Ezra Klein

I’ll never understand folks who alphabetize their books. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the idea of imposing some order on the ever-encroaching floor-monster that is my library, but the method seems so very off. I acquire books at an enormously alarming rate. You think I’m joking, I’m not — the government has retained a […]

Spencer Ackerman, in an article laying out Rumsfeld’s renewed focus on military transformation, writes: But what the arrival of the new senior leadership at the Pentagon indicates is that the Pentagon’s first-term focus on winning ideological and bureaucratic battles about control over foreign policy is largely over. This time around, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is […]

The new issue of Foreign Policy has a blurb on the increasing anti-Americanism of South Korea’s textbooks. To demonstrate, they offered up this question from a teacher’s packet on the 1991 Gulf War: “Which of the following descriptions of Iraq after the Gulf War is incorrect? 1) Infant mortality increased by 150%, and in some […]

The Oil Drum gets it right: Simplistically there are two approaches a government can take to a crisis. They can do something about it, or they can do nothing. Back in the days of President Carter the nation tried the first approach when faced with an energy crisis, this time we are trying the second. […]

I think Jon Henke misses a little something amidst his total confusion over Democratic distaste for Bush’s attempts to turn Social Security into a welfare program. Democrats don’t want everything to be a welfare program. In fact, we don’t want anything save welfare to be a welfare program. We like safety nets. That’s why we […]

Go read Jon Chait’s brutal takedown of the Wall Street Journal. Nice to see him using his LA Times op-ed to land some blows.

This Times article on the economy’s lower-than-expected growth raises the specter of stagflation. Since the S word has been popping up in a variety of places lately, I think it might be worth a quick definition, as I sure as hell didn’t know what it meant a year ago. Stagflation occurs when the economy has […]

I was playing video games, so I just got the James Joyner recap. What’d you guys think?

Derek Rose is right, by the way. Blogs will never replace newspapers*. Newspapers will never give up wood pulp for megabits. My girlfriend is in a serious relationship with a blogger**, reads a fair number of other sites, and gets the paper’s headlines in her inbox every day. And despite all that, she’ll never give […]