Ezra Klein on All Topics
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“Earlier in the week, Chris Dodd annoyed some financial reformers by bemoaning the Volcker reforms as destabilizing to the delicate bipartisan consensus he was trying to work out with Sen. Richard Shelby. But by yesterday, Dodd was singing a more populist tune and blaming the political difficulties on the banks, not the new ideas.”
“All in all, it was a good speech. But it was a good speech because it told the story of a good presidency and an able president.”
“Democrats seem terrified by the prospect of, as some Hill aides have said to me, "cutting another deal."”
“This sort of horse-trading might be common in Washington, and this deal might be both small in the scheme of the bill and decent policy on the merits, but it had come to define the legislation. And people hated it.”
“You can attend a lot of Democratic rallies without ever hearing the chant, "When I say 'spending,' you say 'freeze!' 'SPENDING!''”
“If Scott Brown's election was very bad for health-care reform, it looks like it was very good for financial reform.”
“What Democrats are doing isn't just abandoning a particular policy issue. They're proving themselves unable to govern.”
“I'm starting to think congressional Republicans have mastered the Jedi mind trick.”
“Newspaper revenue might go up under this strategy, but so, I'd guess, will the relative market share of big blogs that are good at aggregation”
“A week ago, people were writing victory speeches. Today, they were trying out language for epitaphs. But by nightfall, the situation seemed to be stabilizing a bit.”
“For all the concessions, the bill is not that different, in effect or in construction, than it was at the beginning. The problem is that the bill's supporters seem to have forgotten why they were doing this in the first place.”
“"If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose--and deserve to lose."”
“We've literally never had a deficit problem this large before. It's going to require some really tough decisions from a Congress that shows no capacity for making such tough decisions.”
“Saving money is good, and it buys us time. But if we just cut payment rates by enough to save, say, $200 billion, all we're doing is buying some time.”
“To be sure, filibuster opponents, at least in my experience, actually are in favor of majority rule. It's just that there's no obvious way to achieve it.”
