Archive

  • Art Matters

    Ezra KleinMar 02, 2005

    In the "that's a trip" category, construction crews are taking sanders to the beautiful Disney Center here in LA. Why?

    Beams of sunlight reflected from portions of the hall have roasted the sidewalk to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to make plastic sag, cause serious sunburn to people standing on the street and create a hazard to passing motorists...

    "I will just appreciate not having the glare," said condo resident Jacqueline LaGrone, who said that her air-conditioning bill had doubled during summer months since Disney Hall opened and that the glare made it impossible to sit on her patio on hot days.

  • Battle Lines

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

    From The System:

  • I Choose You, Hitchy-Poo!

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

    In a landslide vote, Hitchens (not to be confused with Will Smith's Hitch) has won the Oscar for laziest column writer the Academy has ever seen:

    The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase ‘The Arab Street’? I haven’t actually done a Nexis search on this, but my strong impression is that the term has been, without any formal interment, laid to rest.

    Because you know what takes for-fucking-ever? Nexis searches.

  • Risk

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

    Thanks to Peter Gosselin's blog-based outreach efforts (when mid-size bloggers like me are getting e-mails, you know he's casting a wide promotional net!), I've spent some time rereading his series on risk in America. Kevin Drum beat me to the punch and called for a Pulitzer, a demand I really can't argue with. But I'm less desperate for award committees to read the piece and more hopeful that Democrats, of all positions and power levels, will absorb the package. Because it contains everything needed for a compelling, coherent, and critically important economic message.

  • The Long View

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

    Matt's post on the increasingly narrow social outlook of big business is worth thinking about. I'm not in any place to evaluate this, but I've heard a number of people smarter than I attribute it to the shift towards quarterly earning reports. When business thought in the long-term, it made sense to take a wider view of society, because the long-range health of the one would dictate the health of the other. But as the race refocused on immediate earnings, the perspective shifted to cutting costs and maximizing profits in the now, and so the political outlook narrowed to take in only what would pay immediate dividends.

  • Democracy Fever -- Catch It!

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

    With Lebanon's government resigning en masse, it's worth revisiting David Brooks's much-mocked (but then, aren't they all?) column from this weekend, where he identified the question "why not here?" as being the preeminent query in today's world. As he saw it, Ukrainians looked at the peaceful revolution in Georgia and though, hell, we can do that! And they did. And Arabs are looking at the elections in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan, and thinking they should have those too. And so they are.

  • Choose No Choice

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

  • Bleg

    Ezra KleinMar 01, 2005

    I'm participating in a quarterly right-left debate tomorrow. Format is three people each side doing the debate, with each responsible for a two minute statement on a topic besides. I've got secularism. I don't know much about it, so if you guys have any resources on church-state separation plus founding fathers stuff, it'd be a big help. Also, UCLA (or LA) folks are welcome to come -- just e-mail me for the info.

  • Turncoat Joe

    Ezra KleinFeb 28, 2005

    Hate to say it, but I think we're remarkably close to getting screwed by Bush and Holy Joe, and we're not even thinking about why. Lieberman found himself ignominiously rejected during the 2004 primaries, basically ignored during the election, branded a traitor during the Gonzales vote, and then viewed as an enemy on Social Security. The sum total of all that has been a marked uptick of interest among Democrats in finding and funding a primary challenge against him. Worse, Joe's got nowhere left to go, it's unlikely that Democrats are going to retake the Senate anytime in the near future (which would give him a committee chairmanship) and it's damn near impossible that he'll be on another presidential ticket or in a hypothetical Democratic cabinet.

  • But al-Qaqaa is so....Quaint

    Ezra KleinFeb 28, 2005

    Brad Plumer, in a post on the nauseating Hilla bombing, notes that a car bomb has to be pretty fucking big to push the death toll over a 100 people, and so there's probably an al-Qaqaa connection here though, he says, there's probably not much point in revisiting the issue.

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