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January 2013 Archives
Apropos of John’s post from earlier in the week, here’s some additional evidence that people are still paying attention to the issue of gun control a month out from the...
Wait. Stop. What are we arguing about? I hate to spoil the fun, but deficit hawks and deficit doves are actually in agreement about how this sucker should play out....
I highly recommend Stan Collender's latest on GOP budget strategy for those who aren't quite sure what a "budget" (that is, a Congressional budget resolution) is and why it does...
The abstract of my new paper in the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis: This paper reviews the first three years of drug policy in the Obama Administration, focusing in particular...
Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly, has two posts on how and why companies like bit.ly should share data with academics. As a beneficiary (together with John and other members...
Washington tends to have a narrow view of what counts as “economic policy.” Anything we do to the tax code is in. So is any stimulus we pass, or any...
My father, whom I’ve discussed before, is a retired thoracic surgeon who was triple boarded in critical care and ran a trauma unit. When I told him I wanted to...
Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney turns from her highly influential work on data privacy to investigate patterns in Google AdSense. Specifically, she asks whether the ads that you see when you...
Looks as if the corporate bigwigs on the board of the national Boy Scout organization have decided that they’re not happy with bigotry as a family value, and they’re pushing...
The graph is from Danny Hayes, writing over at Wonkblog. He concludes: But the media tend to be reactive, “indexing” their coverage according to the political debate happening within...
Rick Hasen has a good column about about the national GOP effort to get Republican-controlled legislatures in states which vote for Democrats in presidential elections to switch to apportioning electoral...
You will recall that in January 2012, President Obama named Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to the National Labor Relations Board, all...
In the WSJ, Bill Gates writes about the power of data collection and analysis. He writes; “In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to...
I was going to let this go, but I just saw Andrew Gelman's post about what a terrible idea electoral-votes-by-congressional-district would be, and that makes the third one (here's one...
Given my interest in life expectancy, and my desire to overcome the myth that its “meteoric rise” requires trimming benefits for the elderly, I simply cannot believe I missed this...
Given that the apportion-electoral-votes-by-congressional-votes idea is in the news again, I thought it would be a good idea to point to some recent research on the topic.Here’s what Andrew Thomas,...
Thinking about two major stories, the court decision to eliminate the recess appointment power and the plot to rig the electoral college... It strikes me that there's a major unexploited...
David Cameron has just taken a colossal gamble with the future of his and my country and of Europe. In a speech delivered at the Bloomberg offices in London on...
Today could have been the day when Senate Democrats went nuclear – reining in minority party abuse of the filibuster with a simple majority vote. That would have been...
Nate Silver has an interesting piece attempting to forecast how historians will ultimately rank Obama, based on what we know about his presidency thus far. I don't know if he intended...
The latest move under consideration by the GOP is so aggressively anti-democratic that it's flirting with coup d'etat territory. Briefly, the thought is to take the states that typically go...
I have a column up over at TAP arguing that it's a mistake for Barack Obama to aspire to being a "liberal Reagan" -- because, well, because politics doesn't work...
Berkeley’s Martin Shapiro in the Law and Courts newsletter: One of the most difficult institutional taboos to evade, however, may be God’s prohibition on any Americanist employing comparative methods or...
President Obama recently spoke about the value of developing personal relationships in politics, something that a bunch of political scientists have been writing about recently (examples below). Jonathan Bernstein wrote...
I just can’t believe we’re still doing this: Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) doesn’t like President Barack Obama’s health care reform law. It’s too expensive and too intrusive, he says....
A few years ago, when everyone was panicked about the swine flu, pregnant women appeared to be at significant risk to be seriously ill if they got the flu. But...
The Congressional news (see links to text in article) of the day is that Senate majority leader Harry Reid and minority leader Mitch McConnell have reached a tentative agreement on a...
Great pickup by the Associated Press: Governors who reject health insurance for the poor under the federal health care overhaul could wind up in a politically awkward position on immigration:...
As Barack Obama enters his second term, some already are wishing it over. Not just the House Republicans, either – but those who want to locate Obama’s place in The...
The next time some politician talks about the national debt and tries to make it all folksy by comparing it to your credit card or grandma's farm, keep this in...
The House yesterday approved the Republicans' debt limit extension. It was a tough vote...I was going to say for Republicans, but it's probably a tough vote for a lot of...
I linked earlier today to a good WaPo piece by Rachel Weiner explaining why Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget resolution -- mainly that there was no particular reason to...
Earlier today David Cameron made public what had been speculated for a while now: if the Conservatives are re-elected to another term in office, then the UK will hold an...
Hence the basic irony inherent in the Obama presidency: He campaigned as a post-partisan, but his most lasting accomplishments will be those of a partisan. This is the conclusion of...
Last month, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, I argued that while permissive gun laws and mental health were contributing factors in American gun violence, the real cause...
Later today the House is to vote on HR 325, a bill to suspend the debt limit until mid-May and then the debt limit will automatically be increased by the...
Presidents are frequently criticized for campaigning instead of governing, but in a highly polarized era without lasting Congressional majorities, the stakes every two years grow ever higher: witness the gridlock...
Some commenters to my post (and, separately, Kevin Drum) point outed out yesterday that the US string of consecutive peaceful democratic transitions that Dylan Matthews posted on overlooks the case...
U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term confronting a familiar and frustrating incongruity: the gap between how much change he has fostered and how little about the country seems...
Oliver and Maggie are young, very much in love, and planning their honeymoon. What should be an exciting series of conversations becomes surprisingly unpleasant. Maggie resents Oliver’s nonchalance about where...
Ezra Klein offers a provocative argument: Perhaps the House discharge rule could save Congress. He argues: “…[T]here is an alternative to the Hastert rule that doesn’t require Boehner’s assent. Under...
I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in two recent NYT articles.A few days ago, in a news article by Al Baker on “gifted and talented” programs in public schools: For critics...
A piece by Keith Humphreys showed us meta-analysis that reveals Omega-3 supplements that were previously thought to lower the risk of having heart attack or stroke actually do not have...
Thomas Ferguson sends along this news article by Lisa Lerer and Jonathan Salant: Obama’s Inaugural Fundraising Lays Groundwork for Legacy President Barack Obama has mused about his legacy . ....
Over at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, I have a new post on the effects of political advertising in the 2012 presidential race. I first use the map below to illustrate...
I’m a little surprised that Mark Kleiman hasn’t beaten me to the punch on this: a helluva speech by the President. My personal favorite moment was when he noted that...
Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic: Ten years ago, Americans drank enough soda every year to fill a small aquarium. Fifty-three gallons of the stuff per person. That’s half a...
Dylan Matthews tries to spoil the party by pointing out that the United States is not, in fact, unique in its ability to transfer power peacefully. To which I say:...
President Barack Obama’s on Monday made -- or tried to make -- two different points, both concerning the definition of “rights.” Although couched in the kind of president-ese appropriate to...
David Brooks’s latest column reminds me of the definition of an “independent” as someone who wants to take the politics out of politics. Except that by “politics” Brooks means, not...
Some jobs are challenging, and some are so hard it’s a wonder anyone can be found to take them on. Ambassador from Pakistan to anywhere, for example. At the moment,...
At the end of an interesting and data-packed post on the growth in federal spending, Nate Silver offers a hypothesis: Nevertheless, the declining level of trust in government since the...
I suspected that Obama would keep it fairly simple: background checks, real penalties for gun trafficking and straw purchasing, high-capacity magazines, tracing, data, research. Other than the magazines provision, none...
Presidential inaugurations are traditionally occasions for stroking one’s chin and offering sober assessments of what the president and the nation can accomplish in the next four years. This is bound...
Daniel Luzer wrote about how much salary a dean of New England Law School, John F. O’Brien, receives: O’Brien earns about three times the median salary of law school deans...
Is the Hastert Rule dead? Speaker Denny Hastert coined his eponymous rule in 2003 when he declared that the “job of the Speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs...
For all the bitterness in Washington these days, it’s easy to miss the broad consensus that undergirds our contentious politics. Republicans swear to protect Medicare and Social Security, and most...
There’s a new paper out in Archives of Internal Medicine, which I am sure is causing consternation among many primary care physicians. “General Health Checks in Adults for Reducing Morbidity...
Keith Hennessey has a long piece noting that a debt limit fight is bad politics and bad economics, that prioritization won’t work and that Republicans should instead fight it out...
Many people get frustrated by the fact that miracle pills, diets and remedies are announced by scientists with regularity, yet in most cases subsequent research can’t replicate the original “breakthrough”....
Philip Klein has been urging Republicans to act sensibly on the debt limit, but I'm going to have to call him out on this one: [I]t’s undeniable that Obama’s first...
Aaron Swartz died recently, by his own hand. He was 26, and facing up to thirty years in federal prison for downloading most of JSTOR. Prosecutors had offered him a...
Anyone who reads me regularly knows research is expensive. Trials of just a few hundred participants (or less) can run into the millions of dollars. Therefore, most of the big...
Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic has reproduced several interesting measures of taxes in the United States, relative to other countries. Despite conservative politicians’ insistence that the country’s budget problems...
Chuck Schumer today finally said that he would support confirming Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense. This set off plenty of guffaws on the twitter machine, as savvy journalists pointed...
Income growth was slow through most of 2012, and prospective voters were correspondingly pessimistic about the state of the economy. So how was Barack Obama reelected? An important part of the answer is...
Praise where praise is due: the White House has issued a response to the petition calling upon the U.S. to construct a Death Star. (I like to think that this...
So, Jon Stewart took offense at Krugman and myself (okay, just Krugman) whacking him over his crappy coin segment: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full...
We’ve significantly reduced our eating at fast food restaurants in my family in the last year or two. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Pediatrics...
I don’t want to write about the circumstances of his suicide – it’s too raw. I do want to write about who he was. I suspect that the media will...
A key challenge for gun policy reflects the asymmetric passions of the two sides. The National Rifle Association and its allies hold unpopular views in the country at-large. Yet they...
The American Academy of Actuaries says premiums for young Americans will go way up because they will be cross-subsidizing older Americans. No surprise.A consequence is more of them are likely...
My friend Keith Humphreys posts many movie reviews. I’ll step on his turf today. On the recommendation of some friends, I finally caught the documentary: Queen of Versailles. Ezra Klein...
Whenever I write about population level health statistics, inevitably some people feel a need to email, post, tweet, or message me about their belief that it all comes down to...
The traditional system of scientific and scholarly publishing is breaking down in two different directions.On one hand, we are moving away from relying on a small set of journals as...
Jay Rockefeller announced that he will not seek another term. He was going to have a tough time winning it, perhaps; Republicans had already recruited a tough challenger, Shelley Moore Capito....
On January 3, senators put off decisions about if or how to restrict the ability of senators to filibuster. The quasi-deadline for a decision is January 22. Why? Because, the argument goes, the first...
Andrew Sullivan notes that Richard Nixon sometimes didn't kick disabled kids in the face and was a pragmatist on domestic policy and concludes: This was a criminal who betrayed the...
As my friend James Rosen of Fox News has reported at Greta Van Susteren ‘s blog, in the aftermath of the Newtown mass murder, NRA membership actually increased. “A source...
Andrew Sullivan points to arguments by Rod Dreher and David Frum that cannabis legalization would benefit mostly middle-class moderate users at the expense of mostly poor heavy users. Sullivan is...
Kyle Peyton writes: I’m passing you this recent news article by Ewen Callaway in the hope that you will make a comment about the methodology on your blog. It’s generated...
Ezra Klein adopts the arguments which conservatives Philip Klein and Ross Douthat have made: that the "mint the coin" crowd is really bailing out the GOP crazies. The theory goes...
Jon Stewart took a look at the platinum coin option on his show last night, and it really sucked: The Daily ShowGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire...
I agree with Joe Weisenthal, the debate over the platinum coin has been the most interesting discussion in ages. Not only has it split the usual coalitions—with Josh Barro allied...
Precisely: Mere words can hardly convey the preposterousness of the debt ceiling. It is a stupid artifact of legislation that was hastily passed in the World War I era, and...
Aaron Ellis gives every single proximate reason why Notre Dame’s football team was completely crushed by Alabama in the BCS Championship Game. But he misses the higher-order cause: They were...
Just a few more charts from the mortality data I’ve been hitting today.This is deaths from violence: The US is a real outlier. We’re not so much when it comes...
Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis has announced that she's leaving the administration. Barack Obama is going to be under some pressure on the demographic characteristics of her replacement; with Jack...
The most famous painting of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” commemorates the bombing of the small Spanish town on April 26, 1937, by the German air force, in support...
By now, I’m sure you’ve read an article on how we’re dying at higher rates of so many, many things compared to the rest of the world. All that is...
I thought I had written about the platinum coin last time around, but if I did, I can't find it. But basically, I think we all covered this last time...
I can’t tell if this is a spoof: When asked if they have a higher opinion of either Congress or a series of unpleasant or disliked things, voters said they...
Last night PBS’s Frontline featured a documentary on Michelle Rhee, the controversial former superintendent of Washington, DC schools. Rhee, famous for instituting top-down accountability based on results from standardized tests,...
Though I somewhat playfully supported the Platinum Coin fix* to the debt-ceiling problem during the last crisis – as the perfect non-solution to a complete non-problem – I’m sympathetic to...
Pat Egan sends along this monstrosity: It would be a fun exercise to find all the problems with the above plot.I’m really glad to have it out there, though. Next...
Very sad about the loss of Richard Ben Cramer. Since I may have an Oy Bai post in the works for later, I figured that I should write something nice...
For a 70-year-old man, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden sure spends an awful lot of time winning the Internet. No other living politician has quite the same ratio of words...
I talked with Professor Tribe today over email, asking him two questions. One, would it be legal to exploit the platinum coin "loophole," (my word) and two, would reaching the...
Over the last twenty years or so, you could talk with people about great political books, like Game Change or what have you, and then somebody would remember that Richard...
In the wake of the 2012 election, it’s become commonplace to credit Obama’s “formidable” campaign for his victory. I’ve already begun to challenge that narrative a bit. This post will...
Context: Misperceptions are a major problem in debates about health care reform and other controversial health issues. Methods: We conducted an experiment to determine if more aggressive media fact-checking could...
The world is a better place because of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. That’s not the question. The question is whether it is a better place because...
The regression line, that is.John’s post on “the ‘formidable campaign’ narrative” offers some apt words of caution regarding one popular explanation for the president’s reelection. Alas, that’s a bit like...
I’ve often put forth my belief that one easy way we could reduce spending is to stop paying for things that don’t work, or more for things that don’t work...
The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs hosts an excellent debate between two visions for a future U.S. grand strategy (thanks to Foreign Affairs for making both articles freely available...
The New York Times reports: Mr. McConnell did say he would favor reform if it was “revenue neutral,” meaning that any new tax revenue would be matched by spending cuts....
Long time readers know I think that the prohibition against soda in New York City isn’t great policy. I’ve been less hesitant to come out strongly against a tax against...
John Cochrane writes: Yes, infrastructure is crumbling, as a few New Yorkers may have figured out when their power went off, while their politicians—and the Times—instead of talking about burying...
The 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis was rumored to be up for the interim replacement for John Kerry if and when the Senator resigns to become the Secretary...
I'm inclined to agree with Ezra Klein's post that liberals are failing to recognize that this week's fiscal cliff deal was actually pretty good for them. However, it seems to...
I hereby submit my nomination for the most underreported public policy story of the past year: The continuing decline in the number of Americans who are behind bars or on...
Guns do a lot of the killing. From Judith and Sean Palfrey in New England Journal of Medicine: [Cross-posted at The Incidental Economist]...
The continually growing presence of women in Congress — now for the first time breaking into triple digits — is getting deserved attention. Another historic first of the 113th Congress:...
Ezeliel Emanuel has a great piece over at the NYT about end-of-life care. He starts off by correcting a few myths: Here are the real numbers. The roughly 6 percent...
The past decade has treated us to some excellent histories of international organizations. Paul Kennedy’s history of the United Nations, Harold James’ history of international monetary cooperation, and Erez Manela’s...
In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for...
The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs hosts an excellent debate between two visions for a future U.S. grand strategy (thanks to Foreign Affairs for making both articles freely available...
I'm late to this post, so I'm just going to do it scattershot-style... First, I'll give you some links. Of course you're going to want to start with what Sarah...
There is much bemoaning in Blue Blogistan that by agreeing to the fiscal cliff deal, President Obama relinquished his leverage of the sunsetting Bush tax cuts. (Markos says that the...
You can already hear the rumbling in the distance -- a train of noisy liberal Democrats barreling straight for the White House. They should arrive just in time for President...
A couple of things to note from the President’s statement after the House stepped back from the cliff (other than his strong reiteration of a refusal to deal about the...
The House Press Gallery has a nice fact sheet on the incoming 113th House. Lots of fun facts, some of which I knew (78 women, 59D/19R, not counting 3 delegates,...
Some people watch football; I watch Congress. The fiscal cliff drama was my Superbowl and Rose Bowl wrapped into one. First, two septuagenarians negotiated a tax deal overnight, which...
On January 3rd, the 112th Congress of the United States of America finally ends. Thank God. To properly evaluate the 112th, consider the record of its predecessor, the 111th Congress,...
About her own care, which she describes in Journal of the American Medical Association, Nancy Kressin asks, Why was I unable to negotiate a more conservative and less costly path...
Basic fact about the fiscal cliff bill: Aye No D 174 16 R 85 151 Why can’t David Espo and Alan Fram at the Associated Press get that basic...
Shorter Kevin Drum:1. Lead is remarkably nasty stuff. In minuscule quantities (measured in the single digits of micrograms per decliter of blood) it damages both IQ and the capacity for...
Peter Hussey, Samuel Wertheimer, and Ateev Mehrotra conducted a systematic review of the association between health care cost and quality (both variously measured) that included 61 studies. It’s published in...
Like most other liberals, I can’t say I’m overjoyed at the fiscal cliff deal. The substance isn’t so terrible. I’m especially pleased that “refundables” like the Earned Income Tax Credit,...
The story is about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field are astoundingly good as Abraham and Mary Lincoln. The supporting cast is superb. The writing...