Matthew Yglesias

It seems that the guy Bob Novak slammed with his car while he was walking in the crosswalk is in worse condition than before and "appeared to have casts on his neck and back." Novak is saying that the reason he sped away from the incident is that he didn't realize he hit the guy, but a witness says the victim was "splayed on his windshield." I saw on television earlier this morning that for breaking traffic laws and seriously injuring a man through conduct that… More »

Satyam Khanna finds Fred Kagan arguing that "Well, there’s nothing we can do short of an attack to force Iran to give up its nuclear program. … At the end of the day, the only way that you can make for sure that doesn’t happen is with an attack." It can't be emphasized enough that this is dead wrong. If we bomb Iran we will, presumably, destroy some stuff. But we'll have know way of knowing exactly how much we destroyed or what we left undestroyed. Most… More »

Already this offseason, the weak dollar and the strong Euro have changed the traditional pro basketball balance of power with a number of foreign players either opting to head for Europe or else (Tiago Splitter) stay over there despite offers to come to the states. Top superstars can earn more in the United States, but for lesser players the calculation's not quite clear and in certain instances you can make more money in Europe. And then yesterday Josh Childress… More »

Haven't we reached an odd moment in our history when the burgeoning consensus among the media is that one of Barack Obama's big problems is that he's too good at drawing big crowds? His vulnerability is that he's a charismatic guy who people want to see talk? It's a bit of a perverse perspective. Photo by Flickr user Wolfgang Staudt used under a Creative Commons license More »

Tim Lee's been reading some of my posts on inane regulatory barriers and suggests I should get into the Institute for Justice's work. I actually first became aware of the insanity of occupational licensing rules courtesy of the Institute of Justice so I'll gladly give them props. I wouldn't really say this is an organization I support, since they do litigation on behalf of all kinds of libertarian causes I don't endorse like destroying public schools and destroying… More »

Via John Sides, along comes political scientist Dan Hopkins with some empirical research into the "Wilder effect" question (PDF, the phenomena whereby black candidates get a smaller share of the vote than public polling would have predicted. Titled "No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates," the paper concludes that there really was a Wilder effect in the early 1990s but there isn't one any… More »

I've seen a good deal of mockery of this McCain campaign poster on the grounds that he seems to be more angling to be God's successor than George W. Bush's but less on the underlying claim that he somehow possesses a unique level of wisdom necessary to bring about peace: In fact, McCain has a notably thoughtless approach to the world situation. A good case in point is his Russia policy which is focused around the silly idea of needlessly antagonizing Moscow by… More »

Dana Goldstein writes: Robert Novak is driving a black corvette on K Street. He hits a pedestrian crossing the street in a crosswalk with a "walk" sign. And then he speeds away...until a vigilante cyclist, who also happens to be a partner at lobbying/law firm Harkins Cunningham, uses his bike to block Novak from evading the police! This isn't the first time Novak's gotten in trouble with criminal driving. Fortunately, the 66 year-old man Novak hit has only minor… More »

I've been on the edge of my seat wondering whether George W. Bush would speak at the RNC, or whether his gross unpopularity would lead the party to try to stash him away on a presidential visit to Madagascar or something. Apparently, though, no Madagascar for him -- spech is on for September 1. Now I'm wondering about Cheney. More »

I don't have a ton of occasions to offer unvarnished praise to Bush administration officials but Transportation Secretary Mary Peters' op-ed about airport congestion is right on the money. Her idea, basically, is that airlines should pay money in exchange for permission to use runways with the price being higher at high-demand times and lower at low-demand times. This is commonsense and should do something to mitigate the spike in delayed flights over the past… More »

Not only does Barack Obama, as uncovered by Patrick Ruffini, try to communicate to residents of Germany in the German language he also (as Dr. Melissa Couthier sagely observes) uses images of himself in profile just like Adolf Hitler did. If I were to engage in guilt-by-association grounded in Obama campaign iconography, I would probably have observed that his campaign aesthetics seem to have something in common with socialist realism, but it takes all kinds… More »

One odd subplot of the campaign that I've caught occasional glimpses of in comments here are anti-Obama conspiracy theorists raising questions about why the original copy of his birth cerificate isn't available. The idea, it seems, is that Obama was secretly born outside the United States and his parents said to themselves, back in 1961, "this interracial kid will probably be president some day so we'd better cover up his place of birth and pretend it happened in… More »

Folks know that I like counterfactuals, so I thought I might muse on a point that I think's gotten too little attention. Thus far, discussion of tactics in Iraq has tended to focus on either the question of whether things could have gone better had we gone in with a larger force and better counterinsurgency tactics in 2003, or else on how big of a positive impact the "surge" had over the course of 2007. Another point worth considering, however, is whether smarter… More »

Spencer Ackerman has some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on the record against the McCain campaign's sleazy new slanders against Barack Obama. It was while over there that I saw this truly stunning post from McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb in which he tries to argue that to point out that McCain doesn't know when the Anbar Awakening happened is per se to attack the troops. But to be as clear as possible, there were American soldiers serving in Iraq for… More »

Patrick Ruffini slams the Obama campaign for using a foreign language in its promotional material for an event in Germany. Apparently it's now unpatriotic to so much as concede that they speak foreign languages in foreign countries. Or maybe American politicians should only be allowed to speak in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK. Meanwhile, I understand that as a campaign tactic, contemporary conservatism's reliance on the national security… More »

There's some understandable skepticism about the idea that sending more troops to Afghanistan is the right way to go, but stories like this one about how a newfound desire to avoid civilian casualties is curbing the use of airstrikes over there highlights why additional troops might be useful. Fewer civilian casualties is a good thing on its own terms, and it's strategically smart to boot. And to reduce civilian casualties you do need to reduce airstrikes. But… More »

Ben Smith notes that with McCain's press corps eager to ask some followup questions about McCain (a) not knowing when the surge happened, and (b) accusing Barack Obama of seeking to deliberately lose wars for political gain his campaign decided to cancel his press availability. What Smith doesn't note is that this cancellation comes hot on the heels of 48 hours worth of non-stop whining about how the press is paying too much attention to Obama's trip and ought to… More »

Megan McArdle has a good post about why you may feel that airline deregulation has been a disaster -- if you're someone who flies primarily for work it really has been a disaster. We moved from a high price / high quality equilibrium to a low price / low quality equilibrium, which is a terrible move if you're not the one paying for the tickets. Meanwhile, the middle class tourist trying to move a family of four across the country for a vacation has seen… More »

Today's Washington Post editorial on Iraq has a very definite Pravda vibe to it -- sure we all saw, watched, and heard the Iraqi government repeatedly endorse an Iraq strategy along the lines of what Barack Obama has proposed, and repeatedly reject an Iraq strategy along the lines of the Bush/McCain perpetual war for perpetual occupation strategy, but here comes Fred Hiatt to tell us that's not what happened at all. The logic chopping and mixed up facts are… More »

Joe Lieberman on John Hagee: "Dear friends, I can only imagine what the bloggers of today would have had to say about Moses and Miriam.” But of course it's hardly just "bloggers" who are upset about Lieberman's recent antics -- polls show that such people as Connecticuters (Connecticutians?) and Jews all disapprove of Lieberman and his newfound love of rightwing nutjobs. More »