Michael Kinsley

Supreme Court justices, like anyone else, sometimes change their minds. True, there is stare decisis, the principle that they shouldn’t change their minds too often. Reason: If you expect citizens and the government to obey the law, they need to know what the law is and will be. Also, it’s only fair to treat people […]

A friend of mine had his name in the paper the other day. It was an article speculating about who might inherit a prestigious post in the literary world when the current grandee retires. The article said that my friend would have led the list 10 years ago. Ouch! The obvious though unstated implication is […]

Barbara Bush said the other day that the 2012 presidential race has been “the worst campaign I’ve ever seen in my life.” I disagree. My vote would be for 1988, when her husband, George H.W. Bush, built a repulsive campaign against Michael Dukakis based on state prison furlough policy, obscure judicial rulings about reciting the […]

The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers. Well, of course he wasn’t sincere. And […]

Every year around late February, the government puts out the Economic Report of the President, which includes a whole bunch of historical charts on the state of the economy that you can download as Excel spreadsheets. Most years I combine them all into one big spreadsheet and try to draw some conclusions. The exercise has […]

Maybe anyone who voluntarily runs the gantlet we call our presidential election process must be mentally imbalanced in some respect, but this year’s crop of Republican candidates has been especially odd. Of the four who remain viable, only Mitt Romney can even pass as normal — and he has that eerie, Stepford-wife quality of being […]

During a presidential debate in 1984, Ronald Reagan, who was then 73, famously said of his opponent, Walter Mondale, who was then 56 and trying to make an issue of Reagan’s age: “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The joke turns, of course, on the reasonable assumption […]

It’s been going on for too long, right before our eyes. Inevitably, someone was going to blow the whistle, and wouldn’t you know it would be Felix Salmon, the famous financial blogger for Reuters? The name Felix Salmon (for some reason) always makes me think of those plastic singing fish that were all the rage […]

As everybody knows by now, Warren Buffett — class traitor — pays a smaller share of his income in taxes than does his secretary, Debbie Bosanek. In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama proposed the “Buffett Rule” to rectify this. The rule would be a phased-in requirement that all taxpayers […]

Many years ago, when Senator Ted Kennedy was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination, I quit my job at a national magazine in protest over the owner’s refusal to publish an article I had edited about the senator’s extramarital activities. At that time, there was a general consensus among Washington journalists that […]