Ezra Klein

As a childless twenty-something, I’ve been really enjoying the Corner’s weeks-long debate over whether or not parenting matters. In the “cranky bugger” corner, with the impressively hiked-up grandpa shorts, has been John Derbyshire, who’s argued that parenting matters very, very little, and peer influences, genetics, and culture are the real determinants. His primary assailant has […]

Via Jonah, this is a fascinating interview with Bush’s outgoing speechwriter Michael Gerson. I’ve long believed that evangelical Christianity is antithetical to the small government tradition of the Reaganites, but rarely has such a prominent member of the GOP admitted the tension so frankly. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the […]

Like Digby, I’m fascinated by the segment of the punditocracy that is less pro-Lieberman than anti-anti-Lieberman, less interested in the issues at hand than whether their coalition is sufficiently free from peaceniks and bloggers. It’s the Iraq War debate transposed to the domestic realm. You’d think patchouli was some sort of terminal, communicable illness by […]

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf Via Punkass Marc comes Gail Russell Chaddock’s article on the GOP estate tax bill in the Christian Science Monitor: “I want permanent death tax relief. But I cannot in good conscience vote for a bill that also contains an excessive minimum wage increase that will hurt small businesses and cost […]

(Posted by John.) Before you go to bed tonight, or maybe when you wake up Monday, this article in the NYT Sunday magazine is worth checking out – the promise, and reality, of carbon trading as a way of reducing global CO2 emissions. Probably the most telling thing about the article is that the current […]

By Neil the Ethical WerewolfHey, did you know that Iran’s Parliament has a seat reserved for Jews? And by “seat” I mean an actual government position, not some kind of chair that blows up. You can read a little about Iranian Jews here. Their situation is better than I would’ve thought it’d be, though certainly […]

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf I’d heard before that some Arabic language specialists were being fired from the military for being gay. What had somehow slipped my attention was that we had lost 55 of them this way. In fact, the gay ban has been quite destructive to our military: “Since 1993, more than 11,000 […]

Shakes here… The NY Times profiles a conservative evangelical preacher, the Reverend Gregory A. Boyd, who’s getting fed up with the unholy alliance between conservative Christianity and conservative politics. He’s written a book called The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, which is based on a […]

(Posted by John.) On the news that, unsurprisingly, Mel Gibson is a nasty anti-semite: Even the most favorable interpretation of events possible — whichwould include a theory that he was never anti-Semitic until he wasvillified for making the Passion — still leaves Gibson looking like a man with some very sad demons. It’s so very […]