Month: December 2009
-
Revisiting the 1994/2010 comparison
Josh Marshall argues that the GOP landslide in 1994 was driven by the changing political landscape of the South — a point I’ve made before — and that 2010 is likely to be different: The main cause of the Dems 1994 rout was structural. And most of the other causes, tended to play off or
-
The Senate without the filibuster
I’m sympathetic to the case that Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias (among others) have been making against the institutionalization of the filibuster in the Senate, but the debate has often felt highly abstract. Other than a brief spate of posts on whether the filibuster helped block President Bush’s Social Security legislation in 2005, advocates of
-
You Are What You Choose
My friends and former Duke mentors Scott de Marchi and Jay Hamilton have just written You Are What You Choose, a book about the factors that predict individual choices in political and economic life. The authors argue convincingly that a battery of personality characteristics they call TRAITS (Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness) are
-
Twitter roundup
Apologies for the blog hiatus — Thanksgiving and a series of project deadlines intervened. To get things rolling again, here are some quick hits adapted from my Twitter feed, which I’ve been using to post original content more than I expected (follow me!): –Via Seth Masket, the Denver school board hired a therapist to help