Ed Kilgore

As regular readers know, since Charlie Peters’ retirement we’ve turned over his legendary magazine column, Tilting at Windmills, to a series of distinguished WaMo alumni. This issue, it’s Michelle Cottle, who is currently a senior writer at National Journal. Right of the bat, she has an acute observation about the 2016 presidential contest: Forget about […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr Here a really creepy news item from Politico‘s Kenneth Vogel: The political network helmed by Charles and David Koch has quietly built a secretive operation that conducts surveillance and intelligence gathering on its liberal opponents, viewing it as a key strategic tool in its efforts to reshape American public life. The operation, which […]

I understand why Kevin Drum is warning liberals not to mock the American public for its fears about Syrian refugees. It’s always better to understand, express sympathy torwards, and then gently argue against the tendency to panic over scary foreigners. But let’s remember some historical context that shows the politics of this isn’t all that […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr Yesterday, after a long Invisible Primary campaign that pursued almost every strategy imaginable for establishing its candidate as the Truest Conservative in the race, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, out of money and showing no real momentum, packed it in about ten weeks short of his initial monomaniacal target of the Iowa Caucuses. It […]

R& B/Rock ‘n’ Roll pioneer Hank Ballard was born on this day in 1927. Here he is with the Midnighters and one of their hits, “Work With Me Annie.”

I picked Tab Benoit to feature today strictly because he was the only one on the Blues Birthday list I consult, but he’s turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. The refrain of the lunch buffet song, Bring Me My Medicine, is the eternal cry of the blues-afflicted. Here are some […]

It’s become very common to note that the 2016 Republican presidential nominating contest is violating every bit of substantive advice offered by the RNC’s 2013 “autopsy report” on the last presidential election, most especially the need for a more sensitive approach to the immigration issue. It’s less well understood that the big intellectual force for […]

My esteemed friend Rich Yeselson, the great chronicler and sometimes critic of the labor movement, has published an important piece at the American Prospect (in conjunction with an “American Labor at the Crossroads” conference), that reviews what we now understand about the decline of union power during the last half-century, and the possibilities that remain […]

Let me address a few questions that have come my way via the comment threads yesterday and today: No, I do not have to leave California for New York for the new gig. I would not have taken it had that been a condition. But like WaMo’s management, New York‘s seems refreshingly free of the […]

It’s important to note that the public opinion data I’m about to discuss was collected before the terrorist attacks in Paris last week. Seems xenophobia was already on the rise, per a new survey from Public Religion Research Institute. Here’s part of Sarah Posner’s gloss on the poll at Religion Dispatches: As Republican presidential candidates […]