Ned Resnikoff

The day’s guestbloggery is almost over, but before we go I couldn’t resist another song. Since we’ve clearly got a lot of Hold Steady and Gaslight Anthem fans in these parts, I thought I’d go for something in that vein: Lucero’s “The Devil and Maggie Chascarillo.” (Incidentally, the world’s greatest bar band just released another [...]

I propose a new rule for the next major legislative skirmish: Can we ban, forever, any iteration of the phrase “the American people want,” “the American people don’t want,” or any permutation of either as a rhetorical tactic? It’s not just that phrases like this get thrown around with no regard for the latest polling. [...]

Regardless of your take on the legal case for the Affordable Care Act’s unconstitutionality–although that case does seem pretty weak–there’s something a little sad and a little hilarious about watching a party that has, in the past, spilled so much ink and pierced so many ear drums shrieking about the horrors of “judicial activism” and [...]

Serious question for Republicans: How much longer are you guys going to keep using the old “Stop figuring out ways around our obstruction or we will continue to obstruct, which we were planning on doing anyway” threat? Doesn’t seem people are taking it too seriously. On a related note, Ezra Klein has a great piece [...]

Dylan‘s new WKM piece is–as Dara said–excellent. But because I’m a blogger, and quibbling is what I know, I’m going to quibble with a tangential point he raises in the last paragraph. He says: Furthermore, Obama’s campaign proposal to grant a $4,000 tuition tax credit to students who engage in service is borderline disturbing. The [...]

While I’m on the subject of punk (or punk-inflected rock, anyway): any of you folks who like the Gaslight Anthem should check this band out. They’ve got roughly the same sort of thing going insofar as they’re all about combining earnest, soaring Bruce Springsteen ballads with a dash of punk rock grit. Incidentally, the first [...]

My guestbloggers have been doing an admirable job of supplying the “real talk” promised in Spencer’s banner–but where the hell’s the punk rock? We’ve got a huge punk deficit here, but lucky for you there is at least one form of aggressive deficit reduction I can get behind. I can’t match your regularly scheduled blogger’s [...]

I’m late to the party on this, but as you can probably guess from my earlier litblogging it’s really difficult for me to pass up an opportunity to be a tremendous book nerd. With that in mind, here are ten books that had an enormous influence on me, presented in the order in which I [...]

I’d like everyone to take a moment to savor the fact that the guy who wants to grant the president the power to throw anyone he wants in the Tower of London for absolutely any reason thinks that recess appointments are an unconscionable abuse of power.

It looks like a handful of Democratic senators finally want to take a shot at reforming the world’s unwieldiest deliberative body. Good luck, guys! Of course, it’s going to be profoundly difficult, and I think the response from Robert Byrd–quoted in the article–is a perfect illustration of why: “Extended deliberation and debate — when employed [...]