Matthew Yglesias

Trailer: Sadly, reliable sources inform me that this is not a trailer for an actual show just an aspiring director trying to get noticed. But as a Gossip Girl fan now transplanted to DC, I kind of want to see it. One problem here, however, is that DC Prep is the name of a real school, a public charter school in Northeast mostly serving low-income families. And, by most accounts, doing a damn fine job of it getting good results for disadvantaged kids who would… More »

Gallup remarks: Obama's particularly large leads over McCain in Friday and Saturday's tracking suggest that the massive publicity surrounding Obama's speech at the Victory Tower in Berlin on Friday -- the only major public event of the trip -- and coverage of Obama's meetings with the heads of state in France and Germany may have tilted U.S. voter preferences more in his favor. Maybe. But look, Obama's been drifting in the 45-48 range and McCain's been drifting… More »

Beer is back, regaining a large lead over wine as America's favorite alcoholic beverage after wine threatened to close the gap around 2005. Fascinatingly, I see no plausible way of correlating this "beer track"/"wine track" data with anything happening in politics. More »

As the right continues to try to sort out a coherent response to the Iraqi government's embrace of Barack Obama's vision for Iraq, John McCain tries a new gambit -- he thinks Maliki's timetable is just fine: So if McCain likes Maliki's timetable, and Maliki likes McCain's timetable, then logically McCain has to like Obama's timetable. But that's not how McCain sees it -- Obama's policies still equal doom. Or maybe we're supposed to be playing by Ken Pollack… More »

Like Robert Farley I'm not sure whether to believe these tales of super-strength from the German press: He goes and picks up a pair of 16 kilo weights and starts curling them with his left and right arms, 30 repetitions on each side. Then, amazingly, he picks up the 32 kilo weights! Very slowly he lifts them, first 10 curls with his right, then 10 with his left. 32 kilos is about 70 pounds. More »

Back during the primaries, everyone kept formally admitting that it was wrong to engage in the form of inference "candidate X lost group A in a primary, and therefore he's likely to lose group A in a general election against candidate Y of the other party" but I often got the sense listening to and reading pundits that they didn't really believe that. But the Pew Center's latest findings on public opinion among Hispanics should remind people that this is a very… More »

Slate interactive venn diagram of Bush administration criminals is fun and funny, but in that "having played with this for a few minutes I'm actually really depressed" kind of way. More »

Some stuff:CQ shifts its ratings of a bunch of House races in Democrats' favor.Ilan Goldenberg explains why sound counterinsurgency doctrine requires withdrawal from Iraq.Kate Sheppard explores John McCain's anti-feminist record.Nate Silver on the reverse Rader effect if four-way polls.Rachel Maddow should have a TV show. Have a good weekend. More »

Pat Leahy used to have two different bills aimed at tilting the legal playing field more firmly in the direction of large for-profit content producers that he's now folding into a single larger bill. As you would expect, this isn't a step that ameliorates copyright reformers' serious concerns about some provisions of these bills. More »

Marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples leads naturally enough to gay divorce. Along those lines, I was thinking recently that if you really wanted to do something to shore up the sanctity of marriage then rather than ban gay marriages you ought to ban, say, fourth marriages. It's one thing to say that people who make a mistake ought to get a second chance, but serial nuptuals really do make a mockery of the institution's basic premises in a way that same-sex… More »

Via Isaac Chotiner, Andrew Klavan writes in The Wall Street Journal that Bush is Batman: There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W,… More »

Marc Ambinder reports from the stump on John McCain's bold stance against cancer with Lance Armstrong: McCain developed an antipathy to tobacco lobbyists. He once threw lobbyist Charlie Black out of his Senate office because Black worked for Phillip Morris at that time. (Black now works for McCain as a strategist.) And beyond Black, has McCain flip-flopped on any issues? Yes: McCain now opposes sin taxes on cigarettes. He said he worries that Congress would… More »

Nicholas Kristof observes that "Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks." He goes on to suggest that technology may partially mitigate this problem, but veers off the direction of something fairly exotic: "One new venture is Demotix, which offers aspiring journalists a chance to upload their articles and photos for others to see — and some possibility that news outlets will publish them." I think a better way to think about the web's impact would be… More »

Back yards are an interesting phenomenon. Most people, even confirmed city-dwellers like myself, see their appeal. Certainly the thing I miss most about my previous DC rowhouse was that it, unlike my current one, had a yard that while very small was definitely big enough to pass some time in and even cultivate some vegetables. But at the same time, in practice people don't utilize lawn space for a very high proportion of the time -- considering how often you're… More »

Don't ask me, ask former Bush communications director Dan Bartlett: “Time will tell, but the al-Maliki comments about a timetable is very close to a game-changing event," Bartlett told my colleague Daniel Libit in an interview. "That was incredibly damaging [to McCain], because it neutralized one of [Obama’s] biggest liabilities." Meanwhile as Joe Klein says the right's response to Maliki has helped highlight "the bright line of the Iraq debate" between… More »

Spencer was inspired by Joe Scarborough to try out some Cheetos. "They start off good," remarked Ackerman, "but there's a rapidly diminishing return. Soon you wind up eating because you don't want to leave the Cheetos in the bag but you start pining for a tastier snack." He recommends pretzels or Fritos as superior alternatives. More »

Fred Kaplan has a good column trying to move beyond John McCain's many gaffes and get at the point that despite his war hero background, his ideas about foreign policy are terrible. I do, however, think it's a bit unfortunate that the piece has been titled "How Much Does John McCain Really Know About Foreign Policy?" In general, I think it's a mistake to construe the foreign policy issue as one primarily centered on attributes like knowledge, experience,… More »

Here's Ken Pollack explaining that if you count wrong, then McCain and Obama have similar positions on Iraq: Well, I actually think his timeline, Obama’s timeline, even McCain’s timeline are actually pretty close. Now that’s what you’ve seen over the last 18 months, that we’re now really debating months, maybe years, but really just months. Mr. McCain is basically saying he’ll start some kind of a drawdown in 2011, 2012. Mr. Obama is saying it’d… More »

Steve Sailer darkly hints: I hear Stanley Kurtz has been in Illinois digging up Obama's paper trail for upcoming articles in the Weekly Standard and National Review. I have no idea what he's found, but it's certainly about time that somebody went looking. Meanwhile, Noam Scheiber writes about reporters' efforts to get their hands on a copy of Barack Obama's senior thesis, all copies of which have apparently gone missing from Columbia. The thesis was about… More »

In Version 1 of the argument over whether or not the United States should embrace the Bush/McCain vision of a neoimperial relationship with Iraq, the tendency on the right was to simply deny that this was what they were proposing. The Iraqis, you see, really wanted to be part of an American imperium. Thus in that sense it's good to see Charles Krauthammer's demented column in reaction to Maliki's endorsement of a timeline for withdrawal. Now Krauthammer is… More »