Ed Kilgore

Back in July, we published at TDS a remarkable piece by former WaMo intern Mel Jones on the simple but debilitating fact that many minority millennials not only do not receive the kind of family financial support their white peers can count on, but are actually having to provide support to their parents at a […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr According to The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson, today’s endorsement of Ted Cruz by Steve King was known well in advance, and is intended to kick off a week or so that will conclude with an endorsement of Cruz by Bob Vander Plaats and perhaps his whole Family Leader organization. Robinson, who seems to […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr Paul Krugman has some wise words today about the reactions we are seeing from politicians in (understandably) France and (less understandably) the United States to the Paris attacks, and why putting a hatpin through our collective frontal lobes and treating ISIS as an existential threat to our way of life is a big […]

I had to laugh out loud at the headline of Paul’s post announcing my imminent departure from PA. And he’s right: his immediate reaction when I told him I just couldn’t turn down the offer from New York was to emit a single, staccato obscenity. But within seconds, he was being predictably gracious and generous, […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr We are all, of course, shocked and aggrieved by the terrorist attacks in Paris and what they might portend, and being “can do” Americans, we’d like to believe instant reaction will solve our problems. Perhaps the most satisfied man in America is Lindsey Graham, who can repeat his Captain Ahab of a demand […]

Texas blues guitarist Anson Funderburgh is 61 today. Here he is in the 90s performing “Changing Neighborhoods” with his band The Rockets, featuring the late Sam Myers.

Had to evacuate my hotel room to enable its cleaning, and blogging from a casino, I’m struck again by the atavism of Vegas–the smoke, the sexism, the excess in every direction. But I’m afraid Hunter Thompson nailed it more than four decades ago: this city is the “nerve center of the American dream.” Thank God […]

I won’t be live-blogging the next Democratic presidential debate thanks to the decision of the DNC to hold it on a sacrosanct Saturday. But there are, as it happens, two excellent pieces today at TNR that discuss what the three candidates should be talking about to provide Democratic primary voters with a reality-based series of […]

It’s another Friday afternoon, and thus another time for a thread in which readers are encouraged to educate and entertain each other with fresh musical ideas. Go to it!

At The Upshot today, Josh Barro makes short work of Carly Fiorina’s claim that she could reduce the federal tax code (and presumably the regulations interpreting it) to three pages. On Tuesday, she pointed on Facebook to one way she thinks that could be done: by putting in place a tax plan proposed by the […]