David Karol

July the 4th weekend is always a good time to think about political power wielded arbitrarily by unelected, berobed rulers who may serve until their death. In that light,this Reuters interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in which the octogenarian vows to stay on the high court “several more years” raises the issue […]

Politico produces much valuable reporting. Yet it is also frequently problematic. As John Sides and Ezra Klein have long noted, and as its editors admit in a recent interview, Politico is resistant to analyses that Nate Silver and many scholars on and off the Monkey Cage offer. For Silver, “’it’s not that they are too […]

Now that the manhunt in Boston has ended, observers are taking one last look at the failure of gun control proposals in the Senate. I will not linger on dubious claims by Stuart Stevens, Maureen Dowd and others that President Obama should have been able to win 60 votes via more adept arm-twisting, deal-making and […]

In a recent post,the estimable Jon Bernstein considers the question of whether Republicans would blame a Romney loss on Hurricane Sandy. He concludes that this would be a good outcome, because the alternative is Republicans blaming the media and increasing toxic polarization and mistrust in the polity. For Bernstein the key point is this: “We […]

In yesterday’s New York Times Susan Saulny’s article “Young in G.O.P. Erase the Lines on Social Issues” appears. Change in party positioning on issues is a very important topic. I wouldn’t have written a book about it if I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, this is a misleading article that demonstrates that the term “social issues”, […]