Ezra Klein

I’ve long responded to the constant article positing a Dean/Emanuel split with the hope that someone would take a breath from chronicling Emanuel’s desire for more money and actually evaluate Dean’s 5–state strategy. Happily, US News’ Dan Gilgoff did exactly that. “Here’s what the front line of Howard Dean’s revolution looks like.” he writes, “two […]

His parents beat the hell out of him, slapping him with shoes and, on at least one occasion, whipping him with a 16-pound girdle. His household contained “a million rules…regulations and prohibitions for almost every imaginable situation,” and he could be punished for transgressions as mild as uttering the exclamation “hot dog!” He tried being […]

While it’s not necessarily true that you’re only as old as you feel, you may be only as old as you think: In a paper appearing in the current issue of the journal Social Cognition, psychologists report that men and women in late middle age underperformed on a standard memory test when told they were […]

I have a review/commentary piece on the Devil Wears Prada up at Campus Progress. Let’s just say I both loved the movie and thought it a misunderstood commentary on the need for a revitalized labor movement. Pretty much what you’d expect me to say, I guess. Give it a read and let me know what […]

Having already offered up an example of the press corps at its worst, let me now turn to how it looks at its best. Last week saw the release of data showing federal tax revenues far exceeding estimates. True to form, the Bush administration credited its tax cuts, arguing that they spurred the economy, generated […]

If I were crafting a parody of the political media’s decline, I could hardly construct a better set piece than today’s reportage. A live mic at the G8 Summit caught Tony Blair and George Bush talking privately about the conflict in Lebanon. Given the relative opacity of Bush’s thoughts on the situation, the frank discussion […]

Got to love Cato’s David Boaz. Responding to reports that Nancy Pelosi will prove herself a fiscal conservative if made speaker, he writes: Another NTU report showed that Pelosi voted in the interests of taxpayers only 11 percent of the time on tax and budget votes. I just love that framing, as if taxpayers have […]

Wise and benevolent deity Echidne picks up on one of the most bizarre confessionals I’ve ever encountered: A young, Christian woman’s remembrance of the hell that was college, and her warning that most women should stay far from the Ivory Tower’s heretical threshold. I spent my years at college struggling to maintain a Biblical outlook […]

My friend Raffaello Pantucci, research associate at CSIS, sends in this analysis of the conflict as it currently stands: “The Middle East is often read in the West as a baffling and self-destructive enigma. This is an essentially condescending analysis that often leads to incorrect short-term assumptions. We are currently in the middle of watching […]

Some of the stranger moments in blogging come when you go to research something on Google and find the first two results are discussing you and the second two are you. Guess I should have just asked myself. In other, more important news, my main goal in blogging has finally found fruition: I am the […]