Ezra Klein

What a fitting epitaph to the Social Security fight: “I had hoped there would be, after four months, a firestorm of support for accounts, especially among young people,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “It’s not there. I’m very disappointed.” Back in March, I argued that the Republican reliance on the young […]

Tova Wang’s got an interesting piece on voter suppression in The Century Foundation’s Taking Note. According to her, it wasn’t high tech hackers doing the work, but old school class discrimination: Elections officials, whether through incompetence or intentional efforts to suppress the vote, did more damage than any particular technology might have done by failing […]

CJR’s got a good interview with John Harris, author of the Clinton assessment The Survivor. I’m on page 340 of the book and it’s a fun read; not much new if you’ve studied the era before, but about as good an introduction as you’re likely to find. Harris’s insights, though, are more interesting for what […]

Phil Carter, of Intel Dump, has been moved from the ready reserves and into the 101st Airborn, with orders to deploy in three weeks. Wow. Around the blogs, much is made of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, and some of us are quite fond of demanding that war supporters enlist (a line of logic I find […]

Like good people everywhere, I spent last night in a dark room watching Christian Bale kick unbelievable amounts of ass. The verdict? Batman Returns is undeniably the best Batman film ever made, and is probably one of the best action flicks I’ve ever seen. First, I’m a comic geek. Not so much anymore, but for […]

I’m not particularly concerned by the Chinese government’s bid (through CNOOC Ltd., which they control 70% of) to buy Unocal. If they offer a better deal than Chevron, why not? Worries that Chinese ownership somehow compromises our national security strike me as way overblown. If we and China ever get to a point where we […]

The nice thing about high oil prices is that they make new technologies more cost-effective. Take Cargill, a company that has figured out how to replace petroleum in manufacturing tasks with corns and biomass, and is suddenly able to do it on the cheap: When Cargill launched its factory in 2002, its pellets were far […]

Fortuna has a good post on the crucial issue of high school dynamics, particularly the cool friend/less cool friend relationship, that ends saying: Every time I see one of those movies I wonder if anyone who makes them thinks about what it’s like from the other side. If you have a friend who is cooler […]

This article, detailing the results of a simulation focusing on oil crises, is worth reading for an idea of why people are concerned about peak oil. My excellent guests from the Oil Drum gave you a nice rundown this week, but hearing it from Gene Sperling and former CIA directors James Woolsey and Robert Gates […]

Henry Farrell and Matt Yglesias have launched into a fascinating discussion on the relative merits of market taking and market making political approaches. Market taking is identifying a current and understood desire and exploiting it. When Microsoft jumped into the video game sector, it was a market taking move — they knew folks wanted video […]