Ezra Klein

Not to fill the blog with Arlen Specter related content this morning, but this bit from Meet the Press deserves to be quoted. MR. GREGORY: Do you support taxing the value of, the value of employer-provided health care for workers?SEN. SPECTER: No, I’d be very reluctant to do that. Health care provided by employers, which […]

“I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat,” insisted Arlen Specter on Meet the Press. “I did not say that.” And it’s true, he didn’t say that. But people about to compete in a Democratic primary in a blue state tend not to spend a lot of time trumpeting what loyal Democrats they […]

It’s a little dizzying to read that The New York Times is on the verge of shutting down the Boston Globe. And here I thought bloggers were the scoundrels killing the newspapers. Turns out it’s…other newspapers. And that’s true not just in the sense that the Chicago Tribune is wrecking the Los Angeles Times, which […]

The administration is expected to release the results of the stress tests this week. According to David Leonhardt, no banks will be judged insolvent. But some will be judged insufficiently capitalized. In other words, sick, but not dead. And the Obama administration means to heal them without returning to Congress. One of the ways they’ll […]

I understand why people might be angry over Ben Nelson’s decision to come out against a public insurance option in health care reform. But not why they’d be surprised. Nelson, after all, voted to cut the stimulus, voted against the budget, is fighting to retain the breaks to student loan middlemen, is loudly broadcasting his […]

“From my misspent years in DC,” writes James Fallows, “I believe I can identify every person in this photo.” He’s better than me, then. From left to right, I see Austen Goolsbee, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, and Jared Bernstein. Beyond that, I’m stumped.

Noam Scheiber has an interesting story in this week’s New Republic tracking the effort by the banks to screw over the professional investors. The very short summary is that the banks wanted a “safe harbor provision” that would give them legal immunity from investor lawsuits if they modified mortgages. This has, in turn, generated a […]

Obama just exited a cabinet meeting and gave a couple of quick remarks on the flu. I’ve attached his remarks beneath the fold, but in particular, I thought he offered a clear discussion of why this flu strain is different than the seasonal flu strains: somebody asked, why is this different from other flus? We […]

Ed Kilgore crunches the numbers and finds that Pelosi and Reid managed to hold the caucus together pretty well: 47 House Democrats represent districts carried by John McCain in a bad Republican year. They voted 34-13 for the Obama-backed budget. 13 Democratic senators represent states carried by McCain; they voted for the budget 10-3.Of the […]

“Let’s put all this in perspective,” writes Adam Serwer. “There have been 110 Justices on the Supreme Court. Of those, two have been women, and two have been black. The other 106 have been white men. That means that around 96% of Supreme Court Justices have been white men.” The “this” that Serwer is perspectivizin’ […]