Ezra Klein

Matt’s got a good post on why Katrina isn’t the sort of expenditure you want to pay for through cuts,, but through deficit spending, and why Bush’s fiscal philosophy has really cut off the option. The genuine issue here is that before the hurricane there was a lage gap between revenues and expenditures. Spending is, […]

Lots of folks are talking about Ray Kurzweil’s new book The Singularity is Near. His argument, basically, is that true artificial intelligence is a function of computing power, we currently haven’t created it because we don’t have the computer power, given current trends we will have it in about 20 years, then our artificially intelligent […]

The Corner, right now, has a banner ad attacking VA Gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine in a fairly innovative way. First you see Tim Kaine’s head on a sheep, with the message that “Tim Kaine would like you to think he’s the next Mark Warner.” Switch to a John Kerry’s head on a sheep with the […]

Red State’s got a Ginsburg-Roberts comparison that doesn’t quite mean what they think it means: Ginsburg: 17 Hours of Questioning Breyer: 18 Hours of Questioning Rehnquist (for Chief Justice): 12 Hours of Questioning Roberts: 22 Hours of Questioning Ginsburg: 216 Questions Roberts: 510 Questions They deploy this to prove that John Roberts has answered so […]

When I got an e-mail alerting me to John Edwards’ latest speech on poverty, I expected the usual hand-wringing about a country so great and a shame so large and an inequity so massive and so forth. That’s not to dispute the truth of it, but it’s a debate that Americans have long ago been […]

This piece by Noam Scheiber on Bush’s extended cronyism makes a very good point: It’s the second kind of cronyism–call it “outer-circle cronyism”–that’s truly destructive. The focus here isn’t so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates–that is, to one’s own cronies. It’s on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, […]

Stephen Moore, former Club for Growth head and all-around nutty tax-cutter, penned an op-ed in the WSJ that you can just tell had him sobbing tears of frustration by the last line. Nevertheless, it’s fairly good stuff, if only for the minty-cool refreshing feeling that comes from seeing at least one conservative flip out at […]

From David Shipler’s The Working Poor: Breaking away and moving a comfortable distance from poverty seems to require a perfect lineup of favorable conditions. A set of skills, a good starting wage, and a job with the likelihood of promotion are prerequisites. But so are clarity of purpose, courageous self-esteem, a lack of substantial debt, […]

• There’s a whole lotta good stuff on Tapped today. Pay particular attention to Sam Rosenfeld’ one-for-the-road takedown of David Brooks and Matt on why locking away the op-ed columnists was precisely the wrong idea. On a different note, I guess next week I’ll be able to link to myself over there — weird. • […]