Paul Waldman

A number of people have done a Nelson Muntz “Ha-ha!” at House Minority Whip Eric Cantor‘s announcement that his “ideas factory,” called the National Council for a New America, is shutting down one year after its launch, after doing not much of anything. But you’ve got to have some sympathy for him. The organization’s goal […]

You can argue that supposedly important cultural divisions like “Red America vs. Blue America” are not really rending our nation asunder. But one thing has always been clear: While it may not be easy to get a precise measure of who hates whom more, there is a significant difference in who’s doing the complaining. Here’s […]

Three months ago, when Evan Bayh announced he was retiring and gave the standard-issue condemnation of the special interests and the money chase senators have to endure, I wrote this: Here’s what I’d really like to see: a retiring politician go to town on the constituents. Instead of saying what an honor it has been […]

Following up on Adam’s discussion of Joe Lieberman‘s proposal to strip American terrorism suspects of their citizenship so as to avoid having to Mirandize them, there’s something odd about this — and I’m not talking about how profoundly un-American it is (sadly, we’ve gotten used to that). Conservatives seem to have moved their anti-due-process position […]

As someone who believes that citizens ought to view their government not as a hostile force but as something they, as participants in a democracy, have the opportunity and obligation to both monitor and help shape, I find this ad from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue (via Andrew Sullivan) profoundly disturbing: I don’t know whether […]

As you no doubt remember, much of the Affordable Care Act doesn’t go into effect until 2014. In order to deal with the problem of people whose pre-existing conditions make insurance companies uninterested in giving them coverage, the act provides for the creation of high-risk pools for people who have been uninsured for over six […]

Over at her other home, Nancy Scola hips us to the results of the General Service Administration’s video contest, which challenged Americans to create a video explaining the tsunami of awesomeness that is USA.gov. The site is GSA’s portal into a range of government services. I know, I know — you’ve been following this like […]

There’s a saying about the Republican Party: When they’re out of power they argue that government is incompetent and corrupt, and then when they get power they set about to prove it. So failures of government like George W. Bush‘s response to Hurricane Katrina end up as lessons conservatives use to demonstrate not that we […]

For years, hawks have tried to convince us that terrorists, whether affiliated with al-Qaeda or anyone else, are brilliant masterminds of evil with infinite resources who could kill us all at any moment. But once again, we see that actual terrorists tend to be remarkably incompetent. Whoever the guy who tried to blow up an […]

We all have a tendency to assume that people we don’t like have sinister motives underlying their words and actions, and people we do like have good motives. When you’re trying to determine what a politician meant when he or she said something that struck you as potentially objectionable, your overall view of them is […]