Paul Glastris

Best Care Anywhere… Veterans hospitals are usually thought of as Dickensian institutions that waste billions of tax dollars providing at best sub-par care to poor, aging veterans. But as Phil Longman of the New America Foundation makes clear in his amazing cover story in the latest issue of The Washington Monthly, the VA system has […]

Bestiality… In his summer 2001 address to the nation, President Bush explained that he was putting into place a new policy of limiting federal support for embryonic stem cell research to a handful of existing cell lines, promising that this would allow scientists “to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing […]

Words to remember… “A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long […]

Remembering Marjorie Williams… A beloved member of The Washington Monthly extended family, journalist and columnist Marjorie Williams, died yesterday, after a long, brave battle with cancer. She was 47. She is survived by her husband, Slate columnist and Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah, and her two beautiful children, Will and Alice. It?s impossible to exaggerate […]

Simon Rocks… Kevin recently made a pretty strong case for Howard Dean as DNC chair. I’d been thinking along the same lines, and would add one more argument to Kevin’s list: that if Democrats don’t pick someone like Dean, who has cred with the moveon.org crowd, that whole, vital part of the base, which is […]

Tax Attacks III… A while back I suggested that if Democrats are interested in playing a little offense, they could do worse than champion the cause of eliminating the ability of footloose corporations to extract tax concessions out of job-hungry state and local governments. These are some of the least-productive of all corporate giveaways. They […]

Verbal Class Hero… Driving to a Redskins game awhile back with Matt Cooper, the Time magazine White House correspondent who may be going to prison for refusing to reveal his sources in the Valerie Plame investigation, I finally had a chance to really grill my old friend on why he didn’t just give up these […]

Not So Heavy Metal… You’ve heard of soldiers in Iraq not getting armor plating for their vehicles. Here‘s what some of them think about the armor they are getting.

Tax Attacks II… In a previous post, I suggested that neo-populists like David Sirota and New Dems like Ed Kilgore (the two have been warring lately over what a progressive economic agenda might look like), ought to find common ground in supporting some kind of ban on the ability of footloose corporations to extract tax […]

Housing Bubble… Are home prices in America unsustainably high, as Ben Wallace-Wells has argued? And if so, does the Fed risk bursting the bubble with interest rate hikes? Bruce Bartlett, for one, is worried, though his column offers sufficient countervailing evidence to forestall, perhaps, immediate panic.