Ezra Klein

Site alumni Nick Beaudrot and Neil Sinhababu have struck out on their own with a new blog named Donkeylicious. And they’re carrying on the old traditions. The top post is called “Chartmania” and notes that conservatives are doing their level best to defund Planned Parenthood — a policy that will almost surely result in more […]

In my posts on health care reform, and Daschle in particular, I often bring up Ira Magaziner’s disastrous performance as head of Clinton’s health effort. This is not only conventional wisdom, it is the sum of a lot of reporting. It is almost impossible to get through a conversation on the failures of 1994 without […]

The last few years have featured a lot of talk about Bush’s “Wilsonian” foreign policy. Indeed, John Ikenberry, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Thomask Knock, and Tony Smith have just written a new book on the subject. But what we really need is for Bush to engage in a bit more Wilsonian thinking in transition policy, as John […]

Also from Chris’s essay on pragmatism: When a friend of mine decided to run for office this year, someone suggested that he write down a list of positions he wouldn’t take, votes he wouldn’t cast, then put it in a safe and give someone the key. The idea was that by committing himself in writing […]

Chris Hayes has a nice essay on the resurgence of “pragmatism” as the highest of political virtues. It’s no coincidence, Hayes implies, that this occurs exactly as liberals take power. Indeed, it’s the result of a concerted effort to frame the Bush administration’s failures as the fault of “ideology” in its manifestation as a character […]

Andrew Roth runs the numbers: First, Senators make a base salary of $167,100. Assuming a person joined the Senate at age 44 and stayed for two terms, and adjusted for 2% inflation with a 2.7% discount rate (10-year treasury), the net present value would be ~$1.9 million.But membership in the Senate carries more than just […]

Consider this: For most of the last eight years, the American government has been unwilling to forthrightly acknowledge the science on global warming. Indeed, it edited much of the science out of government reports, calling it “not sufficiently reliable.” Bush’s Department of Energy director wanted to abolish the agency one year before he was asked […]

To further the point that you don’t tap a former Senate majority leader to simply run the Health and Human Services bureaucracy, Mike Allen reports: Daschle, who was developing a passion for health care, did not want to be HHS secretary – or at least was lukewarm on it – unless he was given a […]

Some good reporting from Jay Newton Small: Amidst all the auto bailout drama today, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers and Phil Schiliro’s visit to the Hill went relatively unnoticed. The three Obama wise men met with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid talking about what the stimulus package might look like when Congress reconvenes next year and […]

To be fair, David Ignatius is not saying that Warren Buffett should be allowed to pick our CIA chief. He’s saying that Obama should be looking for a managerial director, who will work to improve the agency’s bureaucracy, rather than an ideological director, who will be working to change its mission. Ignatius is just confusing […]