Te-Ping Chen

This February at CPAC, I remember watching Newt Gingrich bounce onstage to tell an audience full of the conservative faithful that they faced a looming electoral catastrophe. “There is something big happening in this country,” he said. “We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it.” And unless the party changed, he said, conservatives should […]

Do you remember how last fall, John McCain said that we never arrest dying patients for using medical marijuana? “You’ll have to show me a case,” he said. “I haven’t heard of such a case, nor has anyone I know heard of such a case, so it must be a very well-kept secret.” Well, the […]

Like tinsel during Christmas, today, the WSJ features its customary election-season editorial denouncing the follies of campaign-finance reform. While the piece does well in debunking the so-called “post-Watergate model,” I also think it’s important here to highlight the fact that campaign finance reform is hardly a fixed entity. There are many strands of reform: McCain-Feingold, […]

There’s a strange new phenomenon I’ve noticed among friends and colleagues who, like myself, have just graduated: Suddenly they’re talking about working for government. Since most of them are Obama fans who’ve been particularly fired up of late and would specifically want to work under his administration, I never knew how representative of a trend […]

With states facing swooning levels of deficits nationwide, turns out more than a handful are considering releasing inmates early in order to save funds. Matt Yglesias flags the story, arguing that we should switch toward more cost-effective methods to deal our problem of hyper-incarceration, e.g., treatment, and the identification of “best-practices” for policing. Good calls, […]

Two months ago, the Washington Post decided it was an amusing lark to write about how women aren’t very smart. Now, WaPo reporter Ian Shapira delivers another star turn in today’s portrait of Chelsea Clinton, a piece replete with all the adjectives of a misogynist cast he could reasonably cram into his 1,800-word piece. Chief […]

It’s unfortunate Clinton has decided to further tarnish her tough-on-policy credentials by slamming McCain for his willingness to echo Bush’s refusal to accept the current farm bill. But that’s exactly what she’s done, in a press release that quotes her accordingly: “Rural America is struggling in the face of skyrocketing energy prices, an economic downturn […]