Matthew Yglesias

Though it’s so far failed to generate the same level of public interest and moral passion as the sad case of Terri Schiavo, the case of MGM v. Grokster being heard this morning by the Supreme Court will almost certainly be more consequential for the country and the world. At issue in the case is […]

I’m not a doctor, and I’m not a lawyer. But many doctors and many lawyers have examined the sad case of Terri Schiavo. They’ve determined that she is in what’s called a “persistent vegetative state” — a state, in other words, in which all the functions of consciousness, decision-making, emotion, and thought have been destroyed […]

Much ink (and hypertext) has been spilled over the past few years concerning the Bush administration’s rejection of traditional Republican realism, embrace of neoconservative idealism, and the appropriate liberal response to all this. So much so that one could be forgiven for thinking this is the only important controversy in American foreign policy. The nomination […]

Freedom, it seems, is on the march, and it’s giving many liberals mixed feelings. We had it pretty easy for the year or so in which the downward spiral of Iraq consistently disproved the administration’s rosy predictions. But now the president’s forward strategy of freedom has started racking up successes. This seems to present a […]

Plan A for this column was to first observe that the National Association of Manufacturers is planning a multimillion-dollar campaign to support the president’s judicial nominees and to then draw some conclusions from this. It turns out, however, to be a pretty easy to understand situation. The association is not putting millions of dollars up […]

Writing last week in Slate, economist Steven Landsburg explained that he likes the Bush Social Security phaseout plan because “it will encourage people to save.” In a sense, of course, that’s true. More private savings accounts would lead to higher private savings. The important thing, however, is not the private savings rate but the overall […]

A recent Washington Post poll indicated that the most effective argument against privatizing Social Security is that it involves transition costs. Huge transition costs. Fortunately, the interests of partisan hackery and sound policy analysis are, in this case, aligned. because one of the best reasons to worry about Social Security privatization is that it involves […]

In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush put to rest rumors of a realpolitik retrenchment in his second term by recommitting the United States to the spread of liberty around the world in the strongest terms since his early 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy. As is typically the case with […]

Once upon a time, there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we were invading in order to destroy them. Then they turned out not to exist. Fortunately enough, it turned out that George W. Bush was only pretending to think the weapons of mass destruction were the reason to invade. Really it was […]