Ed Kilgore

So Canadians go to the polls today (in an interested staggered polling time system where polls will close on the Pacific Coast just an hour after the closings on the Atlantic coast), and the expectation is solidifying that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be put out of office, albeit by a very narrow margin. […]

Marc Nozell/Flickr After reading Matt Yglesias’ cri de coeur against “complacent” Democrats who don’t seem to be aware the Donkey Party is a presidential loss away from a total conservative makeover of the country, my basic reaction is that Matt needs to get out more. The whole premise of his Vox piece is that Democrats […]

So after a few days of silence a new word is coming out of the camp of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan: “Maybe.” According to Nancy Cordes of CBS, Ryan is “open” to the possibility of taking the Speaker’s gavel if and only if he can count on the unconditional submission of the GOP Conference. No […]

If you are a regular reader of the New York Times, and tend to think of it not just as a Newspaper of Record, but as an institution with unimpeachable standards of journalistic objectivity and excellence, you might want to give a gander to a scathing piece by New America’s Peter Bergen at CNN about […]

William Lee Perryman, a.k.a. Piano Red, a.k.a. Dr. Feelgood, was born on this day in 1911. Here he is with one of his classic tunes, “The Right String, Baby, But the Wrong Yo-Yo.”

Sure didn’t feel like a “short week,” did it? Here are some remains of the day: * At Ten Miles Square, outstanding Martin Longman piece on the threadbare excuses for refusing to regulate guns. * Rand Paul says Bernie Sanders in same “socialist” tribe with genocide-prone Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. That’s like saying Rand Paul […]

I’m now really half-convinced Joe Biden might run for president after all. That’s not so much because of the reports I wrote about this morning where Ted Kaufman was telling Biden supporters to batten down the hatches for what might be a long weird cycle. No, it’s because Peggy Noonan wrote this in her Friday […]

We’ve all kinda gotten use to looking at the success of people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina in the Invisible Primary so far as a token of conservative “base” fury at GOP elites, and particularly the congressional party’s inability to keep its atavistic promises to said base. But conservative columnist Philip […]

Funny, isn’t it, how we’re drifting–or maybe slouching is a better term–towards a potential debt limit crisis with the Speaker of the House planning his retirement and absolutely nobody in a position to talk conservatives into accepting the “clean bill” that’s the only thing Democrats will support and Obama will sign. Here’s the situation right […]

So a rock hit our car’s wind-shield this weekend, and a guy shows up to replace it and it starts raining, which was definitely not in the weather forecast. What are the odds? “I’ll come back when it’s not raining.” That could be any time before El Nino arrives in January. Here are some pretty […]