Ezra Klein

Maya Marcel-Keyes, daughter of Alan Keyes, has publicly come out of the closet. In response, her parents have stopped speaking to her, thrown her out of the house, and cut off payments to her college. You know, like good Christians.

Like everyone else in blogland, I set aside a few minutes each day to sacrifice a goat to Google. But despite the enormous bloodletting conducted in their names, I often find them reasonably useless when I’m looking for very targeted information sets. Maybe I’m just not good at searching, but googling has served me better […]

Nixon might have gone to China a time or two, but Arnold’s practically taken up residence. His persona has left him essentially invincible on questions of toughness, and he’s used the freedom for pretty progressive ends. It wasn’t long ago that he signed into law a needle-exchange program that Gray Davis, afraid of being demagogued […]

So back to this blogging thing, huh? I’m 4,000 words into my Prospect critique and I think it’s going well, but we’ll see what the folks at the magazine think when the 8,000 word behemoth crushes their desks. In any case, many thanks to Steve for holding down the homefront. Seems like things were hopping […]

Since Sunday is now coming to an end and therefore the weekend is soon over, I will no longer be posting. Ezra returns tomorrow, Monday, and I return to the comments section. After a weekend off, I’m sure he’ll have much to say. But first I’d like to thank Ezra for inviting me to experience […]

I’m a Chicago guy so that explains the Tribune referencing. For my last post, I’d like to suggest that everybody reads this article about testing race horses for cocaine. The nut of the question: “How much cocaine should be allowed in a racehorse…and whether to disqualify horses for trace amounts of the drug?” According to […]

Oops Steve Chapman, in today’s Chicago Tribune, writes that the Iraq war may have had the unintended consequence of convincing our foes that they MUST obtain WMD – that Saddam’s mistake was not possessing the weapons in order to defend himself against the invasion. Sounds plausible to me. Uh-oh Chapman’s solution (read: not mine) in […]

Matt Yglesias focuses on Crown Prince Abdullah’s scheme to be written up as “reform-minded” in the Western press while simultaneously ensuring that the same Western press will call for Abdullah to stay in power…the Crown Prince being able to institute such a plan by holding very limited elections practically guaranteeing the Islamists a victory. Read […]

Just out of curiosity, if you could institute or subtract one government policy or law, what would it be? If you can’t reduce it to one, list several. I want this to be as personal of a response as possible so, in order to avoid any powers of suggestion, I’m going to refrain from stating […]

Nothing more aptly applies to the phrase “beating a dead horse” than the legalizing marijuana debate. The common sense arguments for its legalization have been repeated ad nauseam for at least the last 40 years. But I read a Chicago Tribune article last Tuesday (I apologize for not having a link, but really the article […]