A plain blog about politics

Happy Birthday to Jessica Pare , 31. And very quickly, some good stuff: 1. Barack Obama's speech on the economy -- which Ezra Klein...

An occasional item about things not in the news -- which is, therefore, newsworthy. 1. Why don't we have controversial surgeon general...

I don't recall every seeing this one; it doesn't surprise me, but, you know, this is just crazy talk: Over the next twelve months,...

I'm behind in my reading this week, so I'll just go with the jobs report as something that mattered -- not as far as electoral polit...

Happy Birthday to Ken Osmond, 70. And some good stuff: 1. " The people have taken over American politics, and they hate it ....

Back to basics: the employment report. Nothing great, but no disaster. We're certainly not having anything like Clinton's peace-and-...

Glad to see that Matt Yglesias is talking about this one again : 3. We should beef up automatic stabilizers in the budget by creating some...

Putting aside the horrible shooting in Connecticut... I'll say that the new actions by the Fed mattered -- not just in terms of the ec...

I'm pretty sure the Romney comments, and even the reaction, go in the "doesn't matter" bin. For something that matters...I...

Happy Birthday to Brian Blessed , 76. I'm not sure he's my all-time favorite actor, but he'll do 'til someone else comes alo...

An unusually newsy week -- if I had to select out one thing, it's probably the economic news including the jobs report, but there's ...

longwalkdownlyndale asks: How important is today's jobs report (unemployment fell to 7.8%!) compared to the coverage of the debate? A...

Surely the attack in Libya matters, and not just from the casualties. The Fed actions? We'll see how important they are to the economy...

To Matt Yglesias, on monetary policy and the Obama Administration : This is a Fed full of Obama appointees pursuing a disastrous policy tr...

Happy Birthday to John Slattery , 50. Was on a Ned and Stacey! Oh, also some other show. But as much as I'm tempted to check to see if...

Brad DeLong gets it . He's looking at a quote from the upcoming Michael Grunwald book about the early years of the Obama presidency, wit...

Happy Birthday to Romola Garai , 30. Excellent in The Hour, which is well worth your time, but you probably knew that. You'll also want ...

I'll go with what Nate Silver said -- that the economic news this week was a bit of a plus for Barack Obama. Not so much that it was gr...

I've neglected doing these recently; I always feel bad about doing them if I don't have any value added other than the link. But I k...

Happy Birthday to Peter Bogdanovich , 73. I just saw Last Picture Show again last week; it's just astonishingly good, isn't it? And ...