Ezra Klein

In the land of the cool, Random House discovered a genius author working in their mailroom and, after getting a five-figure, two-book deal, he’s still toiling among the envelopes. Oh, and his book might become a movie. It doesn’t get much sweeter than that. Via The Elegant Variation.

I want to engage something Ed Kilgore says in a much-larger post on Southern politics: While there may be exceptions in states like Louisiana and the border-state Missouri where there are extraordinarily high concentrations of both fundamentalists and Catholics, I don’t believe there is a popular majority in any southern state for overturning basic abortion […]

With Republicans sweatily gripping all the levers of government, it’s worth taking a moment to see how the worm has turned. MoJo blog had a great post showing that Bush’s speech wasn’t so much penned by Michael Gerson, as lifted from an acceptance address 50 years ago:

Fafblog! 1/20/05: Can you doubt the freedom-spreadery of Giblets? Giblets has decreed Iraq to be free and now it is! Oh sure, not in the petty “liberal democracy with equal protection under the law” sense. But in the “infested with terrorists” sense it’s as free as they come! Once Iraqis were tortured and killed by […]

With little-to-no expertise in labor issues, and no memory of a time when unions were strong, it’s hard for me to enter the debate between Nathan Newman and Chris Bowers. So I won’t. Suffice to say that Chris castigates elected Democrats for abandoning labor and Newman replies that our politicians are quite favorable to labor, […]