If progressives have the right ideas about how to govern, how come California is so poorly governed? @ezraklein on a state that's choking on its own rules: nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opi…
@ezraklein One thing I would note is that there are blue states that do appear to have genuinely superior governance outcomes, like Massachusetts. So there is a good model in addition to some bad models.
I also think Ezra is right to focus on CEQA, which is all by itself responsible for a huge fraction with what's wrong in California. And unlike some other policy problems, it's one the legislature is free to fix whenever it likes.
Look either it's a serious accusation (in which case it is actually a serious error that Taylor attributed the comment to the wrong person) or it's not a serious accusation (in which case it's not a "scandal" and it's improper for reporters to try to make it into one.)
But this is the way a lot of tech industry coverage is conducted: Not merely aggressive and skeptical, as it should be, but treating tech companies and personalities as the enemy.
lol Portman reading from Neera Tanden's tweets, noting that she called Mitch McConnell "Voldemort" and compared Ted Cruz unfavorably to vampires
Rob Portman is upset about Neera's bad tweets and also upset about her deleting her bad tweets? Make up your mind, Rob Portman.
Now he's noting that there are bad tweets she didn't delete! And he asks how she decided which ones merited deletion. Some of the mean tweets about Ted Cruz are still up, he notes. (Maybe she assumed those would be popular with most senators on both sides of the aisle.)
How broadly are we expanding this list of words that cannot even be mentioned? It’s becoming genuinely confusing to read accounts of what Bad things were said when they cannot actually be reproduced.
There is a plausible enough case about the unique role and rhetorical power of the n-word meriting avoidance even of mentions, and with just one such word, that’s not confusing. But if there are going to be dozens of words you’re not allowed to even reproduce, that’s confusing.
Also, if you're going to level an accusation that (you consider to be) serious against someone about what they said, you should be pretty sure about who was speaking.
Maybe if 150 NYT employees sign an open letter saying it's harmful when the paper runs op-ed columns justifying authoritarian crackdowns on journalists in places where the NYT does business, the paper will apologize for having done that?
It's kind of amazing, the organization does not really appear to have management anymore. Only really acts in response to outside pressure (Caliphate) or inside pressure (McNeil).
I don't know all the details of what happened with McNeil, but it certainly appears that Dean Baquet knew the same things about the incident last week that he knew today, and he reached different conclusions before and now. So when did he screw up?
The manner in which Mills brushes past the central error in Caliphate -- a very big error that he presided over! -- makes me quite distrustful of whatever else he has to say.
He says in this letter that he "helped create and produce" Caliphate. The show's credits give him standalone credit as "producer." When it won a Peabody, he posed holding it with Rukmini Callimachi. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/medi…
But when the podcast was wrong, he says he's not to blame, because his bosses told him that. What?