himwhynot

Matthew Yglesias says the idea that warmer sentiments from CEOs will lead to businessmen praising Barack Obama is ill-conceived. I find it difficult to get worked up about debates over whom the president should pick to succeed Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff or Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council (NEC). These […]

Mike Elk asks why a Washington watchdog is attacking an obscure USDA official. The problem of money in politics is simple — those with more resources too often have a stronger voice in the democratic process, regardless of the merits of their position. Watchdog organizations exist to uncover those who would use wealth to improperly […]

Tim Fernholz says key indicators suggest we may have a more positive economic-growth picture for 2011. Despite all that, and maybe it’s a week of vacation talking, I haven’t been so optimistic about recovery in months. A number of key indicators, and the combination of the Federal Reserve’s new direction in monetary policy with the […]

Paul Waldman says we talk about “change” as something systemic, when we actually just want the policy pendulum to swing back our way. There are few things in politics more absurd, or more reliably recurring, than the candidate for Congress who proclaims earnestly that once elected, he or she will “change the way they do […]

Tova Wang says newly elected Republicans are pushing state-level voter-ID laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters. Given the sense of urgency behind these laws, one would expect that on Election Day, droves of people scheme to fix elections by impersonating other voters. That’s not the case. The type of fraud that voter-identification laws would address […]

Adam Serwer says forcing ex-offenders to pay for their incarceration is yet another perverse policy that makes successful re-entry next to impossible. Indeed, the fact that the United States incarcerates too many people and spends too much money doing it is driving criminal-justice reforms in cash-strapped states around the country. Seven million Americans are in […]

Monica Potts asks whether opening juvenile court hearings and records could help uncover systemic abuse and corruption. Barbara White Stack‘s reporting uncovered systemic mistreatment of abused or neglected juveniles within Allegheny County courts: Workers in group homes for juveniles sometimes had worrisome criminal histories, state agencies had broad powers to take children from their parents, […]

Gabriel Arana says the fight over DADT was always about the normalization of homosexuality. As Judge Virginia Phillips noted in striking down the law this past September, for all the talk about “homosexual behavior” and the comfort of straight soldiers, DADT was always primarily a restriction on speech. Very few discharges involved a colleague or […]

Matthew Yglesias says the amount of work that has gone into ratifying the New START should make us very pessimistic about the larger outlook for American diplomacy and non-proliferation efforts. Simply put, START was supposed to be the easy lift. The START vote is a huge deal on its own terms, but that’s primarily because […]

Monica Potts says Democratic losses in Southern state legislatures could imperil anti-poverty programs as states seek budget cuts. The big gains for Republicans in November’s elections didn’t stop with the U.S. House of Representatives: The GOP won governor’s seats and other state-level races across the country. Nowhere were those gains more meaningful than in the […]