A plain blog about politics

I don't really have anything to say about this , other than to say that it's not the first time. Or the second time. In fact, the ev...

Happy Birthday to Mayim Bialik , 38. Good stuff: 1. Sarah Kliff on the people who may fall through the cracks. 2. Jamelle Bouie on dem...

Well, not the president. Just the Attorney General. And not actual impeachment; just a few radicals planning to introduce articles of impeac...

It's a holiday, so no good stuff today. Just my latest columns (yeah, wise guys, very funny, you know what I mean). My TAP column toda...

Matt Yglesias demolishes a conservative talking point about Singapore and health care reform . Bottom line, after he reviews what Singapore ...

Column time. At TAP today, I argued that we're unlikely to have a second shutdown when the current CR expires in January. The big point...

So far today, over in no-we're- not-completely-bonkers House news, the House Republicans prepared a debt limit/funding bill, took it to ...

No links post this morning with the holiday, such as it is. I'm not sure what I'll be writing here today...I will be over at Greg...

My TAP column today is about why we get too much coverage of spin, and why we're stuck with it. At Salon over the weekend, I talked ...

Happy Birthday to David S. Bernstein . Younger than me. Plenty of good stuff to begin Shutdown Week 2: 1. I haven't been linking to...

Happy Birthday to Ed Halicki , 63. Good stuff -- all on one question, today: 1. Why is the Republican Party broken? Regular readers know...

Ed Kilgore has been fighting a running battle with those, myself mostly included, who talk about "post-policy" Republicans. He has...

Mark Schmidt has a very much worth reading piece over at TNR in which he makes the counterintuitive case that the problem leading to the sh...

OK, all through this thing, and all day yesterday, I thought that a shutdown was relatively unlikely. Not impossible, but below 50/50. Why...

Two new columns out, one over the weekend and one hot off the presses today: At TAP, I run down the likely scenarios, and incentives, aft...

One for Matt Yglesias, who makes a good point : [T]he striking thing about American politics today is the extent to which politicians in c...

I put together my thoughts on Syria in a Plum Line post this afternoon. Sort of an extension of what I've already said around here, but...

I did sort of a summary post at Greg's place yesterday on the whole shutdown/debt limit showdown situation. One of the key differences,...

Greg Sargent notes that the idea of Republicans as post-policy and as willing to deliberately willing to undercut policy is gaining ground ...

I saw this from Kevin Drum , who sent me to Dave Weigel , and from there to a brilliant paper designed to fuel infinite resentment for conse...