McCain policy guru Holtz-Eakin does not dispute James Kvall’s math, but says that projecting that health care spending will continue to grow as fast as it has in recent years fails to take into account the measures that McCain proposes to rein in medical costs:

If the question is whether the tax credit is indexed to regular inflation,

…

On the Clinton press conference call this morning, comm director Howard Wolfson was asked to defend Clinton’s roundly-criticized/derided/debunked “gas tax holiday” proposal. I haven’t gotten the recording yet, so I’ll be back with the exact quote later, but his answer was along these lines: “Presidents sometimes do what experts say and …

The blog Facing South has been following the controversy surrounding robo-calls made in North Carolina by the group “Women’s Voice, Women Vote.” You can listen to the call here. Again, the Clinton conspiracists have plenty of grist for their respective mills: The calls instructed listeners to wait for a “voter registration packet” and to …

More math from my email inbox. (Commenter Jay Ackroyd loves this stuff.) This installment comes from James Kvall, of the Center for American Progress:

Holtz-Eakin’s basic math is correct but it begs a basic question: if a typical worker gets an $800 tax cut, how can the whole policy be revenue-neutral?

I think the answer is that the

…

Mark “The Minimalist” Bittman has a lovely, straightforward (if opinionated) approach to food, so I suppose it makes sense that he’d a have similar approach to the politics of food. With the chattering class — and the Washington Post — focused on how expensive food is getting, he has a bracing blog post up today reminding readers that, …

What took so long?

With as much as we have been discussing health care policy here lately, I’m thinking we should re-name this blog “Bedside Manner.” But here’s a point that McCain senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, in an e-mail to me, suggests we need to underscore:

Just wanted to make sure that you understood that there is nothing in McCain’s

…

• “A nation that would separate its soldiers from its communicators will have its COIN (counterinsurgency) conducted by mutes and its communications done by the militarily illiterate.” [Small Wars Journal]

• “[T]his quirky state law gives voters the right to challenge other voters at the polls for not being sufficiently loyal to the

…

Philosophical dilemma: What is a photo-op tour without the pictures? We here at Time.com do not want anyone to go without. So here are some highlights from John McCain’s “It’s Time for Action Tour” last week, which incidentally is totally different from this week’s “Call to Action Tour.” (Hint: One has a complete sentence for a title. …

Sen. Russ Feingold held a hearing this morning on the topic of government secrecy, and he had bombshell of his own — at least it’s news to me:

Office of the Director of National Intelligence had notified him that several long-sought opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel concerning interrogation of enemy combatants would be provided

…

But one of them jumped right out of the transcript of President Bush’s remarks at today’s ceremony with the Super Bowl champion New York Giants on the South Lawn:

Now, they’ve got a lot of experts in our society. Coach, you might know what
I’m talking about. And looking back, it’s hard to find many of the experts
who predicted a Giants

…