Charlie Rose - Ezra Klein / Rep. Ike Skelton / David Finkel (October 13, 2009)
Why Now? (Free subscription) | 12/07/2009
Digby comments on an Ezra Klein post about the complaints of people at AIG that they might not receive gazillions of dollars in pay for their “outstanding performance” in recent memory. The reason they complain is that they don’t accept any responsibility for the melt down, and why should they? The Village is treating it [...]
Liberal Values (Free subscription) | 12/04/2009
The complexity of health care shows the problem of people becoming “experts” on topics in the blogosphere by reading and writing about a topic without actual first hand experience. Ezra Klein has written many excellent posts analyzing health care legislation but sometimes, such as yesterday, he posts total nonsense. (He does admit in another post [...]
The Daily Dish (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
Ezra Klein asks: Is there any evidence that financing wars brings them to a quicker close? Any papers examining this question? From Bruce Bartlett's column last week: History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean...
Rogue Medic (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
... was looking for information on a different section of the book, when I came across this review by Ezra Klein. Under the heading "putting the freak in economics," the book lays out its premise: Decisions that appear easy are actually hard. Take, for example, a night of drinking at a friend's house. At the end of the night, you decide against driving home. This decision, the...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 7) What you emphasize is a lot more important than what you report. People don't read you closely. Twenty years ago, I know what my wiseass comment here would have been: Read? Huh? So, video didn't conquer all, at least for now. But beyond that, I have not much to say about that one; it's true, and probably good...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 6) Pretty much no one watches cable news . I have little to add to this one...I guess there are a couple of things, one about mass publics and one about political elites. About mass publics, what we can say is that the handful of people who do watch cable news are the most highly informed -- and therefore the most...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 5) The media is a political actor, not an observer. Well, yes. It seems to me that the useful thing to know about the media has to do with media biases. Americans overwhelmingly believe that the press has a liberal bias, but that's because Republicans have used it as a talking point for forty years. In fact, while...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 3) Nor does the executive's legislative strategy [matter very much], come to think of it. Politics is much more interesting when it's told as the story of the executive, but in fact, the rules and composition of the Congress decide 80 percent of everything -- including the president's legislative priorities and...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 4) Polls are useful for measuring impressions but very bad for measuring beliefs. Sounds fine to me. What I'd encourage reporters to know about polling is to always keep in mind that most Americans don't pay very much attention to politics and don't know very much about public policy issues. At the same time, Americans,...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Ezra Klein wrote a great post today responding to Politico's silly story about narratives Obama fears...well, he was responding to the White House response, but he was mostly bashing Politico's focus on ephemera and gossip at the expense of substance. It's an excellent post, and not just because it's nice to political science. In fact, I wrote him a note praising the post. Then John Sides...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 2) Presidential speeches don't matter much , either. The link is to an excellent John Sides post, well worth reading. Two ways that presidential speeches don't matter: they don't sway entrenched public opinion about the issue at hand, and they don't change public opinion about the president. Those are important,...
A Plain Blog About Politics (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Intro to this series here ; Ezra Klein's post is here . Ezra says: 1)Campaigns don't really matter. Elections are largely decided by the fundamentals of the economy. The graphs in this article would've done more to predict the 2008 election than reading Politico every day. Reporters would be massively better off if they believed this. However, a little complexity never hurts, right?...
IPE at UNC (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Ezra Klein : Politico isn't afraid of being known as the most sensationalistic, horse-race-oriented, controversy-focused news outlet. That's their business model , or at least the business model of the front page (the stuff inside Politico is a lot better, presumably because it's aimed at lobbyists and Hill staffers). What Politico -- and other campaign-obsessed outlets -- fear are the...
TalkLeft (Free subscription) | 11/30/2009
Ezra Klein can not get away with writing this : As the Internet becomes more and more pervasive and job applicants have a longer and longer paper trail, prospective employers are going to have to overlook a public record containing opinions that, in previous eras, they would never have seen, and would never have tolerated. Come to think of it, my presence at The Washington Post is probably...
The Daily Dish (Free subscription) | yesterday
Ezra Klein previews a possible non-public plan compromise (follow-up here): These plans would be private, but the [Office of Personnel Management] would act as an aggressive purchaser, ensuring that they met high standards and conducted themselves properly. It's a private...
