Jon Chait
No Reconciliation For The Climate Bill
A few days ago, Jon Chait noted that Senate Democrats were preparing yet another budget reconciliation bill this year. That, in turn, raised the possibility that energy legislation could pass the Senate with only 50 votes (rather than the 60 that's now the de facto standard to overcome the inevitable GOP filibuster). Well, so much for that: Kent Conrad's Senate budget committee closed off that option yesterday: READ MORE >>
Response to Comrade Chait
Jon Chait reads far too much into my analysis of Obama’s weakness with white working class voters. He mistakes a special for a general theory of the Obama presidency. READ MORE >>
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Via Talking Points Memo, Massachusetts Democrat Bill Delahunt went on television this morning to suggest Democrats break up the health care bill into component parts and vote on them separately: READ MORE >>
Jon Chait did me a good deed in rebutting Matthew Yglesias' canard calling me a racist. But the blogoleft has been so deprived of facts that it is left to fight its battles by resorting to epithets, of which "racist" is the most common. READ MORE >>
Football and concussions
I’m a big fan of Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. Unlike her colleague Michael Wilbon, she was willing to expose the utter incompetence of Michael Jordan as a sports executive during the time he ran the Washington Wizards. So I was willing to be convinced when I saw her column this morning defending Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach who was fired for punishing a player for sitting out practice after incurring a concussion. READ MORE >>
Dear Jons
At the Atlantic, James Fallows is remembering the passage of a similarly audacious health care program, Medicare, during the 1960s: READ MORE >>
The famous blogger Matthew Yglesias was mentioned twice in the last few days on TNR online, once by Jon Chait on the Plank, another time by me on the Spine. Both were occasioned by Yglesias' involvement with J Street. READ MORE >>
Obama’s Window of Opportunity Turned Out to Be a Shuttered Gate--Self-shuttered, Actually
It could have been predicted. In fact, I predicted it here. So, more or less, did Jon Chait and Leon Wieseltier, with subtle differences ... and, from The Washington Post, Jackson Diehl and Jim Hoagland, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, as well. Plus a few more here and there. No one from the New York Times? Huh. What a surprise. The Times never saw the Holocaust. Why should it recognize malign intentions in the charming Middle East? READ MORE >>
Mike Gerson, Please Look Up Matthew 7:3
In his fine smackdown of Mike Gerson's weird exchange with Ezra Klein over the alleged 1933-vintage threat of marginal internet comment thread ranters, Jon Chait suggests that Gerson "look up Godwin's Law," alluding to the famous internet adage about the inevitability and absurdity of reductio ad Hitlerum arguments. READ MORE >>
