Matthew Zeitlin

A while back, Matthew Yglesias coined the term “Pundit’s Fallacy,” which refers to the “belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.” We see this happen just about any time political writers give “recommendations” to those running for office and reelection. […]

Apparently one of the Sunday morning tiffs that made its way out of This Week‘s studios and into mainstream circulation is a dispute between dueling advisers over Romney’s Massachusetts job record. Here’s how the Hill summarizes it: Fehrnstrom on ABC’s This Week said Romney had achieved a 4.7 percent unemployment rate while governor and would […]

During campaigns, candidates like to talk about all the things they want to do see happen under their watch. While governing, the realm of legislative possibility is severely restricted by the makeup of the actual House and Senate that the president needs to deal with in order to actually sign any legislation that can at […]

James Pethokoukis has an extensive article in the Weekly Standard arguing for a conservative approach to financial reform that both rejects Dodd-Frank and calls for a massive overhaul of the banking industry. Instead of calling for specific new rules on what certain financial institutions can do and empowering regulators to oversee too big to fail […]

Every paragraph in Moe Tkakic’s review of The Lost Bank, a new book by Kirsten Grind chronicling the rise and fall of one of the mortgage boom’s most opportunistic operators, is worth pulling out and discussing, but I will limit it to just this one: At WaMu, the answer was invariably: “fuck reality,” as a […]

If you’re from St. Louis, you might know who E. Desmond “Des” Lee is. The wire-shelving magnate turned into the city’s most prominent philanthropist, donating more than $70 million dollars to civic organizations and universities in the St. Louis area before he died in 2010 at the age of 92. But his good works and […]

If you want a detailed argument for how the Federal Reserve has failed the American economy because of its timidity in considering and implementing unconventional policies against a background of rock-bottom interest rates and persistently high unemployment, read Ryan Avent’s passionate, informed screed for the Economist. If you want a more neutral reading on the […]

Good morning! I’m happy to be given the keys to the stately vessel that is the Political Animal. I hope no one gets hurt. Speaking of hurting, we should probably keep on talking about the depressing jobs report and what it means for Obama’s reelection hopes. Noam Scheiber gets some feedback from the administration on […]

So says Daniel Webster, a Republican congressman from Florida, about the American Community Survey, the federally administered survey that is a wellspring of rigorously collected and academically useful statistical data. Unlike the Census, which is prohibited from using sampling techniques and instead has to do its best to get every American to fill out a […]

The NAACP board passed a resolution endorsing same sex marriage as a natural extension of their commitment to equal rights and non-discrimination on Saturday. What’s interesting about this announcement is not so much that a liberal anti-discrimination group supports same sex marriage — in fact, it would be weird if such a group opposed same […]