By now you’ve heard that tonight, President Obama will propose a package of tax breaks for the poor and middle class, paid for by some tax increases for the wealthy, including raising capital gains taxes and closing some loopholes. In my Plum Line piece today I consider this in light of some basic features of […]
Blog: Paul Waldman
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Mike Huckabee Is Your Candidate Of Cultural Resentment
I’m going to confess an unpopular opinion (among liberals at least) and say that as much as I enjoy The Daily Show, Jon Stewart is usually not that good an interviewer when it comes to political figures. He’s about two-thirds of a good interviewer-there are always some good questions, but he usually misses opportunities to […]
Posted inEnergy and the Environment
Google Glass Is Dead, But It’s Also the Future
Flickr/Karlis Dambrans Google announced today that it is ceasing production of smartphone-on-your-face Google Glass, and although they are characterizing it as just an end to the beta version, everyone else seems to be calling it a failure. There were certainly some reactions the company didn’t anticipate, like the fact that most people thought they look […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
The Entire Conservative World Has Turned On Mitt Romney
Flickr/Gage Skidmore Well that sure was fast. At the beginning of this week, Mitt Romney 3.0 was the talk of the political world, and while it’s certainly unusual for a candidate to lose a general election and then come right back and run again, it didn’t seem absurd. I myself wrote a column titled “Why […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Photo of the Day, Sports Proletariat Edition
View image | gettyimages.com Michael Russell competing in the qualifying rounds of the Australian Open. Qualifying is a tournament-before-the-tournament, where players not highly ranked enough to get automatic berths compete for the last few spots in the main draw. Russell, a 36-year-old American starting his 18th year on the tour, is currently ranked 156th in […]
Posted inLaw and Justice
Are the French Free Expression Hypocrites?
Last week, I suggested that while the outpouring of support and unity in the wake of the horrific murders of staff members of Charlie Hebdo in France seems to be about free expression in the abstract and not about defending particular kinds of expression, we might be misleading ourselves a bit on that score. Many […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Awful Poll Question of the Day, Courtesy of Pew
As a general matter, the Pew Research Center probably produces the best publicly available polls-they’re methodologically sound, carefully executed, and often ask better questions than other organizations exploring the same topics. But I have a real problem with this one, which comes from a new report released today. When you ask, “Do you think Barack […]
Posted inAmerica and the World
Why the Paris Attacks Didn’t Happen Here
We’ve been hearing a lot from certain people that the terrorist attacks in Paris just show how weak Barack Obama is, and we’re probably going to get hit with this kind of attack here, because the terrorist are emboldened or something. In my post this morning at the Plum Line, I looked at some things […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
GOP Tees Up Another Humiliating Defeat On Immigration
Later on today, the House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security and also reversing President Obama’s executive actions temporarily exempting certain undocumented immigrants from deportation. We’ve been on this merry-go-round before, and here’s what’s so remarkable about this: Republicans still believe, even after all this time, that […]
Posted inEducation in America
Today’s Chart
Since President Obama is now proposing to make community college free for anyone who wants to go, I thought it would be a good time to look at the rather extraordinary change in Americans’ level of education that has occurred over the last 75 years. I made this chart using census data; note that the […]
