Ezra Klein

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math I’m hoping that fellow Jojah native Ed Kilgore can help shed some light on the outcome of the recent Voting Rights Act reauthorization. I’m pleasantly surprised that it passed, and that the Republican party overwhelmingly decided to support the measure. But something strange appears to have happened when you […]

(Posted by John.) Is it unseemly for me to say “We told you so”? Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said yesterday that OPEC no longer has control over oil prices. I said much the same thing in February 2005*, and many, many people were saying it before me. OPEC effectively lost control of pricing once […]

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math I’ve been helping my girlfriend [Sorry, ladies update: and nontraditional gentlemen] prepare for the LSAT, so I think I have a good shot at getting Kevin’s question right. We can clearly eliminate D as a distractor. A is also incorrect, since it implies some level of policy error on […]

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf Says Terence Samuel, with an eye on 2008: defeating Lieberman will transform the war as a campaign issue. It will move from being an “effectiveness and competence” issue that the President and Republicans must defend and explain to serving as a political litmus test for Democrats. Suppose Lieberman’s position had […]

The invaluable Anthony Shadid has an article on the effects Hezbollah’s actions are having on the internal politics of Lebanon. A close read raises the possibility that Hezbollah’s actions were a calculated attempt to force Israel to respond to them as if they were the state of Lebanon, rather than a party within Lebanon. As […]

Seems to me that Andy McCarthy is asking the right questions. Though democracy promotion makes for great and stirring rhetoric, it’s really worth having a serious conversation over when and in which forms it conflicts with America’s interests and the War on Terror. It’s testament to this administration’s fundamental inability to shed the Cold War […]

I don’t say this very often, but I agree with Tim Graham. Journalisming isn’t very hard. For Matt Bai to compare it to practicing medicine in the ER is a little…unseemly. At its most basic level, being a journalist is rather trivial — particularly in the Bai school of thought, where you write down what […]

MJ Rosenberg’s column on Israel’s two front battle is about the best I’ve read on the subject. As he notes, it’s a terrible mistake to lump together the actions against Hamas and the actions against Hezbollah — one has an actual grievance — be it right or wrong — against Israel, while the other is […]

Paul Krugman returns to the economics beat with an invaluable look at how our economy is growing: Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. […]

I really try not to quote this much, but Publius wrote one of those posts where I wanted to excerpt the first graf, then couldn’t leave out the next, and wouldn’t think of depriving you of the third, and so on, and now there are five: Generally speaking, I think people (like me) who came […]