Paul Waldman

Let’s say you’re a subscriber to Newsweek, or you get the New York Times Magazine with your Sunday paper. Within the last few months, you probably noticed that each of these magazines went through a redesign — new fonts, new layouts, new look. But let’s say in that first redesigned issue, or maybe the second, […]

The latest New Yorker has an interesting profile of Paul Krugman, and it contains this fascinating nugget: Krugman and [wife Robin] Wells pulled out of the stock market ten years ago and never went back. “It just takes a lot of work to think about it,” Krugman says, “and at no point—except maybe early 2009, […]

Seemingly spent on all their absurd arguments about the substance of health-care reform (death panels! socialism!), Republicans have now moved on to making absurd arguments about the process of health-care reform, namely that circumventing the filibuster is like spitting on James Madison‘s grave (just to clarify, the filibuster is not in the Constitution). But when […]

Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party’s “man of ideas,” has been all over the place in the last couple of days, coming up with inventive new arguments against health reform. First, he said that the attempt to pass reform constituted “suicidal hubris” on the part of Democrats, particularly since congressional staffers “who have never had a […]

During the health-care summit, both Obama and Biden tried to make the point that both Republicans and Democrats agree that there should be some government regulation of health care; they’re just disagreeing about exactly how much. As they observed, GOP members of Congress have signed on to certain kinds of regulation (the popular kinds), like […]

At today’s Health Care Smackdown (“You’ll pay for the whole seat — but you’ll only need the edge!”) and in the postmortems, both sides will likely charge that the other side is being dishonest about their intentions. Democrats will say that Republicans are pretending that they are open to reform, but all they really want […]

NPR today, engaging in a shameless act of journalism, gives us some context on just how crazy and unprecedented it would be for Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to enact changes to a piece of health-care legislation that has passed both houses of Congress (provided they can get the House to pass the […]

If you haven’t yet read Adam‘s fantastic post over at the Atlantic, you should do so now. Here’s an excerpt: The torture memos–indeed, all of the pro-torture arguments rest on asimilar intellectual themes to the takfiris. Suspected terrorists are”illegal enemy combatants”, outside the framework of laws that wouldotherwise guide us. Just as the takfiris justify […]

If you’ve been paying attention to the Olympics, you’ve probably heard about Russian ice dancers Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin and their Australian Aboriginal routine. No? Here’s the version that they debuted at the recent European championships — you’ll only have to watch the first few seconds to be sufficiently appalled: In response to the […]