Matthew Yglesias

It seems the price-induced reductions in miles driven we're experiencing is significant enough that it's producing a shortfall in gas tax money going into the Highway Trust Fund. In response, I would note that John McCain's call for a gas tax "holiday" seems likely to exacerbate this problem significantly. On top of that, it seems to me that this would be an opportune moment to revisit some of our national priorities. With Trust Fund revenue falling, we ought to… More »

In a new Brookings paper, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine reach the startling conclusion that when you increase the number of teenagers eligible to receive family planning services through Medicaid you get fewer teen pregnancies. Imagine that! It seems worth mocking but, honestly, the absurd thing isn't so much the research as that the relevant policies aren't already in place. For the record: "The authors estimate the policy cost of preventing an… More »

I'm sure there were tons of legitimate purposes for issuing this order: The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press. Rick Perlstein can be a cynical as he wants to be about Richard Nixon and the founding of the EPA, but at the end of the day the upshot of… More »

Marc Ambinder writes about the prospects for an elite backlash against the McCain campaign's new strategy of making stuff up: "I will defend every single word in every single ad," a senior McCain campaign adviser told me last week. "But you can't really blame Obama for gas prices," I responded. "As they say, if you're not part of the solution," and here the adviser paused and smiled, "you're part of the problem."Concerns about whether McCain is coming off too… More »

I see Eric Alterman paid closer attention than I did to Jamie Kirchick's missive about J Street from last week and found this important nugget. Kirchick writes: The attempt by people like Ben-Ami, Alterman, Yglesias, Klein et.al. to portray their advocacy of unconditional Israeli negotiations with Iran and Hamas, unconditional Israeli territorial concessions, the Palestinian "right of return," (among other extreme positions) as having any truck within the… More »

One pundit who I guess we can be sure won't be falling out of love with John McCain is Richard Cohen who today writes that he can name more admirable stuff McCain has done over the course of his live than he can about Barack Obama. This turns out to be especially true if you take a question Obama was right about, the decision to invade the war in Iraq, and decide that it doesn't count because he was representing a liberal constituency. But things like John McCain's… More »

Dean Baker notes that press coverage of a "record" deficit projection is based on measuring the deficit in terms of nominal dollars. You can do that if you want, of course, but there's no good reason to use this metric. Measuring by nominal dollars will give you the result that deficits always tend to get bigger over time (because of inflation) and also that larger, richer countries tend to run bigger deficits than smaller, poorer ones. Those, however, aren't the… More »

I caught some of MSNBC's coverage yesterday afternoon and David Shuster was being shockingly forthright in pointing out that the McCain campaign's accusations about the cancellation of Barack Obama's visit to see some wounded troops in Germany were totally baseless. It seems Andrea Mitchell's got the bug too: Unfortunately, my understanding of the research is that a thorough debunking of a bogus charge only very partially undoes the damage of making it. That's… More »

Chris Broussard wrote last week about the Atlanta Hawks lowballing Josh Smith: "Atlanta realizes Smith has no leverage (I'm told Europe is not on his radar), and while one could argue the Hawks are being smart financially, they're screwing up by creating bad blood with one of their main cogs." In the wake of what happened with Josh Childress doesn't the clear solution here seem to be putting Europe on his radar? Smith could even choose, at the end of the day, to… More »

Ross Douthat recommends some anti-Dark Knight musings from A.O. Scott: I don't want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics. I'm willing to grant that "The Dark Knight" is as good as a movie of its kind can be. But that may be damning with faint praise. There is no doubt that Batman, a staple of American popular culture for nearly 70 years, provided Mr. Nolan (and his brother and screenwriting partner Jonathan), with a platform for his artistic… More »

Obama's lead in the polls is bad news for Obama explains the NYT's Adam Nagourney -- he should be winning by a larger margin. More »

It's as if shrill bloggers have taken over The Washington Post: "Justice Officials Repeatedly Broke Law on Hiring, Report Says" Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general's report released today. In addition to inappropriate and illegal politicization… More »

Phil Klinker at the Monkey Cage jokes: Tom Edsall has a good overview of the election predictions offered by various political scientists. The consensus? A big win for Obama, unless he loses. In truth, though, what's striking about the roundup is how little real disagreement there is. First there's Alan Abramowitz, Tom Mann, and Larry Sabato and their essay "The Myth of a Tossup Election" arguing that Obama will win easily. James Campbell, on the other hand,… More »

Traditionally, one of the sources of America's advantage in wealth vis-a-vis the rest of the world has been higher overall levels of educational attainment. What's more, over time the overall level of educational attainment in the United States trended upwards. One of the most disturbing facts about the contemporary United States is that both of those trends have halted -- overall attainment levels have flatlined, and we've been overtaken by a number of other… More »

John McCain likes to point to his record on climate change as an example of an issue on which he differs with the Bush administration. But over time his once good-for-a-Republican record on this has started to look more and more threadbare. He wound up abandoning the legislative process formerly known as McCain-Lieberman, and actively opposed its successor, the McCain-Warner bill. McCain opposes all known efforts to encourage renewable electrical sources, and he's… More »

If I'm understanding Larry Summers correctly he's saying we ought to nationalize Fannie and Freddie: In this scenario, the government would operate the GSEs as public corporations for several years. They would then be in a position to extend credit where appropriate to support resolution of the housing crisis. Once the crisis has passed, the federal government would divide their functions into government and private components, the latter of which would be sold… More »

Back on Friday, Jamie Kirchick wrote a kind of unhinged tirade against myself, other liberal Jewish writers such as Eric Alterman, and J Street, the new progressive pro-Israel pro-peace PAC that was, honestly, too long to read on a Friday. It was suggested to me, however, that in light of today's announcement of six more J Street endorsements of House candidates that I might want to check it out especially the part where he "guarantees" that Robert Wexler wouldn't… More »

I haven't read Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert so I won't vouch for Lee Smith's gloss of its argument but I thought that what Smith says is worth commenting on: He identifies America's chief vital interest in the region without embarrassment: Persian Gulf energy resources. Until the United States develops an adequate substitute for oil, we are stuck in the Middle East protecting the free flow of affordable fossil fuel that not only fills American SUVs… More »

If you look back to the summer of 2005, you'll see that few people at the time regarded conditions in Iraq as "good" or even acceptable. And yet things got so much worse over the course of 2006 and early 2007, that improvement in 2008 to bring us back to the kind of level of violence we had three years ago -- except with more walled-off and ethnically cleansed neighborhoods in place -- is now represented as a great triumph. James Vega has a forceful post up at… More »

Kevin Drum is trying to find the answer to a question I asked him when I was in Orange County a little while back -- why is it that in southern California they use the definite article when referring to highways by number? Here on the east coast we drive on "I-95" or just "66" but over there they have "the 101." Thus far, his research isn't turning up anything very convincing. Anyone over in these parts have any thoughts? My pet theory has to do with Phantom Planet… More »