Ezra Klein

Nate Silver suggests Barack Obama is playing politics — with his NCAA bracket. It’s a neat bit of mathematical detective work: I set up a simple logistic regression model containing two independent and one dependent variable. The dependent variable is an indication of whether Obama picked the favorite or the underdog; the variable took on […]

The lesson of today, in part, is that people who almost got high-level jobs in the Obama administration are much more opposed, rather than much less opposed, to Obama’s agenda. Take Evan Bayh, who was one of three final candidates for the Veep slot, but was passed over in favor of Joe Biden. He went […]

Jon Cohn has an incredibly impressive piece of reporting detailing the internal discussions that ended up embedding health care reform in the administration’s budget. The piece should be read in full, but the common thread is that, at the end of the day, this was Obama’s decision. He wasn’t bullied into it by staff or […]

Deep in this article on the Obama administration’s unwillingness to rule out reconciliation comes the common recitation of constraints reconciliation would impose on any bill. Policies passed under the expedited process expire after 10 years and have to be deeply linked to the budget and tend to eliminate administrative language. A health care bill going […]

I actually don’t think the fact that Judd Gregg supported using the 50-vote reconciliation process for ANWR but opposes using it for health reform is, on its face, a contradiction. Unless you’re prepared to argue that supporting reconciliation for any legislation means consistency requires that you support it for all legislation, I’m not sure where […]

The Washington Post has a very cool new widget allowing you to track the White Houses confirmation process. As of now, the Senate has confirmed a mere 6.1 percent of the total appointees the White House will eventually need. But it’s not just a Senate chokepoint: The White House has only put forward candidates for […]

Never thought I’d get to write that headline. But it’s true. The current Chairman of America’s Health Insurance Plans is George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente. Halvorson also serves on the Commonwealth Fund’s Commission on a High Performance Health System, which just released a plan called “The 2020 Vision.” You can download the plan here. […]

I’d imagine no one is shocked to learn that financial regulators didn’t exactly perform brilliantly over the past few years, but now the Government Accounting Office is saying so in a report to be presented before the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Securities later today. The fun part is that representatives from the named regulatory agencies […]

Lawrence Cunningham, a law professor at George Washington University, says no. Lawrence Tribe says no. And you almost want to dare an angry AIG executive to bring suit. It’s really worth distinguishing what are two separate arguments. The first is that we can’t claw back the bonuses. That’s what outside counsel told AIG Chairman Edward […]

“$165 million, of course, is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total amount of bailout money given to AIG in one form or another.” That’s James Kwak. The whole post is worth reading.