Ezra Klein

By Dylan Matthews I guess I’m supposed to be outraged that George Galloway met with Hamas leader and former Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh, but I’m having a hard time mustering it. For one thing, it’s George bloody Galloway. He’d have a two-hour sit-down with a cactus if it pissed off Gordon Brown or the State […]

By Dylan Matthews When the GOP appears set to dump its first African-American leader mere weeks into his tenure in favor of a member of an all-white country club, it’s hard for schadenfreude not to turn into genuine pity and concern. Obviously, this was in large part Steele’s own doing, but it’s fairly tragic that […]

By Dylan Matthews Harvard Crimson lore has it that somewhere in the newspaper’s building, you can find the old portrait of Lenin that Jim Cramer used to hang in his office. Cramer, back in the ’70s, was an actual Communist; not “restoring the top marginal rate to 39.6%” Communist, mind you, but “establishing a dictatorship […]

By Ezra Klein I’m writing this from beautiful LAX airport, which I’m sure has benefited from a number of earmarks in its time. There’s no way, for instance, that there can possibly be this many Hudson News kiosks without federal subsidies playing a role. (Actually, snark aside, that’s sort of true: The inability to bring […]

By Dylan Matthews John Sides has a good, long rant at the expense of Matt Bai and his somewhat off-handed condemnation of political science. The whole thing’s worth reading, but this point in particular deserves emphasizing: Political journalism would be improved with a bit more rigor and somewhat higher empirical standards. It needn’t mimic political […]

By Dylan Matthews Ezra has already written about Jonathan Krohn, and his fifteen minutes seem to be about up, but it’s worth highlighting Ta-Nehisi’s comments on the conservative wunderkind: If you’re a conservative and you care about this kid, you don’t give him a public forum. You give him your card, and you take his […]

By Dylan Matthews You know, I’m all for dispelling the notions that suburbia is eco-friendly and that urbanization is necessarily environmentally deleterious. That said, I somehow doubt that taking on beloved children’s book characters is the best way of going about it. Can’t we find pro-Seuss ways of arguing for urbanism? Isn’t there some way […]

By Dylan Matthews At a certain level, I really want to agree with Bruce Ackerman’s argument here. His main proposal – requiring Senate confirmation for senior White House staffers like the Office of Health Reform chairperson or counsel to the president – seems like a nice, principled reform that makes a lot of sense in […]

By Dylan Matthews Eric Kleefeld – who’s been covering the legal nitty-gritty of the (still!) ongoing Senate battle in Minnesota for months now – comes bearing some potentially good news. Due to the relative speed of the arguments from Al Franken’s lawyers, a Minnesota election law specialist, David Schultz, is now predicting that there’ll be […]

By Dylan Matthews Thanks to Ezra for having me over again; it’s good to be back. So Andy Grove thinks Obama is being too ambitious. And Fred Hiatt thinks I should care, so Grove gets to express this view on the Washington Post op-ed page, pretentious Machiavelli quote and all. Look, Grove is a smart […]