Matthew Yglesias

CHIMP RIGHTS. Andrew Stuttaford notes that Spain’s Socialist Party is pushing a bill to give great apes legal rights in part on the grounds that “humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.” Jonah Goldberg objects to the whole DNA-sharing methodology, and I think there are some good […]

THE GOOD SPIN. Notwithstanding earlier positive remarks about the Post opinion page, they’ve chosen to run another David Ignatius column in which he simply repeats, utterly uncritically, whatever Zalmay Khalilzad told him yesterday afternoon. Spencer Ackerman gets at some of the issues, but I don’t even understand why it’s a good thing that new boss […]

WHO IS THE BLOGOSPHERE? Chris Bowers‘s analysis of the demographics of the progressive blogosphere is well worth a read. In sum, “Active readers of Democratic political blogs are very highly educated, highly politically active, quite well-to-do, voracious consumers of media, not very young, and skew male.” Bowers thinks this runs contrary to stereotype, but to […]

CROOKS AND LEAKERS. The Post editorial page often disappoints, but yesterday’s missive on Porter Goss‘s zealous pursuit of CIA employees who blow the whistle on illegal torture and detentions is a good one. The only thing I would say is that it’s past the time to drop the pretense that the administration’s problem is, say, […]

HOW MASS IS YOU DESTRUCTION? Jonah Goldberg replies apropos our earlier disagreement. There seem to be two points of contention. On the question of chemical and biological weapons, I’d say this: There’s no doubt that you can kill a lot of people through aerial bombardment with toxic chemicals (see the case of Saddam Hussein and […]

LESS COMMON, MORE GOODS. Ed Kilgore‘s remarks on the Supreme Leader’s “common good” article inspires some thoughts of my own. I certainly agree that the interest-group model of party and movement organization is ill-serving progressive politics. I’m not 100 percent sure how that insight translates into Kilgore’s contention that “there is tangibly a deep craving […]

MORE ON SABRI. Jonah Goldberg links to this earlier NBC news report on the Naji Sabri issue. Jonah and his readers seem to have two points to make. One is that the NBC account allegedly contradicts the CBS account. The other is to mock CBS for being “a month behind” on the story. Both claims […]

FAKE CONSERVATISM. Can there be anything more silly looking than the oil industry’s bought-and-paid-for GOP servants in Congress and the White House pretending to crack down on alleged price-fixing in the oil industry? No doubt some of this is going on (probably at the level of retail gas stations rather than the big business end […]

BUSH LIED, THOUSANDS DIED. It’s almost banal to keep harping on the lying point, but this 60 Minutes story about pre-war intelligence really deserves blockbuster status. Tyler Drumheller was the CIA’s top covert man in Europe. He turned Naji Sabri, Iraq’s Foreign Minister, and got him working as a CIA asset. Drumheller told George Tenet […]