Free Republic

CBS news contributor Nancy Giles wants to sue Congress. Why? For going to bed instead of taking president Obama’s “touchdown dance” call on the night of his 2012 reelection victory. But it also sheds light on the media strategy that will be used in 2014 to bolster the president. In a nutshell that strategy is known as the “I’m-Rubber-You’re-Glue-Whatever-You-Say-Bounces-Off-of-Me-and-Sticks-to-You,” campaign narrative first used in 1973 by 3rd grader Amelia Snodgrass of Temple Mount, NJ as she swept into her second class presidency in three years. Accordingly in her Sunday column CNN’s Giles gets childlike in her complains that Speaker John...

You helped elect an untested presidential candidate, a man almost as liberal as you. He promised to heal the oceans, make health care an unalienable right and transform Washington's toxic culture. You mocked Republicans, independents and squishy Democrats who had the audacity to criticize your guy, much less doubt the inevitability of his victory. President Obama won, twice, and then didn't live up to anybody's expectations, including his own. What do you do? Well, if you're Ezra Klein and a coterie of inflexibly progressive pundits, you re-purpose an attack used against President George W. Bush's bombastic approach to geopolitics. You...

Klein is a leftist journalist who had the audacity to write about his issues with the Obamacare website while working for The Washington Post. His words were immediately savaged by the farther-left blogger, Joan Walsh, who was working for Salon magazine. She penned a harsh critique, headlined: “Liberal pundit fail: Rush to attack Obamacare site only aids unhinged right.” Here’s what Walsh wrote about Klein: “Ezra Klein then picked up the cudgel, telling the crew at MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ where every Obama misstep foretells the end of his presidency, that the Health and Human Services Department is covering up a ‘massive management failure,’...

Liberal blogger Ezra Klein loves to visit the White House, and the White House appears more than willing to open the door. Since 2009, Klein’s name appears in the White House visitor logs 27 times, according to a search of the records. The latest visit recorded in the records was December 12, 2013 -- while Klein was creating a brand new explanatory news and policy website which would become Vox Media. According to the visitor logs, Klein has traveled to the White House eight times to meet President Obama and has met with a myriad of other White House officials....

It’s a couple of weeks too late for this to help most people this year, but I’m sure many of you ran into issues filing your taxes. It’s a huge pain in the backside, isn’t it? Over at Redstate, Matthew Clark dredges up a brilliant scheme from Ezra Klein which should make all of your lives easier. Why not let the IRS do our taxes for us?Liberal wunderkind Ezra Klein (formerly of the Washington Post and now of Vox.com) was pushing this new idea a few weeks ago.Well it wasn’t really new. He’s been pushing it for years.The idea is...

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.