Night Ripper, by Girl Talk, is one of the best albums I’ve come across in a long, long time. Girl Talk is Gregg Gillis, a white boy sample artist who works in biomedical engineering by day and creates wonderfully chaotic mash-ups of Top 40 songs by night. But these aren’t mash-ups as you know them, […]
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.
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In Which I Embrace Earmarks
Via Brad Plumer’s article defending pork (which I’ve more thoughts on here), I spent some time playing around with the Sunshine Foundation’s Earmark map, a cool web program allowing you to enter a city or zip and scroll across all the earmarks in the area. The applet, I assume, is meant to leave you furious […]
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I Had Meant To Do This Yesterday
But do read Max Sawicky’s original 9/11 post: “A Radical Rant.”
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EARMARKS.
EARMARKS. In his triumphant New Republic debut, Brad Plumer makes the liberal case for pork. “It’s not,” he writes, “because pork projects are defensible on the merits, although they sometimes can be. It’s not because they create jobs, although they can do that, too. Rather, it’s because, without pork, activist government would wither and die.” […]
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You Don’t Say
From a new General Accounting Office report on HSAs: HSA proponents see the accounts as a way to incentivize account holders to shop carefully for health care services, but GAO did not find that to be the case in questioning members of focus groups. “Few participants researched the cost of hospital or physician services before […]
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I’m Getting a Divorce
The Family Guy premier last night was weirdly awful. The rape motif threaded through the episode was unsettling and disrespectful rather than funny, the normally hilarious pop culture references lame and off-key, and Stewie was infantilized and annoying. Short Jesus was pretty funny, but that was it. I really, really hope McFarlane isn’t losing the […]
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Nazi Ideas
I’m with Jane Galt on this one: Not everything the Nazis touched was bad. Hitler was a vegetarian. Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company. Universal health care is a perfectly good idea. Indeed, the Nazis actually did a pretty good job increasing economic growth and improving standards of living (they were, many think, the […]
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BEATING DR. BEETROOT….
BEATING DR. BEETROOT. In the world of the AIDS pandemic, South Africa is, as Stephen Lewis, the U.N. Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, memorably termed it, “the unkindest cut of all.” The only country in the region rich enough to truly mount an aggressive campaign against the disease is hampered and hamstrung by an administration […]
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REMEMBERING POST-9-11. …
REMEMBERING POST-9-11. I’m going to eschew the 9-11 remembrance motif that’s flitting through the blogosphere. Like all Americans, I found the day to be wrenching and horrific, the experience hallucinatory and unsettling. But I lived all the way out in California — indeed, in the very same town where Duncan noticed a curious detachment from […]
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Wherein Arnold Kling and I Agree
Kling, a determined advocate of consumer-driven medicine, writes: Right now, no one has good information on the cost-effectiveness of medical protocols. Consumers don’t have it, doctors don’t have it, and government bureaucrats do not have it. In Crisis of Abundance, I argue for a national commission to study the cost-effectiveness of medical protocols. I think […]
