Ezra Klein

Wow. This LA Times op-ed is quite brave. It’s from an Iranian blogger who spent 36 days in jail for criticizing the regime on her website. Having confessed to her sins, she’s now awaiting trial, which probably won’t go well for her either. With all that swirling around her, publishing this critique in a major […]

Remember that time when the Bush administration silenced an actuary and lied $100 billion off the cost of Medicare reform so Congress would pass it? That was fun, even quaint. But this is a brave new second term world, baby! And $100 billion bucks ain’t shit to these guys, so now they’re saying they lowballed […]

The semi-finals are ending this week. I’m up for “Best Writing” and if you feel like throwing me a vote, I won’t hold it against you.

This is crucial.

This was written about a month ago, after I was commissioned to write an article on California’s dying Democrats only to find the meme had no truth but the LA Times had no scruples. I wrote this as an op-ed for the Times but they, unsurprisingly, passed. A few days ago, a friend mentioned the […]

As Brad Plumer rightly notes, that whole “the era of big government is over” idea is being quickly supplanted by the era of “I kinda like big government and respectfully ask for more”. The number of Republicans viewing government as “almost always wasteful and inefficient” has fallen from 74% in the early 90’s to fewer […]

Brad Plumer did a nice job of smacking down an errant peer yesterday: On Sunday, the Washington Post got Laura Thomas, a twenty-something writer, to ponder the future of Social Security. The verdict? “People my age are as likely to believe in Social Security as they are in Santa Claus.” Fair enough, but fortunately for […]

Robert Farley asks an interesting question on farm subsidies, namely, if the reason liberals are so quick to line up against them (in violation of our traditional affection for subsidies) because we don’t like the rural farmers who vote against our candidates and perpetuate Republican rule. The question is fair, I think, but the answer […]

Brooks’s latest column is so, ugh, Brooksian. Billed as a short history of Deanism, it tries and fails to connect Howard Dean to the breakdown of fraternal orders. Or something. I’m really not sure, but I do know that PZ Myers did an excellent job gutting it: Ooh, there [Brooks] goes, treating some nice words […]

Sam Rosenfeld has a very persuasive rebuttal to my recent post on Bush’s farm subsidies. You should read it. I should add, by the way, that I agree with him, but my post was less about the President’s conviction in supporting subsidy reform and more about the total lack of conviction that publicly supporting it […]