A former British intelligence officer provided information to the FBI because it alarmed him. Given the way he’s been treating, future tipsters will be less likely to come forward.
John Sipher
22 February 2018
What David Brooks Misunderstands About Abortion
“Late term” abortion is a wastebasket term used by the anti-choice zealots to describe a spectrum of procedures and needs. It is nonspecific and conjures up the worst images, likely on purpose. Most procedures beyond 20 weeks do occur before 24 weeks, the long-standing threshold for viability, but most of these babies would not be viable if they reached term anyway. The reason there is no comfortable upper threshold for ending a pregnancy is that lethal anomalies can be discovered late in a pregnancy. Should a mother be condemned to carry her anencephalic fetus (which would be born without any brain tissue but a brainstem) to term because she received late prenatal care? What is the argument for that?
Cheryl Axelrod
Cheryl Axelrod
21 February 2018
20 February 2018
Why Rising Wages Scare the Heck Out of Investors
The answer is a useful illustration of why the stock market is often a poor guide to the overall health of the economy.
Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann
It's Time for Wall Street to Give Up Its Love Affair With the Dow Jones Industrial Average
Let's face the facts: The Dow is a historic novelty, and the S&P 500 is a much better stock market barometer.
Sean Williams
Sean Williams
19 February 2018
Survival at All Costs
By releasing the Nunes memo, Trump betrayed the intelligence community to save his own skin.
Phillip Carter
Phillip Carter
The Backward Logic of the Nunes Memo
Amid all the lies Donald Trump has told about the Russia scandal, there is one underlying truth: The intelligence community truly fears him and considers him unfit for the presidency. This is not because the intelligence community is traitorous, or left wing, or (as Donald Trump Jr. sneeringly put it) wine-spritzer-drinking elites. It is because the IC had early access to a wide array of terrifying intelligence linking Trump and his orbit to Russia. People who spend their lives protecting their country from foreign threats saw in Trump a candidate who had at some level been compromised by one of them.
Carter Page is the kind of person who would be brought on as a foreign policy adviser only if (a) the campaign was actively seeking out Russian assets, or (b) it was so slipshod it could easily be penetrated by Russian intelligence.
Jonathan Chait
Carter Page is the kind of person who would be brought on as a foreign policy adviser only if (a) the campaign was actively seeking out Russian assets, or (b) it was so slipshod it could easily be penetrated by Russian intelligence.
Jonathan Chait
16 February 2018
A close reading of the Nunes memo shows how sketchy it is
The memo is conspicuously vague in key places and tends to downplay or omit information that doesn’t fit its narrative.
Andrew Prokop
Andrew Prokop
15 February 2018
How the GOP Went Crazy
The conspiracy-nut wing has long been at the fringes of Republican politics. Here’s how it took over.
Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen
14 February 2018
Forged Under Fire—Bob Mueller and Jim Comey’s Unusual Friendship
The inside story of how the most surreal night of the War on Terror united the retiring FBI director and his evident successor.
13 February 2018
12 February 2018
Donald Trump Just Asked Congress to End the Rule of Law
Trump is calling for an end to any semblance of independence for the IRS, the FBI, the Department of Justice, or any other federal agency.
Yascha Mounk
Yascha Mounk
09 February 2018
08 February 2018
07 February 2018
06 February 2018
05 February 2018
02 February 2018
01 February 2018
Why Is It So Hard for Americans to Get a Decent Raise?
A new answer could change how we think about unions, monopolies, and the minimum wage.
30 January 2018
Democrats didn’t cave on the shutdown
Democrats are funding CHIP for six years and reopening the government without losing their shutdown leverage.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein
29 January 2018
26 January 2018
25 January 2018
24 January 2018
23 January 2018
How to deal with the age of celebrity candidates
So here's the proposal: At party conventions, in addition to nominating a president and vice president, party leaders should put together a Cabinet. Party leaders would negotiate over this, a log-rolling process that would give different groups in the party coalition representation in their party's government. The presidential nominee could play an important role in the process, but ultimately it would have to be a negotiation among different groups within the party. Losing candidates might wind up in the Cabinet, bringing their supporters along.
Lee Drutman
Lee Drutman
19 January 2018
18 January 2018
Bitcoin is the new Middle Ages
Bitcoin changes prices too quickly to be a currency and processes transactions too slowly to be a payments system, but it is juuust right for teaching libertarians everything they don't know about economics.
Not that they're paying attention.
Matt O'Brien
Not that they're paying attention.
Matt O'Brien
17 January 2018
16 January 2018
15 January 2018
12 January 2018
11 January 2018
What Elon Musk Doesn't Get About Urban Transit
The most common falsehood about transit, the one that underlies most of the comments transit agencies receive and many of the worst mistakes in transit planning, is this: “Transit would be better for everyone if it were better for me.”
A special danger arises when relatively wealthy people take this view, demanding that expensive mass transit systems be designed according to their personal tastes. I call this mistake elite projection, and explore it here. Many poor transit investments have arisen from a too-small group of fortunate people assuming that everyone shares their tastes and priorities. They forget that to be elite is to be a minority, and it makes no business sense to design transit around elite tastes if what you really want are lots and lots of riders.
10 January 2018
The real cost of the Republican tax bill
Is Trump’s IRS really going to tighten the screws on giant new loopholes?
If I were undertaking a radical re-write of the tax code, I would also provide the Internal Revenue Service with additional resources to make sure they can enforce it properly.
But does anyone believe the GOP is going to be stepping-up IRS funding?
Matthew Yglesias
If I were undertaking a radical re-write of the tax code, I would also provide the Internal Revenue Service with additional resources to make sure they can enforce it properly.
But does anyone believe the GOP is going to be stepping-up IRS funding?
Matthew Yglesias
Do It Yourself
Trump’s quiet attack on the regulatory state is another part of his broader class war.
Jon D. Michaels
Jon D. Michaels
09 January 2018
08 January 2018
What “affordable housing” really means
Just increasing supply, or just regulating rents, won’t solve the urban housing crisis.
Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias
05 January 2018
The simple reason bitcoin will never be a currency
Just because you call something a currency doesn't mean it is one. It has to be a stable store of value that people actually use to buy things with.
Matt O'Brien
Matt O'Brien
04 January 2018
03 January 2018
02 January 2018
01 January 2018
29 December 2017
28 December 2017
27 December 2017
26 December 2017
25 December 2017
Orrin Hatch just made the Republican agenda startlingly clear
We can afford a trillion dollars in deficit-financed tax cuts. But "we don't have any money" for children's health care.
Dylan Scott
Dylan Scott
22 December 2017
21 December 2017
20 December 2017
19 December 2017
Dr. Strangelove Was a Documentary
Daniel Ellsberg’s new memoir would be an urgent warning about the monumental danger of nuclear weapons—even if Trump weren’t president.
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan
18 December 2017
15 December 2017
14 December 2017
Peggy Noonan’s Willful Blindness
Her latest column suggests that harassment is a product of the sexual revolution. She can’t possibly believe that.
Rebecca Onion
Rebecca Onion
13 December 2017
The case for normalizing impeachment
The Constitution's framers considered a few variants of the impeachment power. An early proposal would have restricted it to acts of "treason and bribery" only. That was rejected for being too narrow. A subsequent proposal would have expanded it to acts of "maladministration" as well. That was rejected for being too broad. "High crimes and misdemeanors" was the compromise, but it was never clearly defined.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein
12 December 2017
11 December 2017
Why Evangelicals Stick with Donald Trump & Roy Moore
White evangelicals get their religion from their politics, not their politics from their religion.
Stuart Rothenberg
Stuart Rothenberg
Worst Secretary of State Ever?
Rex Tillerson’s nonsensical explanations for hamstringing his own department only made things worse.
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan
08 December 2017
07 December 2017
06 December 2017
05 December 2017
04 December 2017
01 December 2017
How Trump walked into Putin’s web
The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russia’s influence on Trump – and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years.
Luke Harding
Luke Harding
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)