Free Republic

An honest debate with a progressive is almost as rare as a verified sighting of Bigfoot. You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and...

. Obamacare has won. And that's why Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius can resign. Calls for Sebelius's resignation were almost constant after Obamacare's catastrophic launch. The problem wasn't just that Sebelius had presided over the construction of a fantastically expensive web site that flatly didn't work. It was that she didn't know healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. And so the White House didn't know that healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. The demands that Sebelius to step down — or be fired — were as deafening inside the building as outside of it. But...

"If all you have is a hammer," the old saying goes, "everything looks like a nail." Left unsaid is the fact that the real problem isn't the possession of a hammer, but the certitude that all you need is the hammer. In other words, it's a failure of the imagination -- which is a kind of arrogance -- that's really to blame. "I've got my hammer, and that's all I need. Besides, have you ever seen a problem that didn't look like a nail?" This is a version of what academics call "confirmation bias" -- the tendency to accept only...

Much to the delight and self-satisfaction of the reality-based community, “Big Data” has been en vogue of late, and to such an extent that it has promised to make hipsters of the terminally uncool. In the space of just a few weeks, both Nate Silver and Ezra Klein have launched brand new websites, which, although imperceptibly different in their core objectives, both promised to overlook the “fundamentally useless” “pundits” that sully the nation’s media and to replace them with the calm explication and modest objectivity that one can only get from the sort of detached, numbers-driven pragmatists who made their...

<p>Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon take Ezra Klein for a spin in the latest edition of RealClearPolitics' "Morning Commute." The duo has posted several clips of their interview with Klein, but one this morning is particularly strange. They ask Klein about JournoList, the email group Klein ran several years ago that often served to coordinate coverage among left-leaning members of the media. Does such a group still exists, Cannon wonders?</p>

The Climate Change alarmists are clamoring to blame the recent cold snap on anthropogenic global warming. And, really, what choice do they have? When record cold temperatures are freezing Niagara Falls, and plunging the American Midwest into an ice age, jokes about Al-Gore sycophants are hard to avoid. In righteous defiance to reality based observations regarding the environment, the far left has unveiled a theory that America’s recent brush with winter weather is actually an experience of anthropogenic global warming. Or, as Ezra Klein put it: Well… I guess to an extent, the Washington Post’s in-house manbearpig alarmist is kinda...

Ezra Klein, an analyst, columnist and television commentator who runs The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, is making plans to leave the newspaper after failing to win support for a new website he wanted to create within the company, according to four people with knowledge of the negotiations. Mr. Klein, who quickly ascended into the ranks of the Washington media establishment with a multiplatform blend of policy nuance and number-crunching on Wonkblog, approached Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher, in recent weeks, the people said. After consultation with the newspaper’s editor, Marty Baron, according to one of the people, he put forward a...

As new owner Jeff Bezos begins his tenure as the head man for the Washington Post, Wonkblog editor Ezra Klein is reportedly making plans to exit the paper after being denied funding for a pet project. Klein built a media presence on the Internet, newspapers, and TV as a "wonk" at a young age. Now, he apparently wants to expand his reach in the media with an extensive new website that he wanted the Washington Post to fund.

On Thursday, Fox News’ Ed Henry tweeted that MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell, as well as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post and Fox News’ Juan Williams, had been invited for a private off-the-record chat with President Obama. Obama’s signature program, Obamacare, has been flailing in the press for weeks, and Obama apparently believes that it is about time to reshift the narrative: Juan Williams refused to describe what Obama himself said, but he did state that the White House is in “full fight mode over the Affordable Healthcare Act right now.” He added, “They feel as if...

During the Obama years, a potent mythology has taken root in Democratic circles. In this narrative, Democrats are victims, martyrs even, whereas Republicans are wily tricksters. Last year, there was a hyped-up fable about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. President Barack Obama told "60 Minutes," "When I first came into office, the head of the Senate Republicans said, 'My No. 1 priority is making sure President Obama's a one-term president.'" Sen. Dianne Feinstein even told the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board she heard McConnell speaking to that effect on the Senate's opening day. The thing is that the quote...

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...