Ezra Klein

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has updated their running series on inequality with new data from 2006. Here’s the picture in aggregate: This graph, it should be said, is even more impressive than it looks. Using percentages actually obscures the growth in inequality. It’s easier, after all, to get large percentage changes on […]

Nate Silver has been compiling turnout estimates for Wednesday’s tea parties and now believes attendance was a shade over 300,000. Say what you will, but those are impressive numbers for protests that were putatively about overly loose fiscal policy. The putative bit of that is important, though: My sense of the Tea Parties is that […]

The torture memo attracting the bulk of the attention is a missive from Jay Bybee counseling interrogators on the proper ways to put a man in a box with insects. So who is Jay Bybee? Jeff Toobin explains: Bybee is generally the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era. The best known of […]

It’s a shame that genomic association studies — where we try and predict disease risks by examining the differences between the gene sequences of the sick and the healthy — aren’t proving the quick leap that we had hoped. I am, however, extremely pleased by the term “recreational genomics,” and am really hoping kids start […]

Gotta give it to them: Rasmussen knows how to chase those links. They’ve already finished a poll asking Texans whether they want to secede from the union. “If the matter was put to a vote, it wouldn’t even be close,” says Rasmussen. “Three-fourths (75%) of Lone Star State voters would opt to remain in the […]

In recent weeks, the vestigial fundraising machine of the Clinton campaign has grown increasingly pathetic. One e-mail touted the chance to lunch with James Carville and Paul Begala. “You will get to tour all the amazing sights D.C. has to offer,” it enthused, “and who knows what else could happen!” I think I know. James […]

What we’re talking about is a vision for high-speed rail in America. Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. (Laughter.) Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 […]

The Obama administration has decided to release the four Office of Legal Counsel memos that the ACLU and others groups have been pursuing for the past five years. The memos were used to advise interrogators in the use of, well, they wouldn’t call it torture. But I will. This bit, flagged by Mark Goldberg, is […]

It’s easy enough to say that American health care costs more because it costs more. The harder question is why we abide this state of affairs. We have agency. We could direct Medicare to bargain for drugs and devices. We could impose global budgets. We could rate treatments on cost-effectiveness. But we don’t. We meekly […]

I don’t think that people should necessarily spend too much time interrogating the logical rigor of the Tea Parties’ message. It’s true, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, that few of these figures were waving signs on the streets when Bush was running up the deficit and Paulson was bailing out Bear Stearns. But I’m […]