Matthew Yglesias

ACTUAL CONSERVATIVE MAGAZINES: ALSO BAD. This Jonah Goldberg post on Linda Hirshman is really pretty revealing. And I’d like to say, for the record, that contra Jonah, I think her arguments should be taken seriously because they deserve to be taken seriously and not as part of some marketing ploy. At any rate, Jonah writes: […]

MAGAZINE BLOG FEUD: NOW WITH POLICY SUBSTANCE. I’m afraid the Lawrence Kaplan post on Kerry and Iraq that Ezra mentioned below is actually way, way, way worse than Ezra’s post would lead you to believe. The thing of it is that the article Kaplan links to is a clear-cut piece of evidence against his basic […]

MORE MALARIA. What do you know, Josh Kurlantzick turns out to have one of those “not online” Washington Monthly articles you can actually read just fine online and it’s all about malaria. –Matthew Yglesias

WHEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY KILLS. As DAS noted in comments below if you wanted to really do something difficult and dramatic to help Africa (mosquito nets being quick and easy) what you’d want to do is revisit the pharmaceutical patent issue. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, TRIPS, is the devil’s own policy […]

IDEALISM IN ACTION. This is arguably a blogofascist position, but one thing I think would be a good idea would be for the United States government to find ways of helping suffering Africans that don’t entail starting wars and killing people. For example, you’ve got all these people dying of malaria even though “there are […]

ON SIMPLICITY. Scott Winship at the new Daily Strategist blog purports to disagree with me and Jon Chait as to whether it’s possible to quickly summarize liberal thinking on economic policy. The trouble is that his summary is, well, not all that quick: How about this for a �single overarching theory�: equal opportunity and security. […]

DAVID BROOKS: MAKING THINGS UP. David Brooks, joining the “kosola” fake scandal brigade over the weekend wrote: When Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, hired Armstrong last year to help with his campaign, this was also a sign of respect. The Kingpin [i.e., Kos] had instructed his Kossack cultists to support Brown’s Democratic […]

NONE DARE CALL IT BULLSHIT. I never, ever, ever watch prime time cable news because it makes me want to kill extremely large numbers of people. Tragically, I walked through the door yesterday and my roommate already had Hardball on. There were two people debating the issue of . . . whether or not The […]

KOS/ARMSTRONG/ZENGERLE FOLLOWUP. All right, a brief comment on this. The folks out there in the ‘sphere alleging that Jason Zengerle deliberately fabricated the now-infamous Gilliard email ought to knock it off. There’s no basis for saying that, it would be a ridiculous thing to do, and it’s irresponsible to be running around making those kind […]

THE REAL ISSUES. Jason Zengerle concedes that, as rumored in the blogofascistsphere over the weekend, the email he attributed to Steve Gilliard was inauthentic. He then pleads that we not “use this minor error to distract people from much larger issues,” namely: Armstrong’s troubles with the SEC; Armstrong’s relationship with Moulitsas and Moulitsas’s pattern of […]