Free Republic

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global). But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal. The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can...

For listeners of my radio show, you’ll know that most Fridays we do a segment called Ezra Klein is an Idiot. We don’t just call out the fallacies of Klein during the segment, however. We include liberals like Al Sharpton and John Boehner too, who both recently bemoaned the effects of sequester on our economy. Our real problems of course aren’t the dramatic and manufactured small things like sequester or the “fiscal cliff” that are made up by Washington wonks to keep the gravy train rolling. They are much more complex, and more dangerous.      It takes a long time to...

Ezra Klein has unwittingly offered a telling insight into the liberal mind. On Morning Joe today, the liberal Washington Post blogger actually argued that quintessential big government programs like massive involvement in housing finance and the imposition of a carbon tax aren't "progressive" but simply "good policy." Joe Scarborough pushed back saying Klein's notion of "good policy" was only so for those who share his liberal mindset. View the video here.

Silver doesn’t quite go so far as to say that it makes a brokered convention or a late-breaking establishment candidate likely, but I’m willing to go that far. There’s just no way the Republican establishment lets Gingrich become their nominee. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out today, you’re already seeing the anti-Gingrich mobilization among conservative thought leaders: Here’s George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Tom Coburn and Ann Coulter, just for starters. There’s this Politico story about all the Washington Republicans who hate Gingrich. Now, I think it’s more likely that this mobilization leads to a Romney win then...

Newsman Ezra Klein is making news again. (See "An Election Season Proposal," 9/10/11) [quote] Klein is famous for starting the secretive political-media members-only clique of some 400 journalists, political operatives, White House staffers, think tankers and lefty economists such as Paul Krugman known as JournoList. Until it was shut down by exposure from the Daily Caller and BigGovernment.com, the JournoList group discussed talking points to create a media echo chamber, tried to falsely smear opponents as racists, and cooked up ways to take Fox News off the air. [end quote] Now he's creating a "new paradigm," at the Washington Post:...

Media Bias: In the early days of the Gulf War, pundits marveled at the specter of Iraqi troops surrendering to journalists. Well, now it's even worse: Journalists are giving the Democratic Party its talking points. The Washington Post's 27-year-old star blogger Ezra Klein has been called "whiz kid," and "brat packer" and a "wunderkind." Now he's actually advising Democratic chiefs of staff, briefing them last week about the supercommittee in Congress, according to a report by Fishbowl-DC on MediaBistro.com. That means the relatively novel idea that bloggers can be placed on an equal footing with reporters in congressional briefings has...

What’s also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama’s major expenses were temporary — the stimulus is over now — while Bush’s were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn’t just lower revenue for 10 years. It’s clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them. To relate this specifically to the debt-ceiling...

See Ezra, See Ezra and Nora Talk, See Ezra and Nora Get Confused... Ezra Klein, a very popular Liberal blogger who also writes for the Washington Post, finally made us all cognizant of the exact reason for his extreme popularity--as it regards the increasingly mind-numbed, diminutively numbered, Liberal automatons of the Nation. In a televised interview with Progressive info-babe Nora O' Donnell on the "Lean Forward and to the Left" network MSNBC, Klein was asked his opinion of the impending public reading of the Constitution in the House. Klein responded that the reading was, indeed, "a gimmick" that "had no...

...One of the first big applause lines of the speech came when Barack Obama said, "For all the hits we’ve taken these last few years, for all the naysayers predicting our decline, America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world." But as Matt Yglesias notes, soon, we won't. China will. And that's okay. A decent future includes China's GDP passing ours. They have many, many more people than we do. It's bad for both us and them if the country stays poor. A world in which China becomes rich enough to buy from us and educated enough...

Ezra Klein invokes a heartbreaking analogy to criticize the GOP for seeking to repeal ObamaCare. But this sad case has nothing to do with the new health law. Klein writes: In February 2007, Deamonte Driver died of an infected tooth. But he didn’t really die of an infected tooth. He died because he didn’t have consistent insurance.

Need to Know January 18, 2011 Ahead of the curve! Lib writer praises Jeb Bush Posted by Staff Ezra Klein writes: I think Jon Chait gets Jeb Bush very wrong here. When Bush says that "second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians" and that "second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups," he's directly answering a critique that has a lot of power among anti-immigration groups: that there's something different about this wave of immigrants as compared with previous waves of immigrants.

The Republican plan to start off the first session of the new House of Representatives today with a reading of the United States Constitution is giving the left the fantods -- and with good reason. At Salon, Michael Lind gives us a piece headlined, "Let's stop pretending the Constitution is sacred." Ezra Klein, a Washington Post blogger, told a TV interviewer that the reading as a "gimmick" and suggested the Constitution isn't binding (though he later backpedaled). And David Corn, under the title "The House GOP Weaponizes the Constitution," argues that the Founding Fathers "wouldn't cotton to lawmakers exploiting their...

1. Blogger Ezra Klein went on MSNBC and said the Constitution is a hundred years old and hard to understand. Apparently, this drew flak. 2. Then he blogged at 11:55 AM on Thursday: “…My friends on the right don’t like to hear this, but the Constitution is not a clear document. Written more than 200 years ago, when America had 13 states and very different problems, it rarely speaks directly to the questions we ask it. The Second Amendment, for instance, says nothing about keeping a gun in the home if you’ve not signed up with a ‘well-regulated militia,’ but...

As we reported yesterday, Republicans plan to read aloud the Constitution of the United States when the 112th Congress kicks off on January 6th, 2011.  Many find this to be a political tactic, a gimmick of sorts.  Republicans are attempting to hold support from the Tea Party and are howling for Congress to follow the Constitution word for word.  A firm skeptic of this Republican stratagem is Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, one of the most astute minds when it comes to procedure within Congress and fiscal concerns. Yesterday he appeared for an interview with MSNBC's Nora O'Donnell to discuss the matter:Returning To...

Via Michelle Malkin: Here’s a good piece by Doug Powers, commenting on the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein’s belief that the Constitution isn’t understandable because it was written over one hundred years ago. You’ve got to see this video, if you haven’t already: http://michellemalkin.com/2010/12/30/constitution/ Where do these journalistic jamokes like Klein come from, anyway? Who hires them? Who needs them? I can read – even the English that was written a few centuries ago – really. But here’s what Ezra says on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown regarding the Republicans’ intention to read the entire Constitution aloud after the new Congress is...

Returning to the Constitution, that’s what Republicans want to do in the new Congress. In the last year, the two hundred and twenty-three year old document has been getting a whole lot a lip service so when the One hundred and twelfth Congress is sworn in next week expect to hear a lot more about it because the Constitution is at the center of three coming Congressional battles. —Nora Roberts Nora Roberts on the daily rundown interviewed Ezra Klein of The Washington Post regarding Republicans who have the majority in the House of Representatives coming in January. They discuss Republicans’...

Huffpo/WaPo blogger "superstar" Ezra Klein reveals everthing that you knew was wrong with the left, including their claim that they're smarter and better educated than you. This clownish juvenile deliquent who passes for informed opinion on the left is pleased to reveal that the Constitution is "over a hundred years old," and hence, out of date, irrelevant, and downright confusing. Video at the link.

One of the dumbest liberal bloggers out there, Ezra Klein, thinks the constitution is confusing because it was written over 100 years ago. He also thinks the GOP's insistence that it be read for the first time ever in Congress is a "gimmick"I don't want to get all technical and use big words that might be too hard to understand for "progressives"...but....WHAT!. I postulated in a previous post that the left has some sort of intelligence allergy, and I'm sorry to see Ezra Klein once again can't prove me wrong. Our government, and the Democratic Party especially, by their...

Yes, the Constitution is binding By Ezra Klein This morning, I gave a quick interview to MSNBC where I made, I thought, some fairly banal points on the GOP's plan to honor the Constitution by having it read aloud on the House floor. Asked if it was a gimmick, I replied that it was, because, well, it is. It's our founding document, not a spell that makes the traitors among us glow green. It's also, I noted, a completely nonbinding act: It doesn't impose a particular interpretation of the Constitution on legislators, and will have no practical impact on how...

Via Eyeblast. The good news? This clip has become such a hit among righties on Twitter that Iowahawk was inspired to cook something up in honor of it. The bad news? I think Klein’s getting a bit of a bad rap. His formulation is idiotic — not all old texts are confusing, of course — but that’s probably just rhetorical clumsiness while live on the air. All he means, I take it, is that it’s often not clear how constitutional provisions should apply to modern circumstances not envisioned by the Founders. This is why there are 5-4 decisions all the...