Sorry for the cynical headline, but the news that the Congressional Budget Office scored Rep. Pete Stark‘s proposal to add a public option to the coming insurance exchanges as reducing the deficit by $53 billion through 2019 is all well and good, but it won’t change the minds of anyone who opposed it the first […]
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
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This Is How You Talk to a Bully.
Why Rachel Maddow continues to be the smartest person on television: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy — Paul Waldman
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Paint It White.
Image courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Popular Science tells us about a new study from the Department of Energy on a relatively cheap and easy way to save energy costs and help combat global warming: painting roofs white, or at least a cooler color than black. This isn’t a brand-new idea, but the […]
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Should Jews Be Allowed to Serve Openly in the Armed Forces?
It’s often said that the military is not a democracy, and that’s for the best. At the same time, it’s important to know what the troops think about any number of things. As it prepares to phase out the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the military has been surveying troops to see what they think […]
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The GOP’s New Race Problem.
A little blast from the past. The date on this story is July 14, 2005, just five years and a few days ago: It was called “the southern strategy,” started under Richard M. Nixon in 1968, and described Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue — on matters such as desegregation and busing […]
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An Opportunity for Tom Vilsack.
The case of Shirley Sherrod, which we along with everyone else have been writing about over the last 24 hours (just scroll down), is full of lessons — about the danger for the mainstream media in relying on charlatans like Andrew Breitbart to be their assignment editors; about the right’s growing obsession with “reverse racism” […]
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Turned Off by the Crazies.
Doing Democrats a favor? (Flickr/Fibonacci Blue) Both Democrats and Republicans spend a good deal of time trying to convince the public that the crazier elements of the other party’s coalition in fact constitute the very heart of that coalition. I’ve made the case plenty of times that the left’s extremists (I tend to use “the […]
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Gut Check for the White House on Elizabeth Warren.
As President Obama decides whom to appoint to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a controversy is on its way about whether Elizabeth Warren — the Harvard professor who currently is in charge of oversight of TARP, and who had the idea for the CFPB in the first place — will get the nod. […]
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Falling Out of Love With Obama
The left is finding out that Obama is not the progressive they fell in love with.
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If You Won the Lottery, Would You Be the Same Person?
I recently interviewed Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the award-winning documentary Spellbound, among other films, about his new documentary. The new film, called “Lucky,” debuts tonight on HBO. It’s about the lottery and what happens to people when they win. Here’s an excerpt from the interview: You have one subject who had his siblings put […]
