The Editors

Ezra Klein explores what Barack Obama‘s choices for his health care positions mean for reform: Yesterday, in Chicago, Illinois, Barack Obama named the personnel for his own health-reform effort. Tom Daschle, the former majority leader of the United States Senate, will serve as both secretary of Health and Human Services and as director of the […]

Today, Barack Obama announced that Tom Daschle would be leading his efforts to reform health-care. Last May, Ezra Klein reviewed Daschle’s book on the subject and interviewed the former Senate leader: EK: But when you have a history, like you did in 1993, when people had bumper stickers saying, “If you like the DMV, you’ll […]

Gershom Gorenberg explains Palestine’s political crisis: Despite all appearances, the United States only has one president at a time. Come Jan. 9, however, the enigmatic entity known as the Palestinian Authority could have two rival presidents — one in the besieged non-state of Gaza, the other in the fragmented Israeli protectorate in the West Bank. […]

Harold Meyerson argues that reformers often come from corrupt environments: So — does this troglodyte drag Obama down a peg, even though he’s on record cursing the president-elect? Clearly, Republicans hope so, but it’s not as if these kinds of associations, tenuous though they may be, haven’t dogged our greatest presidents before. In the months […]

In addition to Ben Joravsky‘s piece on Rod Blagojevich, we have two more pieces on the main site today. Brentin Mock argues for better fuel-efficiency standards for all car companies, not just the big three: As heads of the Big Three automotive corporations go before Congress looking for at least $15 billion in bridge loans, […]

Today on TAP Online, Ben Joravsky explains how Rod Blagojevich‘s father-in-law helped him rise to power and how their falling out spurred Blagojevich to new heights of corruption: He was a nobody lawyer for the state’s attorney, prosecuting traffic ticket offenders, when he hooked up with Patti Mell, the daughter of Richard Mell, one Chicago’s […]

Paul Waldman explains why people no longer see government as their enemy: Years from now, we will look back on Jan. 20, 2009, as the day the era of conservative dominance we might call the Age of Reagan finally came to an end. Twenty-eight years ago, the 40th president looked out over the National Mall […]

In an article from our last print issue, Robert Kuttner reviews several authors who predicted the financial crisis: Unlike Tolstoy’s unhappy families, bouts of extreme financial unhappiness are all basically alike, with variations only in the details. At bottom, they all involve speculation, deception, and failed regulation. The beginning of wisdom is to understand what […]

Eli Sanders explains how the new movie Milk examines the idea of California: “We can come home,” Milk, as played with impressive intuition and bravery by Penn, tells a cheering crowd of activists in San Francisco on the night that Prop. 6 was defeated. If you think about it, the statement doesn’t make much literal […]