Ezra Klein

I love Mark Thoma‘s description of this graphic showing the gender breakdown of singles across the nation as “like a 7th grade dance with the boys huddled together on one side of the room, the girls on the other with a few mixtures scattered about.” For whatever reason, single males seem clustered on the West […]

In the aftermath of the Mark Foley scandal, the Congressional page program is more popular than ever.

Read Stoller. I really don’t think the damage Bush has done to America’s foreign standing is irreparable, and the receptions greeting American political leaders like Clinton, Pelosi, and Obama when they travel abroad is evidence of a continuing thirst for the stability that the concept of America provides.

Pelosi’s donning of culturally appropriate apparel for a mosque visit is being painted as anti-feminist. This leads Matt to wonder whether “any actual examples of Reynolds taking a feminist stance on anything for any reason other than to find a pretext for attacking liberals?” Yes. Reynolds, along with so many others on the right, takes […]

Mark Thoma’s thoughts on why savings have fallen are very interesting, but a bit economically deterministic for my tastes (and I do love my economic determinism!). He writes that “[s]aving didn’t fall because we suddenly decided to party rather than work or because we forgot the value of a penny saved. There are fundamental economic […]

According to Nick Beaudrot (via e-mail), Obama’s got a lot more room for future fundraising than Edwards or Hillary: The most impressive thing about Obama is how low his per-contribution take was from non-internet sources. Obama got $25M from around 100,000 donors. But, $6.9M came from 50,000 online donors. That means his non-online donors averaged […]

What sort of surprises me about Obama’s mega-take is how disconnected it is from his apparent momentum. He appears to have functionally matched Hillary’s fundraising, despite routinely trailing her in national polls. Moreover, he’s not only been unable to gain much early traction in Iowa, where Edwards leads, but he just ceded second place in […]

Between January 2005 and June 2006, the pharmaceutical industry spent a record $155 million lobbying Congress. During this period they had over 1,000 lobbyists working the Hill and the Bush Administration, blocking efforts to allow Canadian drug reimportation or Medicare bargaining power. And that doesn’t even get into the $19 million spent on campaign contributions. […]