Like Mark, I'm exceptionally impressed with Bill Bratton. Given the state of the LA police department before he hit town, the city really ought to erect a statue to him somewhere. I mean, a BIG statue. The weirdest part of Bratton leaving, however, ...
Ed Glaeser has an interesting post attempting to run the numbers for high speed rail. For my money, the most important point is that the thing that makes high speed rail problematic in most parts of the country is the absence of a tightly concentrated ...
It was not all that long ago that the careful study of the interaction of public policy and politics was a somewhat moribund field in political science. What little work existed was, too often, not terribly useful for those of us—citizens, activists, ...
We're so far into this Henry Louis Gates thing that almost everyone has ceased to really care about what actually happened, or to try to understand both sides. At this point, the conflict is tribal--the side you end up on is determined by norms of ...
The health care debate is getting to the point where a large number of the important actors involved are starting to lay down their bottom line. Put another way, they are figuring out what constitutes a minimally acceptable compromise. For what it's ...
Two Republicans--Bob Inglis Jeff Flake--and one Democrat, Dan Lipinksi, have just introduced legislation that would seek to reduce global warming by imposing a carbon tax, all of the revenue from which would be used to reduce the payroll tax. It ...
Chapter One of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement opens with a quote from Stephen Skowronek, which I think sums up much of what I was trying to argue in the book: “Whether a given state changes or fails to change, the form and timing of the ...
I am not at all sure that I understand Obama's reasoning in considering HRC for Secretary of State, but my gut tells me that we may be seeing an instance where politicians get in trouble through the misplaced use of historical analogy, in this case the ...
I seriously doubt that Secretary of Education will be one of the cabinet positions chosen in the next couple of weeks. That's good, because I hope that Obama's advisors take the matter very seriously. The tendency will be to pluck an aggressive K-12 ...
This was a great victory for this particular black man, and for all those who invested their sweat and tears into him, but we should not go overboard. This does not mean that America's scar of race has healed. The life chances of young ...
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