Ryan Cooper

Nixon releases the edited tape transcripts, via The big piece today is in the Washington Post, where Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward share a byline for the first time in 36 years. It’s about President Nixon and Watergate 40 years after the fact, and how the whole situation was much worse than was thought back […]

The Corey Robin item I linked earlier contains what is probably a common thought about the left wonkosphere: This is a challenge to the left…the left that’s like, well, me: the academics, the writers, the bloggers, the journalists, the think tankers, the kibbitzers. The people who talk too much… Have you ever organized a majority, […]

If I don’t stop forgetting my lunch at home, I’m going to burrito myself into the poor house. Anyway, while I grab a quick bite, here are some tidbits from around the web: 1. Speaking of Joe Scarborough… 2. Corey Robin has a challenge for the left. 3. The Nation excerpted a bit of Chris […]

Count me among the many devoted fans of Jon Stewart, but this segment from Wednesday’s show bothered me a bit. In case you can’t watch, the segment was on the failed Wisconsin recall election, and Stewart drew an extended comparison between the right-wing gloating on Fox News and the left-wing sadness on MSNBC, that came […]

Bob Casey, via I was talking previously about how lefty politicians need at least a working understanding of the intellectual base of policy to understand where their political fate may be decided. Just yesterday, we got a perfect example of this: On Thursday morning, Bernanke testified before the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee. Republicans at […]

That’s it for today, folks. Posts were a little scattershot reading them again, but I think there were some good ones. 1. One Wall Street regulation that Republicans like. Maybe, but when the next crash comes, banks will get bailed out again. Trust me on that one. 2. Are Blackberries the cigarette of this century? […]

I’m late to this party, but I was intrigued but this Matt Yglesias post about why people seem to hate inflation so much: Now a fancy-pants economics blogger can tell you that the most important price in the economy is the price of labor and the price of labor is equal to workers’ incomes, so […]

The big discussion today is the long, seemingly unstoppable death of the labor movement. We seem to be faced with an insurmountable concentration of influence in corporations and the very wealthy. Plutocrats use their influence to swing elections, and then use the power there obtained to further eviscerate countervailing interest groups, so they can strip […]

Looming like Sauron over every other issue in the world is the specter of sudden environmental collapse, documented in small scale in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse (see New Yorker review here). A group of scientists based in Berkeley just issued a report making exactly this prediction: A prestigious group of scientists from around the world […]

The best thing I’ve read today on the legislative branch comes from a very good article in the Washington Times, of all places. It bemoans the plight of young, inexperienced, and overworked congressional staffers, who are paid in pencil shavings. The consequences are about what one would expect: While senators make $174,000, staff assistants and […]