Joel E Lewis

Charlie Crist, the sitting Governor of Florida is in the senate primary race of his life against up-and-comer Marco Rubio.  538 has some excellent analysis on his options from here on it.  They suggest his best chance to win is to run for the Senate as an independant candidate, disavowing party polarization and the crazy [...]

The NYTimes has an article about the canceling of a old school Washington social scene column, with some interesting insight into how the way our leaders interact has changed and polarized over the last 50 years:
…The Washington that Ms. Quinn covers, one governed by convivial elites who battle by day and clink glasses at night, [...]

From a research paper on international management practices and their effect on firm success:

One interesting group are the family firms, defined in our research as firms owned by the descendants of the founder… Those that are family owned and family managed (“Family, Family CEO”) have a large tail of badly managed firms, while the family [...]

The Republican base is being supplemented by older generations shifting away from the Democrats, which might have some interesting ramifications for republican policy:
In a way, these figures should make small-government conservatives a lot more nervous than they make partisan Republicans. After all, you can win an awful lot of elections just by mobilizing the over-65 [...]

FiveThirtyEight makes a good point:
4.) I’m surprised how unimportant estate and gift taxes are to the overall scheme of things. Even before the generous estate tax credit of the last few years (essentially exempting estates worth less than $3.5 million), estate and gift taxes are remarkably unimportant from a total revenues perspective. It’s obvious they [...]

How Moderates think:
Like Mr. Brown, Ms. Snowe said she did not think the measure went far enough, and she also protested the Democratic decision to bar any Republican amendments. But the senator, who was particularly supportive of some business-oriented provisions in the measure, said those concerns were outweighed by the need to show Americans that [...]

Bruce Bartlet is one of the writers of Capital Gains and Games, an excellent policy analysis blog, with writers who can provide great insight from their time as Washington insiders, but always rise above the talking points you hear on TV.
My favorite contributor there is Bruce Bartlet (bio).  Bruce is best described as a member [...]

538 has a great article on the role of moderate politicians in congress.
The Bayh’s , Lieberman’s and Snowe’s of the world are moderates, in that they muddle together proposals of each side to make bastardized policy proposals that meet in the middle (legislative man-bear-pigs).   As long as they remain moderates, patching together existing proposals, they [...]

Rolling stone has a really (really) long, but interesting comparison of recent wall street moves to real world cons and schemes pulled in movies like Goodfellas and The Sting.  Some of the connections are a stretch, but most range between clear cut copies and eerily similar set-ups.
I definitely agree that Flash Trading is inherently unfair.  [...]

For those of us concerned about unsustainable government spending/commitments and our politicians inability to deal with it, reading this lede in the NY Times is a big sign of the times.  The realignment to the center-right is upon us (I emphasize the center, unlike republicans who say center-right but mean ultra-conservative-fundamentalist, as in “Those liberal [...]