Matthew Zeitlin

The kerfuffle over why Elizabeth Warren (sometimes) identified herself as Native American when she joined and served on the faculty of various law schools seems to have much more to do with how desperate elite educational institutions can be for some patina of diversity and with white Americans longtime fascination with America’s native population than […]

Tyler Cowen, the libertarian leaning economics professor at George Mason, riffs on an argument about financial regulation made by Edward Conrad — the now slightly infamous former Bain Capital employee who has turned into a high profile defender of economic inequality: I would stress that the real problems come when the overwhelming majority of banks […]

Joe Nocera thinks that a viable postal service is possible, but what’s really necessary is “for Congress to get out of the way and allow it to begin truly operating like a real business.” What he means is that not only was Congress responsible for imposing all sorts of uniquely onerous pension burdens that made […]

Felix Salmon, the finance blogger at Reuters, has described JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office, the division of the bank responsible for the $2 billion (and growing) loss on an unwieldy credit derivative trade, as “at heart a hedge fund,” because the purpose of the office is to invest the “excess” money that JPMorgan takes in as […]

For civil liberties advocates, the Obama administration has been a disappointment. A major reason for the administration’s retrenchment on many Bush-era civil liberties and national security policies is that the administration seems to substantively agree with their predecessors that a great deal of the policies and programs they introduced are worth either preserving and expanding, […]

As reported by the New York Times earlier this week (and discussed extensively by Ed), Joe Ricketts, the conservative businessman who founded TD Ameritrade, put together an advertising strategy with the help of famed conservative adman Fred Davis to bring back the Jeremiah Wright issue right around the time of the Democratic convention. The way […]

The Washington Post has a blockbuster story on how the passage of the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida has “coincided with a sharp increase in justifiable-homicide cases.” The piece documents three cases, all ambiguous (at best), and all heartbreaking, of shootings that did not lead to prosecutions or convictions because of the new law. […]

In Politico, Byron Tau has a delicious, concise blog post that consists of two things: Newt Gingrich’s support for the “Chilean model” for retirement saving, and then Tau pointing out that the Chilean model relies on mandating that workers devote a certain portion of their wages to private investments. Gingrich also used to say good […]

In the past few days, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who is internationally (in)famous for his campaign against the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees, signed two pieces of legislation that, while totally in keeping with a conservative agenda, seem to have little to do with the crisis in the state’s finances and economy […]

The conservative movement has something of a tortured history with race. The movement has to grapple with the fact that conservative icons like William F. Buckley* and Barry Goldwater were, for a time, either openly supportive of segregation or, in the case of Goldwater, thought that the issue was not worth the federal government intervening […]