ehm1212

Justin Charity talks with a group that advocates for increased transparency on foreign aid: “Transparency” is the latest buzzword, but what does it mean, and what does transparency promise? Our own Mark Schmitt questions whether, when it comes to domestic spending, transparency for its own sake makes for good governance. “Much transparency … actually obscures […]

Monica Potts on the soda tax: There’s one thing on which nearly everyone can agree: The overconsumption of soda and sugar-sweetened drinks is harmful to our health, especially for kids. That’s why New York state’s budget measure to tax those drinks is a win for public health. Gov. David Paterson of New York dropped a […]

Matthew Yglesias reviews Julian Zelizer‘s new book American politics and American foreign policy partake heavily of certain pieties. At the intersection of the two one finds above all the piety that they should not intersect. Politics, as the saying goes, ought to stop at the water’s edge. Except, as the historian Julian Zelizer demonstrates in […]

Paul Starr explains how letting individuals out of the insurance mandate might improve the odds of health-care reform: If the House of Representatives passes the Senate health-care reform bill with the changes recommended by President Barack Obama, and the Senate then passes those final changes through reconciliation, no one will be more pleased than I […]

Paul Waldman considers the Postal Services’ current challenges: What can you get for 44 cents these days? You can get a fun-sized candy bar. Or 3 ounces of coffee. Or maybe one AAA battery, if it’s on sale. Or, you can have someone come to your house, pick up a letter you’ve written, take it […]

Courtney Martin argues that we have a moral obligation to focus on international women’s uplift, but that we must also act locally: In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Jessica Valenti writes about American women’s tendency to look far across the oceans to get their pity fix while ignoring the sexism that still pervades […]

Mark Schmitt reminds us that conservative Democrats are not Rahm Emanuel‘s invention: A surprising number of people seem to have strong opinions about whether Rahm Emanuel should stay or go as White House chief of staff. It’s surprising because chief of staff is kind of a black-box job — or should be, anyway — not […]

Monica Potts asks if promoting responsible fatherhood is really the best way to lift families out of poverty: Of the many biographical details that shaped Barack Obama as a political figure, perhaps none is more prominent than the absence of his father during his upbringing. The president’s public effort to understand Barack Obama Sr. began […]

Rebecca Delaney talks to a former police chief who thinks drugs should be legal about new efforts to ban a pot substitute: With more states debating whether marijuana should be legalized for medical use, and with many on the West Coast considering broader legalization measures, drug-policy reformers finally seem to be winning some arguments. Just […]