Ezra Klein

I always find it tricky to listen to The Financial Times‘s Martin Wolf. British accents have a way of overwhelming my critical faculties. And true to form, speaking last night at a dinner panel alongside Laura Tyson and George Soros, he made a lot of sense. But looking at my notes today, I think it […]

This cartoon showing a jackbooted Zionist rolling over Gaza might be offensive, or unfair, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly anti-Semitic. Abe Foxman, somewhat predictably, disagrees. “Pat Oliphant’s outlandish and offensive use of the Star of David in combination with Nazi-like imagery is hideously anti-Semitic,” he railed. “It employs Nazi imagery by portraying Israel […]

Justin Fox is an invaluable economics commentator, but I wasn’t expecting to get much in the way of food blog tips from him. Today, though, he links to StillTasty.com, which may be my favorite web site on the internet ever. The creator is apparently a retired food expert with the Canadian government and the site […]

According to Greg Sargent, Dean means to throw his considerable weight behind a Democracy for America campaign “to build support for the public insurance option in Congressional districts across the country.” Arshad Hasan, DFA’s executive director, puts it pretty starkly. “We’re drawing a policy line in the sand,” he said. “We’re saying that if the […]

One aspect of the nationalization debate that gets insufficient attention is that the federal government already nationalized a bank: They took over IndyMac Bank in July. Estimates were that cleaning its balance sheet and selling it back to the private market would cost between $4 billion and $8 billion. So how’d that turn out? Last […]

One of the themes of my health care coverage is that so far as interest groups go, it’s actually a lot easier to see how you get the insurers to buy into health reform than, say, the medical device companies. As evidence, over the past few months, the insurers have slowly been moving towards supporting […]

The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.

Jon Cohn and friends have been having a good debate on the Massachusetts health reform experience over at The Treatment. Cohn gives the plan a qualified pass. “The big success,” he says, “is the expansion of insurance coverage,” and he’s right about that. Diane Archer is less impressed. But the post worth reading closely is […]

This is a useful distinction from Noam Scheiber: At the very least, it’s important to distinguish between two classes of people who often get lumped together under the heading “Wall Street.” The first are people who mostly work at hedge funds and private equity firms. These people tend to be a little younger on average, […]

I’ve uploaded the official Summary of the Chairman’s Mark here. Particularly worth noticing is the degree to which Conrad’s rhetoric echoes the Obama administration’s preferred messaging — the title is literally “Laying Foundation for Long-Term Economic Security With Investments in Energy, Education, and Health Care, Cutting Deficit in Half by 2012 and by Two-Thirds by […]