Feb. 26 marked the beginning of the Conservative Political Action Committee (or CPAC) annual convention. Conference speakers include leading figures from the Republican Party as well as conservative columnists, pundits and activists. Among yesterday’s speakers was John Bolton, U.N. ambassador under President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. During his speech, Bolton repeated a bit of old bunk from the 2008 campaign, falsely claiming that Obama called Iran “a tiny threat.”
Money on the Table
Before he gave the Republican rebuttal to Tuesday night’s presidential address, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was making headlines by saying he would leave some of President Obama’s stimulus funds on the table. Other southern GOP governors, such as Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, said they may follow his lead.
Jindal announced last week, and reiterated Feb. 22 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he would not be applying for some unemployment insurance funding available to his state through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,
Ride into the Danger Zone
The Air Force’s much-criticized F-22 has been a favorite subject of much of the blogosphere, particularly since Mark Bowden’s feature article praising the fighter appeared in the March issue of The Atlantic . Tuesday night the discussion went mainstream, with Obama’s oblique reference to “Cold War weapons we don’t use.” As we said in our article over on the main site, Obama is right to describe the F-22 this way. Development on the fighter began in 1981,
ARRA Under Attack, Again
The belated attacks on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 keep on coming. For the second time in less than a week, the American Issues Project has released a television ad criticizing the stimulus legislation recently signed by President Obama. In our article "GOP Stimulus Myths," we discussed the group’s first anti-stimulus ad that contained misleading claims about "pork and pet projects" in the legislation, as well as a one-sided characterization of a Congressional Budget Office analysis.
When Economists Agree
We’ve been telling you for the last couple of weeks how economists are divided over the virtues of the stimulus bill. But, as former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and current Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw reminds us, we shouldn’t get too carried away with our skepticism of economists. While they might have differing views of macroeconomics, there are still a lot of areas where they agree. Mankiw provides us with a list of principles that most economists accept,
Obama’s Supporters Take to the Small Screen
The ink is still drying on the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, and the government’s corresponding Web site for tracking its progress is still being programmed. But Americans United for Change, a liberal group, already is airing an ad that lauds President Obama for its passage and extols its benefits.
FactCheck.org has reviewed dubious ads from Americans United for Change before, when the group was attacking then-President Bush and other Republicans. This ad repeats the Obama claim that the stimulus will keep or save 3.5 million jobs.
Special Election Season Begins
Since President Obama plucked at least three advisers and cabinet members from elected positions, and some of those positions were then filled by other elected officials, we have a spate of special elections to watch as these empty posts are filled. Of particular note is the 20th House district in New York that was vacated when Kirsten Gillibrand was appointed to replace Hillary Clinton as senator. The district had traditionally trended Republican before Gillibrand’s win in 2006,
A Cool Reaction to Warming Trend
Americans For Prosperity, a conservative group, has found a unique way to attack Democrats for the recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: global warming alarmism.
The group notes that the stimulus package calls for “spending billions of dollars” for “green energy.” That much is certainly true. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill did include $16.8 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy, and as we’ve previously discussed there was an additional $11 billion for a so-called smart grid.
On Logical Fallacies
We’re always pleased when our readers write to us with questions or comments that really make us think. Here, for example, is reader K.S., who writes:
Perhaps it was intended facetiously, if so I apologize for this “correction.” However, in your piece on ACORN you concluded with the following statement, “We’re accustomed to seeing logical fallacies in political arguments. But working two of them into a single argument is unusually bad logic.”
All fallacies are errors in logic,
When Economists Disagree, Part II
In a post last week, we explained some of the difficulties involved in trying to determine whether or not the stimulus package will work. As we said at the time:
Well, for one thing, economists have very little data with which to work. There are plenty of theoretical models out there, but those models are largely untested. … [O]ur long period of relative prosperity means that economists haven’t been able to plug a lot of real-world situations into their models to see how well those models hold up.