Ezra Klein

Ben Adler has an excellent article in this month’s American Prospect detailing the environmental movement’s curious silence on meat. For a bunch of folks willing to tell you that greenhouse gases will crisp the earth and kill countless human beings, they seem oddly afraid of advocating one of the simplest and most powerful meliorating steps: […]

Via Kevin Drum, Jonathan Zasloff employed some crack reporting techniques to ferret out the truth about card check legislation. And it’s more terrifying than you could possibly believe: Employer interests have already declared their intention to go nuclear on the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unions to be certified if a majority of […]

My libertarian friends and I used to joke that it would be nice to reach the day when we could disagree again. Reading Andrew Sullivan’s reply to my post on the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, I think we’re there. “One reason I’m a conservative is the British National Health Service,” he says. “Until you […]

Christopher Hitchens is apparently arguing that we should stop using the term “Mumbai,” which is what the democratic elected government of India calls that city, and go back to using the European term “Bombay.” Hitchens bases this opinion on a passage from an old Salman Rushdie book. Terrific. As Tim Fernholz says, “Hitchen’s uninformed argument […]

Nate Silver’s list of likely swing Senators is useful, but a bit too blunt. When trying to figure out whether a Senator will swing, you have to ask “on what?” Baucus might swing on taxes but not on abortion. McCain might swing on cap-and-trade but not on taxes. Lugar might cut deals on foreign policy […]

Sebastian Mallaby takes advantage of the woes of the Detroit Three to take a shot at unions, saying “given the object lesson from the collapse of the Big Three carmakers, government should think carefully before empowering labor unions further.” All well enough, but his next sentence says “The growth of U.S. government need not be […]

Netflix will now stream movies and TV shows directly to your Mac. This is the sort of advance that could prove revolutionary for the movie industry, and for the destruction of my productivity.

Bloomberg reports that Timothy Geithner is trying to push out Sheila Bair, head of the FDIC. Bair has gotten a lot of good press in recent months for her aggressive focus on helping individual homeowners, and she was often mentioned in the same breath as Geithner for the Secretary of the Treasury position, largely because […]

As mentioned earlier, I’m talking health care at Cato tomorrow. But on Monday, I’m hanging with my leftie brethren and talking progressivism at the Center for American Progress. The deets: In Search of Progressive AmericaDecember 8, 2008, 1:00pm – 2:00pmAbout This EventRecent survey research confirms that majorities of voters agree with policies historically labeled as […]

Brad Plumer has a nice post on the proposed DC “Purple Line” that does a good job illuminating some of the more current challenges for urbanism. Namely, what we need to do is not simply create more cities, but to “citify” more suburbs. As Brad notes, “The logic undergirding the Purple Line is that D.C.’s […]