Matthew Yglesias

The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee should announce a plan to target inflation at 3 or 4 percent More »

The new David Simon series has its moments of painful sentimentality, but it seems poised to offer a refreshingly accurate picture of black neighborhoods in New Orleans More »

Well, kids, today is my last day as an Atlantic blogger and this is my last Atlantic post. The blog should re-launch on Monday, August 11 at: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org That means no blogging for me for a week. I think I haven’t gone 24 hours without a blog post since 2004, and I haven’t gone blogless for a week since I started doing this over six years ago. I’m not sure if the vacation will be good for me, or if I’ll just drive everyone I know… More »

Megan McArdle says we shouldn't blame bad management from GM's staggering $15 billion loss: The company is scrambling to retool for small cars, and I'm sure we'll hear a loud chorus of voices saying that GM did this to themselves by becoming so dependent on light trucks. Well, they did, but I'm not sure it's fair to blame management. GM's historical pension and healthcare obligations, and the vast difficulties they have in permanently laying off workers, mean… More »

Barack Obama paraphrases Ronald Reagan's famous question: "Are you better off than you were four or eight years ago?" Now personally, I'd say I'm much better off than I was as an awkward nineteen year-old college sophomore. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'd give George W. Bush a ton of credit for that. Which is what's a bit odd about this question -- I'm not sure how tightly linked people's overall well-being really is to average economic trends. And at… More »

Ali Frick notes Michael Goldfarb expressing some displeasure that the NYT editorial page's blog didn't like his candidate's dumb ads. Here's Goldfarb: But in their new role as bloggers, the paper’s editors seem to have all the intelligence and reason of the average Daily Kos diarist sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of dungeons and dragons. Now here's the thing. Say what you will about RPG-loving nerds, but… More »

With the fundamentals so favorable to Barack Obama, why can't he crack open a bigger lead against John McCain? What's wrong with him? Does he need to change tactics? Or is it, as Andrew Gelman explains, that what the fundamentals predict is a modest victory with Obama getting about 53 percent of the vote. Right now, that's exactly what he's in line for and I expect it's what he'll get. Note that close-ish elections are probably how the world should be. A lot of… More »

Francis Fukuyama, ex-neocon, bloggingheadses with Robert Kagan, the wiliest and best-respected of the neos. I note, for the record, that Kagan's current kick about the need to revive great power conflict is orders of magnitude more wrongheaded and dangerous than the post-9/11 "let's invade Iraq" fad was. My friend DM likes to say that the one good thing about Iraq is that it distracted the neocons from their even crazier war with China schemes, but now those… More »

It really is too bad that in this country an accident of birth can get you preferential treatment and cushy jobs, when we should be building the kind of color-blind meritocracy that would exist if we eliminated racial considerations from college admissions. More »

Eric Umansky at Pro Publica has assembled some cool graphics on the fiscal cost of the Iraq war. As you can see below, the inflation adjusted dollar cost has been enormous: However, I don't think you can understand the politics of the war without understanding that in relation to the size of the American economy, Iraq has been small potatoes by historical standards: A ton of money has been spent on the war, but compared to other wars the impact of this one on… More »

She's good: So there are all these liberals in the country. Probably if you took a smart liberal who performs well on television and made her the host of a TV show, those liberals would watch that show. Just a theory. More »

Enough people in the business have gotten in touch with me in a hurry to dispute the idea that Slate is a center-right publication that I'm starting to have some doubts. And I'll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I'm not a particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in my mind. I suppose I could take some time to do a thorough content analysis and see whether material that criticizes liberals or liberal positions… More »

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt report on evidence that Pakistan's ISI helped plan the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul which is pretty distressing: The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the… More »

I'm pretty sure the behavior Wal-Mart is engaged in here, pressuring employees to vote for John McCain, is illegal. But the real scandal is what's unquestionably illegal. There's an awful lot companies can do perfectly legally to block union organizing drives. But some of the most effective tactics are illegal. That doesn't, however, mean that following the law is smart business strategy: On June 30 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Wal-Mart… More »

Zvika Krieger reads about LibertyWire: Have you ever been reading Slate and found yourself thinking, "This is great, but if only if were more conservative..."? Then LibertyWire is for you! The new online publication, being launched in mid-August, is billing itself as "a conservative version of Slate." [...] A job listing I found for the new endeavor claims it will be "general interest," along the lines of "Slate, Esquire, Good, City Journal, The Atlantic or The… More »

Ezra's damn right about this. Go to pretty much any populated part of the United States, buy some land, and try to build something on it and you'll find that there are a lot of land-use restrictions in place. Some of these rules are good, some of them are bad (on balance I'd say we're over-regulated in this regard) but they're really all-pervasive. Then along comes the LA City Council to say you can't open a new fast food restaurant in South LA and libertarians and… More »

WSJ: "But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them." Obama's also taller than average, which is well-known to be a disadvantage in presidential politics. In all seriousness, if the… More »

As sometimes happens when I read Marc Ambinder's blog, today I'm puzzled by the mentality of the campaign reporter: While we've been focusing on the race card, the Republican echo chamber has been sounding full tilt about Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter-esque turn as advice columnist to Americans about energy. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spent part of their broadcast mocking Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires to help conserve gasoline.Obama had a… More »

Despite yesterday's news that the economy is back to growing (albeit slowly) it seems job losses are still mounting. With inflation also on the rise, my understanding is that basically we're screwed. More »

I think the McCain campaign's "Celebrity" ad and the whole line about Barack Obama being too arrogant or something are pretty ridiculous, but it's a bit puzzling to me to see liberals expressing the view that these are some kind of crypto-racist lines of attack. Given that Obama's black, and America's history, I think it's always going to be possible to read some kind of racial subtext into attacks on him. But both of these are lines of argument you could easily… More »