Matthew Yglesias

Ross Douthat comes out for banning third marriages meaning that my proposal to ban fourth marriages is now the centrist stance on the topic. Ross says "now all we need is for David Broder to write a column endorsing it" but at this point I'd settle for a link from the DLC's Ideas Primary Blog or some love from Third Way's culture program. More »

The military is fessing up about a bad shooting in Iraq a little while back: The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops. The thing you need to remember when you hear this kind of story of misconduct is that literally… More »

The New York Times takes a look at Senator Tom Coburn and all the legislation he's single-handedly holding up under the Senate's weird rules where one member can block a bill unless it's Chris Dodd trying to maintain some limits to presidential surveillance power. Tim Fernholz comments on efforts to put a stop to Coburn's obstructionism: It'll be interesting to see how Harry Reid handles this one (the Times seems pessimistic about his chances for success) since… More »

To be a bit flip, you could say that rather than thinking in a serious way about public policy the conservative movement debates issues by asking "what would Reagan do?" Either that or you could flip over to the home page of the Heritage Foundation, the flagship policy outfit of the right, and find a prominent banner advertising Heritage's new What Would Reagan Do? website. At the moment, they seem to be having a special focus on energy policy. Might I suggest… More »

Many analysts believe that the incidence of the gas tax falls mostly on oil companies rather than on gasoline consumers and that, therefore, a "gas tax holiday" as proposed by John McCain would do much more to increase the profitability of oil firms than to help out average Americans. Michael Cohen notes that when McCain was asked about this he gave a notably unimpressive answer not disputing the analysis, but instead underscoring that he really has no capacity… More »

An excellent point from Ezra Klein: For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base electoral behavior on. Take this Time article on the various tax plans floating around the election. The piece argues that the plans are composed of loosely connected soundbites, lacking numbers or details or real information. To read it, you'd think… More »

James Wimberly observes that the NYT's Steve Erlanger seemed pretty hard-up for a "to be sure" graf in his article about Barack Obama's triumphant European tour: Obama was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if Obama becomes president. The issues include Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, as well as new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the… More »

McCain Is Really Old.com -- and indeed he is. More »

John Quiggin calls attention to the fact that Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, the President and General Secretary respectively of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, are going on trial July 30 on trumped-up charges launched by the Mugabe regime. The We Are ZCTU website is seeking gestures of support from readers abroad. More »

I've had a Kindle for a couple of months now and my reactions largely follow James Fallows' first impressions right down to the fact that at this point I've become very attached to my Kindle and don't want to give it up, but at the same time have no intention of eschewing traditional books entirely. One added observation, however, would be that the Kindle actually suffers from several ridiculous flaws. James refers to the inability to "flip" multiple pages at a… More »

"Can minority journalists resist applauding Obama?" asks Jesse Washington of the Associated Press. Say what you will about Michelle Malkin, but I'm pretty sure she can resist applauding Obama. Meanwhile, can white journalists resist applauding John McCain? I'm sure a handful of them can, but McCain's received some instances of favorable press coverage over the years and the vast majority of that has come from white journalists. More »

The health policy reform world has, in my view, a tragic if understandable tendency to get bogged down in the swamps of the politically viable so I'm always glad when someone puts something obviously unpassable on the table. Here's Robert Waldman: One politically unfeasible approach to this would be to assign people randomly to HMO's and pay the HMO's based on their health but have the HMO's pay for their health care. Then the HMO decides incentives. You have to… More »

Friday's Washington Post had an article by J. Freedom du Lac about Max and the Marginalized who were coming to DC to play a show on Saturday at the Velvet Lounge with Spencer Ackerman's band, the Surge. The Marginalized sound is glossed thusly: Imagine Frank Rich fronting Ted Leo's group, or maybe a Matthew Yglesias mash-up with Husker Du, Bob Mould's old punk band whose logo Bernstein has tattooed on his left forearm. Meanwhile, in case you had any doubts as to… More »

Once again, John McCain has an unfortunate run-in with a straightforward effort to quote his words, and protests to George Stephanoupolous "I didn’t use the word 'timetable'" when, in fact, he called Nuri al-Maliki's plans for Iraq "a pretty good timetable" just days ago. Perhaps he meant to say "general time horizon." More »

Via Frank Rich's column, a USA Today article on the growing prominence of the terrorist fist-jab greeting in business circles that scores very high on the unintentional comedy scale. If Obama wins, I think this could wind up being like JFK and men's hats. More »

Harold Pollack meets the world of major newspaper op-eds: Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote a self-satirical op-ed in the New York Post slamming the Obama health plan. These authors went on for several hundred words about how wrong it would be to offer undocumented immigrants the same health benefits now offered to the United States Congress when this would require rationing care to elderly Americans.I noted one problem with their argument: The Obama plan does… More »

When you think about the stunningly dishonest ad John McCain is running, falsely accusing Barack Obama of not meeting with troops during his trip abroad and falsely accusing Obama of some scheme to deny money to the troops, you have to recall the breathtakingly unprincipled way in which McCain has been pursuing the presidency from the beginning. Jon Chait writes about the audacity of flip-flopper allegations coming from the McCain camp: If one needs any final… More »

Responding to increasing indications that John McCain is looking seriously at Mitt Romney as a VP choice Noam Scheiber rounds up the evidence that Romney doesn't exactly have huge appeal to swing voters. Stepping back, though, before McCain does this I would urge him to recall what happened back in the primaries. Romney had a lot of advantages -- solid conservative positions on the issues, a lot of institutional support, and a ton of money. But he wound up losing… More »

The Tax Policy Center discovered a $2.8 trillion gap between between the various promising John McCain has been making throughout the campaign and what his economic policy advisers have been describing more quietly to expert analysts. Slate reports on McCain's explanation: “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with… More »

There's an excellent piece by Elisabeth Bumiller in The New York Times which makes the point that one area in which Bush and McCain now differ is foreign policy. Specifically, Bush has -- without explicitly admitting any errors -- moved away from his earlier, disastrous policies on a number of fronts. McCain, by contrast, has stayed much closer to the true faith. Bumiller explains that "as the administration has taken a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy,… More »