Ezra Klein

From Today’s Papers at Slate: The Wall Street Journal does a “lessons learned” from the roughly 20 countries that have partially privatized their state pension systems. One: Don’t give workers too many choices; they’ll screw it up. Another: Going private can add lot of debt, helping to explode the economy. (See Argentina and Bolivia.)

A few days ago, I responded to a QandO post accusing the Democrats of being all opposition, no ideas. The folks over there have issued their latest missive, amending their argument to admit yes, the Dems have ideas, but they don’t have any good ones. So, sure…you’ve got ideas. But while you’re designing yet another […]

Chew on this: Timed as it was to get lost in the hullabaloo of the State of the Union address, the Tuesday night/Wednesday morning purge of the House Ethics Committee was still a pretty audacious move. It’s been known for some time that the now-outgoing Chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Rep. Joel Hefley (R) […]

You’re not going to find a better SOTU wrap-up than Shakespeare’s Sister has penned: I had the notion that I would do a thoughtful analysis of the State of the Union speech, and maybe I still will, but now, immediately afterwards, my feeling is: What’s the point? It was all just bullshit wrapped in the […]

• Quick query for the techies in attendance — do RSS feeds deliver hits? By that I mean my RSS feed refreshes itself every 30 minutes, is every site it pings notching up a hit every 30 minutes? Or is it completely ignorant of RSS aggregators and thus missing all the folks (again, like me), […]

New commentary up top. Your commentary in comments. Let’s play ball. 7:26 — Why do Dems need to have their leaders give the rebuttal? Our congressional heads have a lot of roles and talents, but oratory is not necessarily among them. Is there a reason we can’t have, say, Biden and Tim Ryan offering the […]

Over at MoJo, they’re finding that the revealed thrust of Bush’s Social Security plan isn’t matching the pre-SOTU leaks on what it’ll be. Full of good intentions, they try and reconcile the two and have some trouble, but I fear it might be simpler than that. Sinclair simple. You remember them, of course. After getting […]

Blah blah blah Orwell blah blah blah: Outgoing Attorney General John D. Ashcroft forcefully defended some of his most controversial policies and statements yesterday, arguing that aggressive law enforcement and intelligence gathering were “expansions of freedom” that helped prevent terrorist attacks on the United States.

Andy Sullivan is sorta-kinda-maybe leaving the blogosphere, at least for awhile. I don’t generally agree with the guy (particularly when he called me part of some imaginary liberal fifth column), but he’s one hell of a writer and I’ve always liked his blog. Plus, when he agreed with you, you could just quote him and […]

Matt’s got a post full of true bigthink on the multipolarity (present and future) of the word, and our position vis-a-vis the emerging powers of China and India. Read it in full. I, on the other hand, am going to zoom in a bit: In military terms, I think there’s also less here than meets […]