Hey Spackerfans, I’m Matt Zeitlin aka Young Zeitlin (which, interestingly enough, my older brothers’ friends have been calling me for as long as I can remember).  Spencer already introduced me, so on to my trenchant, incisive analysis! This on Brookings discussion, where four wise men (really three men and one woman) discuss the on-face absurd [...]

Jon Chait: The purpose of winning elections is to solve problems like health care. There’s something strange about advice that presumes it’s appropriate to value the preservation of popularity above all else. I’ll be the first to point to institutional difficulties as the source of a lot our political parties, and that’s often at the [...]

Gerald Seib’s diagnosis of the Senate — its problems are merely a symptom of our political system’s larger dysfunction — is mostly spot on, with the exception of this bit: Yet the real issue here isn’t the number of filibusters and cloture votes needed to stop them, but that there is so little common ground [...]

Reihan Salam is unhappy with the president’s definition of bipartisanship (via Andrew Sullivan): So when the president claims that the Senate health-care bill he still hopes to salvage includes many Republican ideas, he’s stretching. Republicans wanted interstate competition for insurance policies, allowing New Yorkers to buy South Dakota policies that have fewer expensive mandates. The bill [...]

First, huge thanks to Spencer for letting me guest-blog again. As he mentioned, I spend most of blog-time at my own joint, but you can also find me hanging around the good folks at PostBourgie. By now, it’s obvious that Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate because he is angry; angry at liberal activists for [...]

“What are they going to do? Fire me?” — With that, a canny old bureaucrat who’s been at the game for 30 years, lets the DOD, the services and Congress know he’s come to get things done. Having found a surprising level of comfort with his new boss, will he stick around for longer than he’d planned?