Excerpt from Kevin Drum’s 2003 interview with Paul Krugman.
Train wreck is a way overused metaphor, but we’re headed for some kind of collision, and there are three things that can happen. Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply [...]

Some nazis won elections yesterday, and nobody in Germany is quite sure what to do about it. Should one adopt a tone of moral outrage? Or would it be better to make reassuring noises? (‘Germany is not moving towards extemism. This was merely a protest vote’. Repeat till you feel better.)
In the elections to the [...]

Perhaps the most damaging effect of 9/11 and all that has followed will be its role in making divided loyalties one of the most dangerous things a person can have. From the beginning, while the ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning, any effort to hold non-trivial positions about terrorism and Islam [...]

In a state election (Landtagswahl) in the Saarland that was widely considered another benchmark for the approval of the German federal government’s reform efforts, particularly of the labour market deregulation programme known as “Hartz IV” - these elections are, often to a significant extent, second order national contests - the Social Democrats have been dealt [...]

Readers of my previous comment on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even [...]

Yesterday was regional elections day in France. France has not traditionally had any strong local government structure - one of the first acts of the revolution was the abolition of the old provinces and their replacement with purely administrative “departments.” However, the last 20 years have seen radical changes in the way French [...]

Well, little by little the details are getting clearer. According to the Spanish daily El Pais the police now know the identity of six Moroccans who are thought to have participated in Thursday’s bombing.
According to the newspaper one of those responsible is Jamal Zougan from Tangiers who has been identified from photographs by two [...]

Two versions of the Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero story, Fox and Bloomberg, choose for yourselves.
BTW: anyone out there help me: what is the Blair/Labour Government official position right now on the UN and troop withdrawal? Just to put this in some sort of perspective.

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If you’re looking for an eminently sensible warning againt misinterpreting the PSOE’s electoral upset of the PP, see Edward’s post below. This here is just my own ?0.02 cast in about the margins.

Read more… or Read more right here… »
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By now virtually everyone must know the results of the Spanish elections. I suppose the real questions people are asking involve how to interpret them. I would advise against jumping to hasty conclusions here. I picked up one comment on Crooked Timber to the effect that:

“anybody who decided to vote Socialist after the bombings [...]