HealthLawProf Blog (Free subscription) | yesterday
Ezra Klein does a terrific job providing two critiques of Senator Baucus's health plan. He writes, Bob Laszewski and Richard Eskow, two health policy thinkers who I respect very much, have come to opposite conclusions on the Baucus plan. Eskow...
9 Numbers (Free subscription) | 25/11/2008
Ross Douthat quotes Ezra Klein’s good post from this morning on how stellar Bush’s cabinet and staffing appointments were, but the former seems to have missed the latter’s point. Ross thinks Ezra is throwing “some much-needed cold water on all the excitement about how smart and experienced and hyper-competent the Obama Administration is shaping up [...]
The Plank (Free subscription) | 2 hours ago
Ezra Klein, building on this Richard Cohen column about Eric Holder's role in the Marc Rich Pardon, says no : I'm not one who thinks the attorney general should be some sort of lone renegade within the administration, but he should feel empowered to aggressively push back against abuses of presidential power. Holder's history offers little evidence of that sort of temperament. I think...
Amspecblog (Free subscription) | yesterday
Ezra Klein has suggested that Ben Bernanke's "extremely aggressive" moves during the financial crisis have undermined the case for Milton Friedman's monetarism, but Ezra is working off of an inaccurate understanding of monetarism. Friedman's argument wasn't that we need more aggressive monetary policy, but actually, quite the opposite. He believed that no matter how brilliant...
Brian Beutler (Free subscription) | yesterday
I have to take brief exception to this post by Ezra Klein. When Bush's first appointments were named, I was, like, seven years old, so (with the exception of the occasional knee-jerk reaction to the scandal of the day) I didn't give politics much thought. I read somewhere that Cheney had voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, so he seemed like a real prick, and...
D-Day (Free subscription) | yesterday
A week or so ago, Ezra Klein argued that America is a small-c conservative nation from a structural and operational standpoint, in that the checks and balances between the different branches and the practice of the filibuster in the key lawmaking body frustrate major change or rolling back policies already enshrined into law. Insofar as you take the traditional definition of conservatism...
Raw Story (Free subscription) | 1 hour ago
... $18 million to fight AIDS across the world. Another $48 million has been authorized by Congress.Ezra Klein of found it somewhat odd to award a "PEACE" medal to a president who presided over two wars."There's no argument that Bush has done some genuine good in pushing America's HIV/AIDS policy forward, but giving Bush the International Medal of PEACE is like giving the Dalai Lama the...
The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | 3 hours ago
... public policy has nowhere left to turn except direct government spending on economic support, as Ezra Klein argues for The American Prospect. President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to deliver a major fiscal stimulus package as soon as possible after taking up his new job on January 20. Joshua Holland notes for AlterNet that Obama does not have to radically overhaul the economy to...
Vino's Political Blog (Free subscription) | yesterday
Ezra Klein rightly takes issue with the idea that wealth comes more from hard work than from luck and social circumstances. He points out that he doesn't really work harder than people at laundries, or in coffee shops, or working on road maintenance. It is that the market is arranged in such a way as to reward him more for his work than them for theirs.
Yes, Let's Talk About This (Free subscription) | yesterday
There’s been a bit of talk lately stemming from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outlier, which basically suggests that luck and circumstance tend to have far greater impact on individual success than work ethic. Ezra Klein remarks: I’ve always had a lot of trouble with the idea that success come more, or at least as much, from hard work [...]
Later On (Free subscription) | 29/11/2008
Ezra Klein writes: You occasionally have folks speak truth to power, but you rarely have folks in power speak truth. The closest you get is folks who once had power speaking truth. You see it a lot with past presidential candidates, and in Israel you saw it in Ehud Olmert’s outgoing interview where he lambasted Israeli [...]
News to Cromley (Free subscription) | 28/11/2008
The Obama campaign definitely tapped into a lot of ordinary Americans' desire for change. According to Ezra Klein his campaign got $500m from 6.5m small donations . It is difficult to imagine something like that happening in a British election! However, of course, the fact that parties get free Party Political Broadcasts in elections and can't buy TV time helps reduce the cost of our...
Unqualified Offerings (Free subscription) | 27/11/2008
As you know, it’s been a contentious week filled with controversy. Yglesias kicked it off by declaring that "Turkey Sucks." That led to rejoinders from Ezra Klein and Atrios, some parsing of words by Matt, and clueless sniping by Jonathan Chait, later updated. Note: While instinctively anti-Chait, I think it’s possible that Patrick Nielsen Hayden [...]
TODAY ON VOT3R - Politics STORIES (Free subscription) | 27/11/2008
From Aaron Kagan via Ezra Klein : It’s hard to say what’s worse: the fact that a would be vice president could be so oblivious to her surroundings, or the fact that Americans were so alarmed to see that turkeys have to be killed in order for us to eat them. By total coincidence and thanks...
EconTech (Free subscription) | 27/11/2008
Drezner writes: Battle of the All-Star Cabinets Ezra Klein and Megan McArdle have divergent takes on the caliber of Obama’s incoming cabinet vs. Bush’s incoming cabinet back in 2000. Intriguingly, on this issue they go against their ideological predilections. Klein first: “Isn’t it amazing,” asks Krugman, “just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the [...]...
