Ezra Klein

Remember Joe the Plumber, the apolitical everyman who wandered into the election and electrified the nation with his blunt common sense and folksy wisdom? Well, as one of The Economist‘s mystery bloggers noticed, The American Spectator asked him to offer up some Christmas reading for the masses, and his picks are, uh, surprising. Temples of […]

Via Mike Scherer, the people on the financial news shows are idiots who are trying to make you poor. The video gets good four minutes in. And of course they are. The gig is to make you feel like you can make money, so you keep watching for more awesome, money-making tips. That means they […]

David Gregory has been tapped to step in as Tim Russert’s replacement on Meet the Press. A quick scan of TV Newser’s ratings information suggests that it reliably loses in its time slot against Wolf Blitzer and Brit Hume. Meet the Press is an oddly significant reward for what looks to my untrained eye like […]

The final few episodes of Entourage were a return to form. This season has been rough because it lost sight of the show’s central premise: This is a fantasy. And in most fantasies, things go well. For most of its life, Entourage understood that, and things went better than well. They went absurdly well. Aquaman […]

Some high quality wonkery over at Tapped.

The New Republic has a good piece today by two academics who’ve studied the auto industry outlining what the optimal bailout deal would look like: Under this scenario, the government would make available $25 billion in financing–similar to the “debtor-in-possession” financing that the private lending market would make available in a healthy economic environment. And, […]

I’ve spent part of the day reading about super senior tranches and synthetic bonds and all the rest, and on some level, I think we’re making this too complicated. The other day, Robert Rubin was asked if he’s made mistakes. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d […]

You should read Michael Berube’s letter to Peter Singer.

Matt Yglesias notices Joe Biden talking up the wonders of rail: It’s a bit unsettling to face up to, but the creation of national policy often follows a scarily delicate path. For instance, John F. Kennedy’s interest in poverty, which laid the groundwork for the War on Poverty, came because he read Dwight MacDonald’s long […]

Spencer Ackerman has an interesting post asking whether counterinsurgency doctrine is intrinsically imperialist. He concludes that it’s not, but that it may nevertheless be of great use to imperialists. It’s worth reading as a primer on an important debate. And for a broader look at the influence of counterinsurgency ideas within the military, check out […]