Jesse Singal

In The Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner argues that John Kerry shouldn’t be nominated as secretary of state or defense. Doing so, he says, would legitimize baseless Republican attacks on UN ambassador Susan Rice, Obama’s top choice for one of the posts, who the GOP has been raking over the coals for Sunday talk show appearances […]

Grover Norquist, despite what some might construe as recent evidence to the contrary, is nothing if not bullish on the future of his brand of radical anti-tax ideology: “We are about to have a Tea Party second wave that will dwarf the first wave and that is because while ‘spend too much’ brought the Tea […]

If, like me, you can’t get enough of people who are less intelligent than Nate Silver getting their comeuppance after sternly lecturing their audiences that Silver couldn’t possibly be correct in saying that the 2012 presidential race really wasn’t a tossup, TPM (via Bill Simmons’ “B.S. Report”) .

Marketing research can be pretty fascinating: In an experiment, subjects were divided into two groups and directed to replicate the preparation of an “award-winning smoothie.” All of the participants were set-up to fail with poor quality food processors. Half the group was made to feel the smoothie failure was their fault and the other half […]

A month ago I was in Israel and Palestine with some classmates. As part of the final “policy workshop” we must complete to get out of here with our shiny MPAs (estimated wage premium: +$3/year), we’re preparing a report on whether or not the two-state solution is still viable, and, if it isn’t, what alternatives […]

There’s a good rundown in the Times of how young activists in the immigration reform movement—many of them undocumented immigrants themselves—helped get President Obama re-elected: Now, movement leaders say, it is payback time. When Congress last debated broad reform, in 2007, populist energy was on the side of those opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants. Angry […]

Morning! Very good to be back at Political Animal after what felt like a lifetime away. Let’s start with the always-cheerful subject of Israeli-Palestinian relations — namely, Mahmoud Abbas’s trip to the U.N. and the subsequent upgrading of the Palestinians’ status there. Over at The Daily Beast, Daniel Levy adds a little context to the […]

Have a great weekend, guys. It was fun stopping by.

I like Peter Cohan’s take on edX, the big collaboration between Harvard and MIT to put a bunch of college courses online: So if pricing is a market signal, what message is the free edX sending out to consumers and suppliers of higher education? To answer that, it’s worth pointing out that there are many […]

I missed it when it went up a couple days ago, but Noam Scheiber had a great post about the relationship between Wall Street’s denizens and Obama. He pulls out this nugget from a piece in today’s Times Magazine: For the next hour, the [Wall Street] donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been […]