Month: September 2013

Jonathan Bernstein is correct that you can tell who the target audience for an opinion piece is by looking for the “to-be-sure” paragraph. The “to-be-sure” paragraph is intended to anticipate, confront,...

J-Rube says that “the grown-ups are taking the Senate back,” from Sens. Cruz, Lee and Paul. This is true only in the sense that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is promising not to filibuster the House’s...

I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey where “Yale Sucks” t-shirts were ubiquitous precisely because there was no argument that Harvard was the country’s premier university and the only debate was over which...

In my last diary, my first at the frog pond, I pointed to some geopolitical dynamics happening in the Middle East that support the notion that a Peace Train is gathering momentum. The usual East/West, Dem/Rep identifications and...

While reading Steven Teles’s long tome on kludgeocracy in National Affairs, I was reminded of what a Philadelphia congressman once told me in confidence. He told me that he favored the introduction of gambling in...