and the rest of the Senate Republicans to cheat in order to ignore Senate rules.

A most unprincipled unethical bunch. Shame on them.


...reddhead says Ed Henry, whose reporting consists almost entirely of passing on whatever Republicans tell him, may be full of shit. In any case my criticism still stands if not the proximate cause for it. The establishment of the "gang of 14" enshrined the right of Republicans to cheat at will, no matter what any of them do subsequently.
Categories: Blogs
08:49
Chafee says he'll vote against. Though, unless Chafee votes against cloture this says more about his political calculation - more vulnerable in the general election than in the primary he'll be facing - than his principles.
Categories: Blogs
07:58
If by up, we mean down.

U.S. President George Bush has 42 percent of popular support and a 56-percent disapproval rating in an ABC News/Washington Post poll published Monday.


If journalists want to make claims about poll trends they should stick to some methodology. There are plenty of options. Only use your own institutions poll. Choose a basket of regularly taken polls and compare averages from month to month, or some sort of moving average. There are ways to do it which are consistent and precise.

From what I can tell Bush's poll numbers are basically flat at about 42 approval and that's about where they've been since December. If anything they've fallen a bit since December because that month contained a couple high outliers, but basically he's stuck at 42 now.
Categories: Blogs
07:16
Always wrong. Only total whack-jobs think this guy has any brains.
Categories: Blogs
06:54
I've seen some of the super-secret poll results that Chris Bowers has been teasing us with. They really are quite fascinating and while obsessing poll examination isn't usually my favorite thing to do I've been looking at these with some interest. So far the most interesting results I've gotten to (lots of x-tabs to go through and try to think sensibly about) are about whether or not people think the federal government's emergency responset to an attack/natural disaster would be good. Republicans have *much much* higher confidence than do Democrats, as do those classified as fundamentalist/evangelical versus other religious classifications.
Categories: Blogs
06:47
That's what we'll find out at the State of the Union. That and, presumably, that Osama Bin Laden is operating out of Ted Kennedy's Senate office. No fear, Bush has a plan! Make sure we have less health insurance!

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — Millions of low-income people would have to pay more for health care under a bill worked out by Congress, and some of them would forgo care or drop out of Medicaid because of the higher co-payments and premiums, the Congressional Budget Office says in a new report.

The Senate has already approved the measure, the first major effort to rein in federal benefit programs in eight years, and the House is expected to vote Wednesday, clearing the bill for President Bush.


The general debate, about HSAs and whatnot, is going to be a bit trickier. It'll be easy for Bush to do much what he did with Social Security - never actually propose a plan as the Broders of the world demanded the Democrats propose a plan to fix what wasn't broken - by framing it in nice terms like choice, and tax cuts, and some bogus stats pulled from a non-specified plan which will prove that x million new people will be "insured" under his non-plan, of course that insurance won't actually cover anything.
Categories: Blogs
05:53

Oh! False one, you have threaded me.

Categories: Blogs
03:02

Awa, away, my thread's on fire!

Categories: Blogs
02:33

When you had left our pirate thread.

Categories: Blogs

January 25, 2006

12:34
heh-indeedy:

On the specific underlying issue, it's worth pointing out that the flashpoint for all this was a flatly inaccurate statement by the ombudsman -- that was then left uncorrected and unaddresed for several days. That was a big mistake. The Web offers great newspapers the opportunity to correct their mistakes quickly and effectively. When we don't, I'm actually quite happy to see people getting angry.

Furthermore, the fact is that the over-the-top abusive comments were in a tiny minority. From what I can tell, the vast majority of posts were passionate, articulate, reasoned, interesting.
Categories: Blogs
12:15
Brady sez:

Jim Brady: Yeah, that's a terrific analysis. So the point is that the only people qualified to discuss comments on articles are people who allow comments and delete nothing? That would be one heck of a discussion. As for clearly exaggerating, I saw that "analysis." It was of a cached page of one of the two problematic posts, and as I have mentioned a number of times, didn't have any of the posts that we'd removed. If you want to act as it that's proof of clear exaggeration, I think you lose some credibility when you talk about the press and its burden of proof. If The Post had used that burden of proof to show that Abramoff directed money to Democrats, you'd rightfully be all over them.



First, the point of having a conversation about how best to handle a large volume of comments on a high volume site is, presumably, to get some feedback on how to do so. I have site with a high volume of comments. Jane does. Kos does. Charles Johnson does. The slashdot people do. Having Reynolds on to sniff for an hour that he doesn't like comments is rather pointless.

Brady's been all over the map with his claims about number of intolerable comments he deleted. He has, at times, clearly exaggerated the number. Or, maybe, at other times he's clearly underestimated the number. We've heard a few hundred. We've heard 50.
Categories: Blogs
12:08
Oh my.

And I thought it was all that nasty Larry Flynt's fault.
Categories: Blogs
11:11
The Post's Jim Brady:

Jim Brady: I have made this point countless times, but to no avail. The cached posts you see don't include any of the posts we removed. Simple as that. When we saw them, we took them down, which means they weren't live and thus not on that cached page. So analyzing that page and drawing conclusions is faulty.


Were they never live? Anyway, all this could be settled by Brady sending any of us doubters the several hundred intolerable comments he has claimed existed.

...Brady then says they were deleted too fast for a cache to pick them up. Of course, we've gone from a few hundred to 50+ of these intolerable comments.
Categories: Blogs
10:38
08:50
CNN report on black market fertility treatments:

I find it hard to believe that employers and insurance will cover things like viagra - even abortions - so in other words insurance will help pay for someone to have sex, they'll help pay for someone to actually get rid of a child, but they won't help pay for someone to have a child. That surprises me.
Categories: Blogs
08:27
For the second day in a row, Ed Rendell and Bob Casey!

There are lots of obvious reasons - reproductive rights - to not be thrilled about Bob Casey as our man to beat the yellowest elephant Santorum here in Pennsylvania. Supporters point to the fact that he's very pro-labor and progressive on economic issues.

Similarly, there are lots of obvious reasons to not be thrilled about Samuel Alito - reproductive rights - as a Supreme Court nominee. But there are also lots of less obvious ones, such as his awful record on workers' rights. Casey hasn't just demonstrated he's an asshole, he's also demonstrated that he has the political instincts of a fig. I'm not sure why 11 months out a Senate candidate like Casey is obligated to take a stand on an issue like this, but if he was going to he could've found lots of very serious reasons to oppose Alito's nomination, ones which would've cemented his reputation as a principled fighter on important issues not related to reproductive rights.

Fucking wankers.
Categories: Blogs
08:21
Only Jim Caviezel is allowed to pose as Jesus. It's in the Bible.
Categories: Blogs
08:16
Here in Philadelphia the 12th Street Gym is right in the middle of the "gayborhood" and I think it's probably fair to call it a central fixture in the local gay community. As upyernoz informs us, the owner is a big contributor to the yellowest elephant, Rick Santorum.
Categories: Blogs