Paul Waldman

We’re spending a lot of time these days talking about the proper size of government, an eternal debate in American politics. You’ve probably gotten frustrated recently when you see Tea Partiers talking about how they feel terribly oppressed by the tyranny of things like the stimulus bill. “What the hell are they talking about?” you […]

(Flickr/Ivan Walsh) Amtrak recently released a plan to create a “Next-Gen” high speed rail line on the eastern seaboard. For $117 billion and 25 years of construction (new tracks and tunnels, among other things, would be needed), we could get trains moving 220 miles per hour. And we should — it would create more economic […]

This bundle of cuteness has just been saved by the U.S. Senate. (Flickr/Stijn Vogels) Back in April, the Supreme Court struck down a law banning depictions of animal cruelty on the grounds that the statute was overbroad (I wrote a column about it) . The law was meant to crack down on “crush videos” – […]

We can all shake our heads and laugh at the likes of Sharron Angle, crusader against big government, who just happens to get her health insurance, and her husband’s pension, through the government (he was a government employee). Is it hypocritical? Sure. But there’s something a little more subtle going on. Take a look at […]

During the 1990s, when we spent a lot of time debating campaign finance reform, conservatives argued that restrictions on how much someone could give to a candidate or spend on an election were a violation of free speech. The answer to the problem, they often said, was disclosure. Let a corporation spend as much as […]

What do you do if you’re an ostensibly “objective” publication, and you really don’t like something a politician has done? Well, you can’t come out and criticize him, because then you wouldn’t be “objective” anymore. So you write a story like this one, from Politico: Rep. Alan Grayson’s ‘Taliban’ Ad Backfires Rep. Alan Grayson‘s attempt […]

A new study of technology news from the Project on Excellence in Journalism has a lot of interesting stuff in it, but I wanted to focus on this: That’s right — 15 percent of all technology stories were about Apple. And most of those were about Apple’s awesomeness. “More than 40% of the stories about […]

Andrew Sullivan points us to this rather extraordinary interview Anderson Cooper did with Renee Ellmers, the Republican nominee for United States Congress in North Carolina’s 2nd District. Elmers got some national attention by running an ad about the Islamic center near Ground Zero, which conflates “Muslims” and “terrorists,” and asserts that the Islamic center is […]

To chime in with Jamelle‘s post on John Thune below … You may recall that it was The Weekly Standard that delivered Sarah Palin unto the rest of the country, after a stopover on the magazine’s 2007 fundraising cruise in which the Alaska governor charmed the pants off the likes of William Kristol and Fred […]