Month: February 2009
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Don’t trust National Journal rankings
National Journal has released its 2008 rankings of members of Congress from liberal to conservative, which means it’s time for another reminder not to rely on their fairly primitive methodology. The rankings produced by UCLA’s Jeff Lewis and UCSD’s Keith Poole for the 110th House and Senate are vastly preferable (they scale almost all votes,
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Blog slowdown
As you may have noticed, my blogging has tailed off dramatically in recent weeks. The reason is that I’m in the process of finishing up my dissertation. Posting will return to normal once it gets the final stamp of approval…
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Gerson vindicates Suskind and DiIulio?
John DiIulio quoted by Ron Suskind in Esquire, 1/1/03: “I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he writes. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance
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Will and Krauthammer are pro-recycling
Back in 2006, I caught the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer recycling the same World War II quote to denounce supposed appeasement in 1989, 1994, and 2006: Consider Charles Krauthammer, an influential Washington Post — and TIME magazine — columnist and administration ally. He is the probable source of Rumsfeld’s quote, having used it in his
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Karl Rove transformed into economic purist
This is too much. First Karl Rove lectures the Obama administration on White House management. Now he’s criticizing their economic statistics! Team Obama was winging it when it declared the stimulus would “save or create” 2.5 million, then three million, then 3.7 million, and then four million new jobs. These were arbitrary and erratic numbers,
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Economic crisis headline of the day
Here’s the headline of yesterday’s today’s Wall Street Journal editorial on the Obama mortgage plan: Dukes of Moral Hazard They’ll be here all night — tip your waiters and bartenders!
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Exaggerating the effect of gerrymandering
Matthew Yglesias correctly dings Richard Cohen for this passage: Congressional Republicans have made a stand on the stimulus package, just as they did on the original bank bailout when they refused to accommodate a president of their own party, George W. Bush. These Republicans are as wrong as wrong can be, and history, I am
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The “end of newspapers” bubble
Last week Michael Kinsley joined the chorus of people predicting doom for the American newspaper: And the harsh truth is that the typical American newspaper is an anachronism… The Times, The Post and a few others probably will survive. When the recession ends, advertising will come back, with fewer places to go… With even half
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Making judicial elections even worse?
As longtime readers of this blog know, I despise judicial elections, which destroy legal norms and create extensive conflicts of interest. But things could get even worse — the Supreme Court is considering a case from West Virginia about whether a state supreme court justice there should have recused himself from a case involving a
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A gridlock model of the Senate stimulus vote
It’s interesting to note how precisely the vote to end debate on the economic stimulus legislation corresponds to the gridlock zone model of the political scientist Keith Krehbiel. In the current configuration of power, the model predicts that the 59th most liberal senator — the so-called filibuster pivot — determines the fate of any legislation