The Feed

One of the major growth industries in Washington is the promotion of budget hysteria. Well-funded groups have weekly, if not daily, events designed to hype the country’s budget situation. Much of the national media, most importantly The Washington Post, have enlisted in this effort, devoting both their opinion and news sections toward this goal. Unfortunately for ...

In 2008, Montana was the canary in the coal mine. About a month before the election, a local citizen named Jacob Eaton formally challenged Kevin Furey’s voter registration, swearing that he was no longer eligible to vote. Furey had asked the post office to change his address from Helena to Missoula. Eaton asked local election officials to take ...

The title of Hanna Rosin’s new book, “The End of Men,” now serves as shorthand for a slightly less apocalyptic event: the end of male economic advantage. Ms. Rosin and others, including Liza Mundy, author of “The Richer Sex,” assert that this end is nigh. Those who disagree, like me, challenge many of their quantitative ...

“I think we quite likely are in a different period, where an issue that seemed to be settled by 1970 is unsettled again,” Keyssar told me. “I don’t think anyone is going to propose that we impose a property restriction, or impose racial restrictions, but I think there is certainly conflict over any measures that ...

The 2012 presidential campaign may seem like it’s all about the economy, but it’s really being driven by the chief political development of the last 30 years: the Republican Party’s movement further to the ideological right. Mitt Romney’s attempts to win over his party’s increasingly hard-line base forced him to tack far to the right ...

FOR almost 20 years, I’ve been spending time on a craggy stretch of British Columbia’s shoreline called the Sunshine Coast. This summer, I had an experience that reminded me why I love this place, and why I chose to have a child in this sparsely populated part of the world. It was 5 a.m. and ...

We are coming up in January on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. What are the chances that the Supreme Court will overrule Roe if Mitt Romney is elected president? A reasonable guess at present, based on past performance, is that five of the current justices (Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Kennedy and Sotomayor) ...

You might think being responsible for arguably the worst election debacle in American history, in 2000, would have spurred Florida’s politicians to make the state the nation’s model for excellence in election administration. But in the past few years state Republicans, from Gov. Rick Scott on down, have worked tirelessly to come up with ways to ...

In Washington today, “bipartisan” is a loaded term. The traditional usage of bipartisan refers to an agreement across the usual political divide — sometimes a good idea and in many cases the only way to get things done. But a darker meaning applies all too frequently — to a group in which the members, irrespective ...

The continuing U.S. economic recovery from the Great Recession, powered first by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and then by a variety of measures taken by the Obama administration, is rapidly translating into clear jobs gains in states across our nation. First the national picture. In September the unemployment rate fell to ...