The Right-Wingers Behind the Mueller Smear Campaign Are Guilty of Everything They Accuse Democrats of Doing

The right-wing canard that Democratic operatives pay women to invent allegations of sexual assault also looks particularly rich this week, in light of allegations by two women that men who identified themselves as Burkman and an unnamed Surefire employee offered them money to talk about nonexistent encounters with Mueller. 

Christina Cauterucci

The Waldensians

What one small town’s celebration of immigration tells us about how white Americans think about history.

Molly Edmonds

After Fanning the Flames of Anti-Semitism, Trump Is Hiding Behind the Pro-Israel Defense

Jordan Weissmann

The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politics

Insulting rank-and-file Republicans (even if it was only about half of them) was treated as a huge national scandal. Republican Party politicians and conservative pundits harped on the line, providing a point of party unity at a time when many party and movement stalwarts were reluctant to actually praise Trump. The mainstream press covered the controversy intensively, and left-of-center pundits weighed in with a range of takes, including one from yours truly, which concluded that Clinton really had messed up by violating “the norm against attacking the other party’s constituents” rather than its politicians.

This past Friday, meanwhile, President Trump said that 100 percent of people planning to vote Democratic in the upcoming midterms — a majority of the electorate, in other words — are “crazy.” Nobody cared and almost nobody even noticed.

Matthew Yglesias

A White House report points out that Mao and I both like low health care costs. True, but…

Health care systems where the government sets prices are more efficient than those where prices vary dramatically from one health plan to another, and this lowers costs across the board for patients. As Mao, Lenin, and I all agree (as do leaders of every other wealthy planet in the world): That’s a good thing.

Sarah Kliff

The White House, definitely not scared of socialism, issues report on why socialism is bad

Because Swedes can’t afford pickup trucks. Also because Stalin.

Dylan Matthews

The looming danger of non-banks

The most likely cause of a future financial crisis isn't the banks, it's the non-banks. They're enormous, they're much less regulated than banks are, and they tend to have much greater leverage.

Felix Salmon