Brief programming note: Because of Rosh Hashanah, I am joining the great Exodus to the New Jersey suburbs for the holiday. (If you’re wondering about my surname, and people do, my dad was a Polish Catholic and my mom’s a Sephardic Jew from Morocco.) I’m going to go dip some things in honey—like maybe my [...]

In the postmortems of the failure yesterday of the Congressional bill to right the credit markets, I’m noticing a repeated refrain: representatives voted against it because their constituents hated it, and their constituents hated it because they didn’t understand the consequences. But if that’s true, isn’t there someone at fault besides voters and their elected [...]

1. Let’s be fair: John McCain and Sarah Palin weren’t claiming that a question from a voter was “gotcha journalism.” They were claiming that for Katie Couric to have the temerity to take Palin’s answer to a voter seriously was “gotcha journalism.” That, of course, makes all the difference. 2. Should the McCain-Palin camp—given the [...]