Facebook
Twitter
Ten Miles Square
February 2013 Archives
Oy, Bob Woodward: The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief’s decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is “a...
Maya Sen (University of Rochester) shows in a working paper (pdf, ungated) that the American Bar Association (ABA) has systematically assigned lower judicial qualification ratings to minority and female nominees...
University of Montreal political scientist Andre Blais sends along the following: A team of scientists has launched the website voteforpope.net. The website has two objectives: inform the public about the various...
Let’s get something straight: Sequestration doesn’t prove that the government is broken or that it can’t get anything done. If anything, it proves the opposite. This is the American government...
There can be no doubt that the covered jurisdictions differ, as a group, from the noncovered jurisdictions in their rates of racially polarized voting. There can also be no doubt...
Adrianna McIntyre sounds a familiar theme, but in a new context. [Moving] 65-70 year olds from Medicare into private insurance populations will make those [private insurance] populations, in the aggregate,...
Josh Putnam has an interesting item up about talk within the GOP of finding a way to limit debates during the next nomination cycle. I agree with him that it's...
Time to “catch the vapors” again: The Senate Budget Committee’s top Republican said a new government report shows that President Obama’s healthcare law will add $6.2 trillion to the deficit...
With sequestration’s March 1st start date in sight, Adler and Wilkerson make a good point about why the two parties seem to be treating the imposition of $85 billion...
Having spent all that (mostly enjoyable) time in graduate school reading The Prince, I was delighted to see that Professor Stephen J. Milner of the University of Manchester has discovered...
According to the smart money, the odds favor the election of Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson as the next Pope, the first from Africa since Pope Gelasius I over fifteen hundred years ago. In...
Musings about laughter and politics from the fireside on a London evening just parky enough to keep me indoors.A vivid political memory: I am listening to an erudite speech by...
I’m getting a lot of emails about this study: BACKGROUND: Observational cohort studies and a secondary prevention trial have shown an inverse association between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and...
So I finally got around to reading Steven Brill’s piece in Time this weekend. Yeah it took me a while, but man – why so long? I have a number...
If the quotes in this NYT piece are accurate, the administration is doing itself no favors in trying to make Medicaid more popular: The Obama administration said Monday that states...
Dave Weigel on Friday argued that there's been too much emphasis on disastrous GOP Senate candidates, especially the Tea Party ones; Ramesh Ponnuru follows up on that today by pointing...
Pay for senior jobs in big financial services firms consists of salary plus bonus, with the bonus being a large part of the total. If the employee stays at the...
The Senate is taking up cloture on the Chuck Hagel nomination today, and this time it's expected to pass, most likely easily -- I haven't seen any estimates, but I'm...
I'm sympathetic to films and TV shows that seek to dramatize politics. There's real drama in politics, of course, but not all of it makes for good public theater, which...
On the heels of a prominent monetary policy conference last week, Friday saw a flurry of news stories (for starters, here and here) noting the political fallout that could ensue...
My Georgetown colleague Fr. Thomas Reese in the Washington Post: Benedict has appointed 57 percent of the cardinal electors (John Paul II named the rest), so they will most likely...
I guess we're not explaining this well enough. Dave Weigel: I enjoy the new, #slatepitchy argument that gerrymandering is overrated as an issue, and that it doesn't influence whether members...
Keynesians, this new National Bureau of Economic Research paper will resonate.Losing Heart? The Effect of Job Displacement on HealthSandra Black, Paul Devereux and Kjell Salvanes NBER Working Paper No. 18660...
Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner have a new article in the American Political Science Review (ungated version here) that takes advantage of Switzerland’s high level of direct democracy to measure...
If you have to write a story about Chicago’s crime problem, you couldn’t do much worse than Kevin Williamson’s “Gangsterville: How Chicago reclaimed the projects but lost the city,” on...
How to Survive a Plague was up for an Academy Award last night. It’s gripping, one of the best films on HIV/AIDS ever made. Those who have seen it know...
There’s already been a lot of reaction to Steven Brill’s way-too-long Time cover story on the variation of health care prices across payers and what it means for the uninsured....
I have a piece up at the American Propsect trying to predict the issues that might divide Democratic candidates in 2016; yes, it's early, but as I say over there,...
Matt Yglesias praises Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy, and notes that their continued call for a more-Swiss like health care system is a “surrender” to Obamacare. I’ll leave that political...
The recent Mandiant report has spurred a lot of debate over whether the US and China are moving towards more confrontational relations over cybersecurity. In a recent paper, Erik Gartzke...
We know that there is a lot that we don’t know. This suggests that we should run more field experiments to pilot potentially good policy ideas. Today’s UCLA Daily Bruin...
Kevin Drum thinks that "There is No Possible Sequester Deal to be Made" and goes through the various possibilities, showing that every permutation but one -- kicking the can down...
I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from earlier in the week, and I realized what is really bothering me.Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of...
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It will be hard for states to turn down the Medicaid expansion: This is a pretty good deal for states. They’re...
For years, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson pulled off a very unusual and very difficult trick: They managed to position themselves firmly in the political center even as their budget...
Even a conservative who ordinarily doesn’t care much for government regulation of business ought to find the case for a government-mandated minimum wage pretty compelling. In brief: As a conservative,...
Conservative Byron York today blasts the Republicans, and Speaker Boehner in particular, for incoherent spin on the sequester. I basically agree with him...the GOP message is that the sequester is...
I finally got to the NYT Style section from Sunday, and spotted this gem: The fabric of politics has always been gossip and jokes and crazy personality stuff and memes,”...
Republicans and Democrats don't just think differently, they actually use their brains differently: We explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82...
Does exposure to the stock market in legislators’ personal investment portfolios affect their vote choices? Do personal financial interests matter as much or more than the typical predictors of legislative...
Recall that Ron Fournier wrote a recent column about how the Republicans and Democrats are in danger of cracking up, and that Brendan Nyhan and I wrote responses bashing him...
Jared Bernstein shared the chart below, sourcing it to “National Health Expenditures data, BEA, BLS.” You can click over to read his take on it. Mine is much simpler. Perhaps...
Sam Baker reports, House Democrats reintroduced a bill Tuesday that would revoke the health insurance industry’s exemption from antitrust laws — a liberal priority that failed to make the cut...
South African Olympic and Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius, who became famous after competing in the London Olympics on carbon-fiber blades, has been charged with the murder of his girlfriend Reeva...
The latest in Washington’s self-induced crises is called the “sequester.” It is a product of the 2011 Budget Control Act bringing us to the current crisis. It began in the...
Barack Obama took a nice dig at Second Amendment absolutists in his second inaugural speech: For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting...
George Orwell, writing in 1944: No less than 20,000 English girls … married American soldiers and sailors … . Some of these girls are being educated for their life in...
In the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Kip Sullivan of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program thinks almost everyone doesn’t understand Medicare’s administrative costs....
Observe the golden tongue of the chief magistrate of the republic. President Lyndon Johnson orders pants, 1964: His directions to the Haggar clothing company are very, ah, anatomically specific. How...
Three cheers to Wonkblog for starting the day with a little Senate parliamentary puzzle. Dylan Matthews gets us going by noting Majority Leader Harry Reid’s procedural move this past Thursday. ...
Too many prisons are terrible places. Inmates stab and rape one another, mostly with impunity, to the point where gang membership becomes a survival strategy. Gang leaders maintain the capacity...
During the health reform fight, a handful of people emerged with distinctive voices, who had a huge impact. The best of them combined the policy expertise, empathy, and graceful writing...
A new article in the British Medical Journal by Peter Lindenauer (first author), Harlan Krumholz (last author), and colleagues finds that 30-day hospital readmissions for 65+ year old Medicare beneficiaries...
Robert Cottrell has a very nice long piece in the Financial Times on (inter alia) academic blogging. To read the blog of a political scientist, or an anthropologist, or a...
What happens to the electorate when you tighten up rules for voting? Does everyone have a harder time voting, or are some groups of voters affected more than others? We...
In this recent speech, President Obama announced that he will soon implement incentives for promoting “Promise Zones”. These are intended to improve quality of life in distressed communities. “Here he...
Presidents Day is a terrible idea for a holiday. Just an awful idea. In this republic, there's absolutely no good reason to take a day to honor our presidents. On...
I’m late to the conversation about whether Republican efforts to insist on sixty votes for cloture on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense constitute a filibuster. Bernstein’s earlier...
Matt Yglesias makes some good points. Of course the ability to cure the blind could also lead to “higher health care costs” (cue threatening music). Most likely it won’t actually...
The last week or so has been quite revealing about Obama’s drone policy. First, there was the leak of a white paper obtained by NBC. Then Obama agreed to release...
State of the Union addresses are traditionally laundry lists of policy proposals. U.S. President Barack Obama’s this week started that way, but it ended as the most emotional speech before...
Today marks the beginning of my gig as a regular blogger for Pacific Standard. I'll be doing a weekly column there on, you know, politics 'n stuff. (Thanks to Marc...
Leaders in some republican dominated states have discussed making changes to the way their Electoral College votes are distributed. These changes if enacted would largely be favourable to republican presidential...
For those who would like to see voting become easier, the State of the Union riff and the planned presidential commission have to be disappointing. Here's what Obama said: We...
Requesting anonymity, officials in the White House told reporters last week that President Barack Obama would talk about the middle class in his State of the Union address. They added...
The President mentioned being open to Medicare reforms of similar cost magnitude to those proposed by the Simpson-Bowles report in the State of the Union.Here is a post from April,...
In November 2011, Representative Barney Frank, the mouthy Massachusetts Democrat, announced that he would retire from Congress in January 2013. A few short weeks after his retirement last month, he...
Okay, the water thing was fun but rapidly hit overkill; the fact that Sen. Marco Rubio was just repeating standard GOP rhetoric was true but unsurprising; and I figured there...
I recently testified before the Indiana State Government in support of the Medicaid expansion. My wife even brought my daughter, so she could see how government works. I thought I’d...
Politicians crave being the one who “gets to” respond to the state of the union address. Yet Rubio is one of a series of people who came out minimized (see...
Kimberly Morgan (GWU) has a new Foreign Affairs article that draws on the comparative welfare state literature to present two novel propositions to American policy makers – that the modern American welfare state...
Former Office of Legal Counsel head and Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith adds a useful wrinkle to the drone debate in his discussion of House Intelligence chair Mike Rogers’s appearance...
Much of the discussion in political circles with regard to the state of the American economy, and the benefits of reform, has to do with social mobility. The great goal...
For the last week, all I've heard about is that the new plan for the Republicans is to let the sequester take effect. But thinking about the sequester ($85B in...
Clara Bow was Hollywood’s original starlet with “It”, that undefinable quality that made people immediately like her. Politicians who lack “it” (e.g., Mitt Romney) have a hard time getting elected,...
Annie Lowrey talks to some smart people and gets some good news: One sign that the slowdown might be lasting is that it seems to have started before the recession...
I am teaching causal inference today and was reminded of this article from the British Medical Journal. Below is the abstract: Objective To explore the perceived wisdom that papal mortality is related...
Scott Lemieux blasts Democratic Senators today because they left the filibuster in place, thus allowing GOP nullification to continue in the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I have mixed...
The rule of law is the moral underpinning of U.S. foreign policy. President Barack Obama must now reaffirm that principle. This task became all the more urgent with the disclosure...
What a difference a few months can make. Last fall, during the presidential and vice-presidential debates, the issue of climate change didn’t even come up. But last month, in his...
The pope has resigned. That’s it. Don’t really have anything more to add at this point, just figured it might be a while before I ever get to write that...
At one of those Washington parties where unimportant people mix with important ones and ask them annoying questions, I decided to ask Senator John Warner why he had recently decided...
Since the foreclosure crisis began six years ago, homeowner advocates advanced two priorities: accountability for the fraud and abuse that took place, and safeguards to ensure it never happens again....
The New York Times reports this morning that President Obama wants to renew his efforts to cut the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal. He is not proposing unilateral cuts. Yet, any...
Charlie Stross argues that we’re living in a post-democratic system. Institutional survival pressure within organizations — namely political parties — causes them to systematically ignore or repel candidates for political...
There was a memorial service for Aaron in DC last week. Like Rick Perlstein, I wasn’t able to go. Unlike Aaron’s funeral, it was a specifically political event, intended to...
I have been meaning to write about the important court order overturning Medicare’s longstanding ‘improve or you’re out’ (of Medicare financed SNF and/or home health) policy for rehabilitation services. Basically,...
A few years ago I watched a bunch of Speed Racer cartoons with Phil in a movie theater in the early 90s. These were low-budget Japanese cartoons from the 60s...
I have a new column up at the Prospect arguing that Karl Rove's group isn't likely to make much difference, and that for sane conservatives to really do something about...
We welcome a guest post by Daniel Cox. He is the Co-founder and Research Director of the Public Religion Research Institute and a Ph.D. candidate in American Government at Georgetown...
John Brennan’s confirmation hearing started, complete with early protesters being ejected from the hearing room, this afternoon. The protesters, of course, are a physical manifestation of the explosion in the...
Ron Brownstein: With his suddenly aggressive second-term agenda, President Obama is recasting the Democratic Party around the priorities of the growing coalition that reelected him—and, in the process, reshaping the...
I put something over at PostPartisan yesterday afternoon saying that Marco Rubio is nuts to give the State of Union response, which he'll apparently be doing this year. It's a...
[There is] a gross mismatch between the corporate world we inhabit and the liberal individualist frames we use to interpret and address this world. It is commonplace, for example, to...
Andrew Sullivan is annoyed that Richard III is to be buried in an Anglican church. After all, living before the Reformation, he must have been a Catholic; why bury him...
There’s a new Perspectives piece over at New England Journal of Medicine that analyzes statements by governors wo support or oppose the Medicaid expansion. Here are rationales behind opposition: Among...
Something very interesting is happening in the Republican Party. It’s just not entirely clear what it is, or how far it can go. Dick Morris and Sarah Palin are out...
New research by the firm HelloWallet finds that more than a quarter of Americans who have an employer-sponsored retirement plan are raiding these accounts for other uses. According to HelloWallet’s...
A leaked Justice Department white paper published Monday night by NBC News gave some hints as to the legal rationale behind the Obama administration’s killing of American citizens who are...
One would think that the main value of Western jihadists to terrorist organizations would be their passports and thus their ability to take the struggle directly to Western countries. Thomas Heghammer looks...
Ed Koch died last Friday at the age of 88. In retirement, he became a beloved figure, a loud, opinionated uncle, unhip in his easy gracelessness, comfortable in his blotchy...
The big news in civil liberties circles today is the leak of a white paper laying out some of the legal reasoning behind the administration's drone strike program. It's not...
Kindred Winecoff, himself a political scientist, writes in reaction to an earlier post: This is an opportunity for the social sciences to demonstrate their value by making a clear, coherent...
In a recent interview, director Steven Soderbergh suggests that Washington could learn a thing or two from Hollywood: One thing I do know from making art is that ideology is...
For a few years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that, in American politics, the perception of polarization is larger than polarization itself.I’ve been interested this ever since reading Fiorina’s...
So the body of Richard III has been found, buried under a parking lot. (Jimmy Hoffa is still missing.) There’s no evidence of the withered arm portrayed by Shakespeare. Oddly,...
According to new work by Dana King and colleagues, baby boomers are less healthy than their parents. Despite their longer life expectancy over previous generations, US baby boomers have higher...
There is it, in the lead of an editorial in the WSJ: Those Misleading World Health Rankings The numbers are distorted because, for instance, U.S. doctors try so hard to...
One of the central goals of our blog is to improve communication between political journalists and political scientists. From one direction, we want to make journalists aware of important and...
I think Kevin Drum – about the smartest blogger, or journalist of any description, now working – makes a mistake from time to time just to keep the rest of...
The Sunday-school version of the story of Joseph and the famine is reasonably well-known: Pharaoh had two dreams, seven lean cows devouring seven fat cows and seven withered ears of...
Last fall, I wrote about Barack Obama's field office advantage in the swing states. The final tally shows that, across all the states, Obama had 786 field offices; Romney had...
h/t Wayne Curtis via Andrew SullivanOrwell wrote: One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade...
I forgot to write a post about Tom Harkin's decision, announced over the weekend, not to seek re-election next year. I've never been a big Harkin fan, but make no...
The NY Times has published an impressive piece by Thomas Edsall about consumption and income inequality. If you read this long piece, I have the feeling that most of the...
As Andrew Thomas, Gary King, Jonathan Katz, and I discussed in our recently published article (see also discussion here), the electoral college has had little partisan bias in recent decades....
This is getting interesting. The reporters on the scene -- Dave Weigel today, Josh Rogin yesterday, and others -- believe a filibuster is unlikely in the Chuck Hagel nomination; they...
In the summer of 2011, when the “Grand Bargain” on deficit reduction failed, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner accused President Barack Obama of “moving the goal posts” -- shifting his...
Tom Miller makes some worthwhile points about generalizing the Massachusetts experience with an individual mandate to the nation. And then he says some other things. I’m not going to repeat...