Paul Waldman

There’s a new poll out from the Kaiser Family Foundation on health-care reform, and it shows pretty much what you’d expect: The public is closely divided and extremely misinformed. But they aren’t randomly misinformed; they’re systematically misinformed. Democrats are slightly misinformed, independents are quite misinformed, and Republicans are ridiculously misinformed. Take, for instance, this question: […]

Marjorie Margolies‘ op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, which was a salutary reminder of the meaning of votes in Congress, should also remind us of something else: When Republicans make predictions of terrible events to come, they are almost certainly wrong. This is important because if health-care reform passes on Sunday, they’ll be saying not only […]

If you reside in the reality-based portions of the United States, you’ve probably looked on with amazement at the latest iteration of the regular battles over Texas textbooks. Briefly: because Texas is a huge market for textbooks, the standards the state’s education board sets influence what books are sold across the country. And the current […]

NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed Karl Rove yesterday about his new book (spoiler alert: George W. Bush was strong and resolute!) and showed why he may be the most difficult person in politics to interview effectively. Gross wasn’t trying to “get” Rove — along with some tougher questions, she also asked him about his youthful interest […]

So The New York Times‘ Media Decoder blog is reporting that “ABC News is close to concluding a deal to install the longtime CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour as the new host of its Sunday political discussion show “This Week.’” This is extremely good news, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s nice to see […]

Remember how Republicans used to gaze in worship at Gen. David Petraeus‘ stony visage, dreaming of the day he would run for the GOP nomination for president? When an insult directed the Great Man’s way was enough to generate a congressional resolution of condemnation? Well, I think we can start packing up the boxes at […]

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the moment-by-moment maneuvering over health care, the latest twist is a suggestion that the House might pass the bill using a parliamentary device known as a “self-executing rule,” which works like this: Instead of having a vote on the Senate bill and then a vote on the […]

(Flickr/Jonathan McIntosh) Is Fox News’ Glenn Beck going to turn out to be the Icarus of the current political moment, flying too close to that giant fiery ball of crazy in the sky and falling back down to Earth? He’s gotten into some trouble recently after attacking churches who advocate social justice, which is … […]