Ezra Klein

Kash takes Greenspan out to the woodshed and gives his absurd antitax jihad the what-for (read it in full). Anybody exclaiming that tax increases equivalent to those levied in 1993 would destroy our economy should be recognized as a Rayndian hack and no longer given the keys to the Fed. But with Alan descending ever-deeper […]

Poor Bill Frist. Caught between a Bush and a hard place. Now he’s not even sure he can bring Social Security to the floor before 2007, which is congressional code for “never”. That, as the Bush Administration surely realizes, is the problem with promoting a nobody who wants to be president. His first allegiance is […]

Daniel Munz, who I’ve always found really excellent and thought-provoking, has got himself a new blog. Go say hi. And while you’re there, tell him to make the banner atop the site smaller, it’d be nice to see a post or two when I first land on the page. On a related note, I’ve been […]

The NY Times has chosen their new columnist, and the lucky winner is libertarian gadfly John Tierney (who looks shockingly like Regis Philbin. I’m serious, go look). Via Julie Saltman, we’ve got Chris Mooney’s extensive profile of the rhetorical agitator, and via Nexis, I’ve got a bunch of his columns from the past few years. […]

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 […]

From The System: Had any part of the Clinton plan passed that Congress in any form, Gingrich and his closest conservative allies believed, their dreams for forging a militarily conservative future would “have been cooked,” as a key Gingrich strategist later explained. It would have been the final nail in the coffin of the American […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s sad to say, but the US has begun acting like a freshman fraternity pledge in international meetings, clinging desperately to some absurd point that their frat brothers insisted they promote. Only the US isn’t an annoying freshmen, it’s the world’s superpower. And it’s not being controlled by fraternity officials, but by the Christian Right. […]