Jesse Singal

First of all: Sorry for the server difficulties. I’ve been grappling with them too. In fact, if any of my posts today struck you as less than cogent or insightful, let’s go ahead and blame the servers. That’s all for me today. But as I head for the door, I just wanted to ask you […]

Since a decent chunk of Political Animal readers are or soon will be under a blanket of snowfall, it seems like as good a time as any to recommend a really interesting not-new article from the Yale Law Review I read recently: “Consumerism Versus Producerism: A Study in Comparative Law” (PDF) by Yale law professor […]

Jon Cohn has a characteristically smart rundown of the policy and political implications of the New Year’s deadline: Is January 1 truly the make-or-break date that so many politicians and pundits seem to think? That’s a lot less clear. The administration has already instructed federal agencies to keep spending money as if the old, 2012 […]

By now most of you have probably read the Washington Post’s Wild West account of how Dick Armey tried to seize control of FreedomWorks with an armed militia formed from K Street roustabouts (or something). ABC News has the followup: Former House majority leader Dick Armey says he took an $8 million consulting deal in […]

The Washington Monthly has had a pretty big impact on my life. Prior to my web-editing and Political-Animaling days, it was my first full-blown journalism internship, and I have fond memories of doing fact-checking and research for wonderful editors like Zach Roth and Rachel Morris (both of whom, in Monthly tradition, spend a couple years […]

That’s been the question on my mind as I’ve read about the tragic news from India. The Times reports that “India, which has more than 1.3 billion people, recorded 24,000 cases of rape last year, a figure that has increased by 25 percent in the past six years.” That’s a staggeringly low number, when you […]

You should check out Joe Wiesenthal’s chart-jammed Business Insider piece arguing that there is only one way to fix the deficit, but it’s “painless”—increase growth by reducing unemployment. I liked his take on the psychology of “pain,” a word we have heard a lot of in the recent, seemingly endless negotiations/grandstanding exhibitions: It’s understandable why […]

Sahil Kapur’s rundown of the current situation in the fiscal cliff impasse/embarrassment is a very useful guide to the politics of the situation. The short version is (still) that Obama has all the leverage. (There are millions of cynical Democrats, of course, who are waiting for him to squander it.) Also worth a look is […]

You know that genre of righteous anger where what immediately follows is shame that you were naive enough to get angry about the thing in question, that you weren’t jaded enough to understand that That’s Just How The World Is? I got a serious wave of that when I read this Times editorial about gun […]

That’s it for me, folks. Hope you’ve had an enjoyable Saturday. Also, happy birthday to Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris. Paul is a great editor and a great guy, and I’m not just saying that because of that whole he-hired-me-as-web-editor thing from back in the day.