Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

The words do not have to be perfect.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

I really should read my own blog.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Not all heroes wear capes.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

You are here: Home / Politics / Media / Meet the latest Kaplan employee

Meet the latest Kaplan employee

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I would say this bums me out but Ezra Klein continues to do good work inside the belly of the test prep beast (Michael Calderone via Weigel):

David Weigel, who’s been covering the right for the Washington Independent, will soon be heading to the Washington Post.

Weigel joins the Post on April 5, and will be launching a blog focused on the conservative movement, tea party activists, and how the GOP’s preparing for November.

National editor Kevin Merida confirmed the news to POLITICO and said that Weigel will be “a voice on our politics page online and a presence that will add to our robust coverage of the 2010 midterm elections.”

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  1. 1.

    kindness

    Oh, him. I’ve written comments under his bylines bunches. Funny thing though. They get wiped off the screen at the Independent almost as quickly as my posts to the Washington Times. Can’t blame Rev. Moon for everything I guess.

    On Fred Hiatt…..I have to think this wunderkind has taken out insurance on the death of the WaPo. He’s doing everything he can to stick a knife in it and push it into the grave.

  4. 4.

    Brian J

    On a somewhat related note, one of the supposedly better reporters at Kaplan, Binyamin Appelbaum, is headed to The New York Times. I say supposedly because I rarely read The Post but know that lots of people here seem to like him.

  5. 5.

    slag

    Oh great. They’re going to steal all our good pundits and then go out of business leaving them all without jobs. Luckily, Ezra, Dave, and Greg will now at least have healthcare afterwards.

  6. 6.

    Warren Terra

    This is off topic, but John Scalzi has a (predictably) great essay on the bill; an excerpt:

    That said, the Democrats were magnificently fortunate that, as incompetent as they are, they are ever-so-slightly less incompetent than the GOP, which by any realistic standard has been handed one of the largest legislative defeats in decades. The GOP was not simply opposed to health care, it was opposed to it in shrill, angry, apocalyptic terms, and saw it not as legislation, or in terms of whether or not health care reform was needed or desirable for Americans, but purely as political strategy, in terms of whether or not it could kneecap Obama and bring itself back into the majority. As such there was no real political or moral philosophy to the GOP’s action, it was all short-term tactics, i.e., take an idea a majority of people like (health care reform), lie about its particulars long enough and in a dramatic enough fashion to lower the popularity of the idea, and then bellow in angry tones about how the president and the Democrats are ignoring the will of the people. Then publicly align the party with the loudest and most ignorant segment of your supporters, who are in part loud because you’ve encouraged them to scream, and ignorant because you and your allies in the media have been feeding them bad information. Whip it all up until health care becomes the single most important issue for both political parties — an all-in, must win, absolutely cannot lose issue.
    ….
    But in the end, it got done. We have health care reform. We have it because Obama decided that it was going to get done, one way or another, and that it was worth risking his presidency over — and worth risking Democratic control of the House and Senate as well. Like the GOP, he went all in, but unlike the GOP, he didn’t do it just for tactical advantage or for short term advantage of power and party; he did it because when all and said and done I think he really does believe that health care reform is to the benefit of the American people, and that it in itself was more important than just being president for as long as Constitutionally possible.

  8. 8.

    arguingwithsignposts

    Just curious: Since we don’t get the Kaplan Post out here in the flyover ‘murka, do they actually run any of Ezra Klein’s stuff in the newsPAPER? Or is it just online. Will they do the same for this new guy, whom I’m unfamiliar with?

    Merida said that Weigel was brought to the Post’s attention by Klein, and later met with Raju Narisetti, the paper’s managing editor who oversees digital content.
    __
    With Weigel aboard, it’s clear the Post wants to make sure the conservative movement is fully covered in print and online. In addition to Weigel, the paper recently assigned a reporter in National to cover the tea party movement and developments within the Republican Party.

    Ah, the village young pundits reach around society continues apace.

  9. 9.

    WereBear

    I bear a grudge, since a testing service only kept them for twenty years, and I needed them just a bit after that.

    If you can’t show a piece of paper right now, request it, before your time is up.

  11. 11.

    slag

    @LT: Jane Hamsher hates him because he repeated a mean thing somebody said about her one time. However, whenever I’ve read Weigel, I’ve found his stuff both enjoyable and informative. To each his own.

  12. 12.

    The Main Gauche of Mild Reason

    @LT:

    You’re supposed to be sad that he’s moving from a reasonable liberal publication like the WIndy to the beast that is the WaPo. DougJ just worded it a little strangely.

  13. 13.

    Ash Can

    Weigel joins the Post on April 5, and will be launching a blog focused on the conservative movement, tea party activists, and how the GOP’s preparing for November.

    Thank goodness, because God knows the WaPo ignores all those guys now.

  15. 15.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Speaking of Beltway journamalism, this is the part that almost no one is really looking at, from TPM:

    The initial top-line shows only 39% of registered voters favoring the bill, to 59% opposing it. However a follow-up question finds that 43% oppose it on the grounds that it is too liberal, while 13% oppose it on the grounds that it is not liberal enough. So another way of looking at the data is that 43% oppose it for being too liberal, 39% favor it, and 13% oppose it for not being liberal enough, with another 3% who oppose it for some indeterminate reasons.

    One way of looking at those numbers is that a healthy majority (39%+13%) are on the Democrats’ side in this thing.

    Sure, 13% wanted it to be even more liberal (I’m one of them) but there’s no way in the world those 13% would vote for Republicans, for what, to get more liberal results? Some will go third party or sit it out, but that’s pretty small and part of that is already reflected in the 3% undecided.

    This may seem obvious to a lot of us but I see people all the time even on the Democratic side in the Villager press seeming to just admit “Okay polls show that people are against this health care reform” but “once they see the benefits, they’ll come around”.

    They already are around. At least in terms of a solid majority seeing this more the way the Democrats saw it than the way the Republicans saw it.

  16. 16.

    mantis

    When the librul media decided they needed to pay more attention to teabaggers and other wingnuts, if I knew they were talking about hiring people like Weigel to do it I would have been much more positive about the idea.

  19. 19.

    Ailuridae

    As long as Weigel gets the same leeway Ezra does I can’t see the downside of him going to a more widely read (and sadly more respected) publication.

    And on a good note for Dave he’s likely both going to get paid more upfront from WaPo and his appearances on MSNBC will garner him more cash too. Like Ezra though, something tells me he won’t be a regular on Morning Joe.

  20. 20.

    Clark

    Interesting footnote about David Weigel. I was a big John Edwards guy in 2007-2008 (yeah, I know,) and I helped man the Edwards booth at Yearly Kos 2007. We had a really friendly set up, with lots of comfy chairs and extra outlets so bloggers could hang out and charge their laptops in between panels. We also had a lot of schwag to give to people who stopped by, and we had a dry eraser board where supporters could write something clever about how they supported Edwards, and then have their picture taken so that they could put it up on Facebook or something.

    So anyway, Weigel hung out there quite a bit, even though was there with Reason Magazine (yeah, I know.) He was really friendly and funny, though, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to shoo him away when he started writing sarcastic comments on the dry erase board and asking to have his picture taken with them. The only comment I can remember was something like “There is possibly one JRE supporter at Reason Magazine” which I took (and still take) as a badge of honor.

  21. 21.

    carlos the dwarf

    @freelancer:
    His personal views are libertarian. But he keeps his politics out of his work, and he’s good about presenting the TPers honestly.

  28. 28.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @freelancer:
    Read the story DougJ linked to.

    The paragraph was from Politico, and it didn’t say he *was* conservative, but that he “covered” the conservative movement. He worked for Reason Magazine, though, so I doubt he’s a DFH.

    I have no idea what his politics are because I’ve never read him previously (unless I accidentally clicked on a link to him from here), but I’d be curious to read some of his stuff to see if he’s “giving a voice” to these nutjobs without providing a context like, i don’t know, “reality” or “truth” or something.

  30. 30.

    Cain

    @carlos the dwarf:

    His personal views are libertarian. But he keeps his politics out of his work, and he’s good about presenting the TPers honestly.

    You mean he’s a real journalist. wow.

    cain

  32. 32.

    liberty60

    Saw this from Politico – Randy Barnett (who I don’t know from Adam, but if this is an example of his work, he promises to be a comedy goldmine):

    If John McCain had been elected, we would have had something like this bill enacted last year in a bipartisan fashion – as was Social Security and Medicare.

    Yeah really! Thats our story and we’re stickin’ to it!

  33. 33.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @liberty60: Exactly.

    “If WE had proposed this exact same bill, then we’d have voted for it!”

    Kind of what we’ve all been saying.

  35. 35.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @Cain:

    His personal views are libertarian. But he keeps his politics out of his work, and he’s good about presenting the TPers honestly.

    You mean he’s a real journalist. wow.

    This is a misperception. It’s possible to be a “real” journalist without keeping your politics out of your work – Rachel Maddow, among others, is proof of that.

    What is not a “real” journalist is presenting yourself dishonestly as an impartial observer (a la Ron Fournier at the AP) or practicing “he said/she said” shoddy scribery without a bias toward the truth.

  37. 37.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    I love Dave, he has done stellar work on the birfers and baggers (he is also a member of Politijab and comes there for the scoops on the latest dismissals of Orly’s cases etc, he has even appeared on the Politijab Blogtalkradio Show “Reality Check Radio” how many main stream journos would have done that?) I hope that he is allowed to continue his brilliant work. We shall see.

  39. 39.

    cs

    He was one of the best things about Reason and approached the libertarian movement from the left, thus reliably pissing off at least half of their commentators on a daily basis as he relentlessly attacked many of their sacred cows. Probably not a DFH but obviously not a conservative either.

    This gig will mean the teabaggers and their ilk will get daily ridicule from a mainstream news source. Glad he’s moving up in the world.

  40. 40.

    jamie

    Randy Barnett is a Con Law professor, and blogs (sometimes) over at Volokh. He is libertarian, in the Reason sense, but more so. To be fair, he took the medical marijuana case to the Supreme Court – he was Raisch’es attorney, which wins him points, to me. And I think he’s sincere, not glib. But I think some of his arguments are profoundly weird to anyone who that maybe things are a bit different today then when the Constitution was signed. And I think he gets quite clouded by Republican sympathies, to the point he make really strange arguments. (I traded mail with him after he posted Obama-critical remarks right after the undie bomber thing failed to explode, and he was trying to argue that this was Completely Different than the shoe bomber because the undie bomber plane was over the continental US at the time.)

  41. 41.

    BruinKid

    Good for Dave. Met him at NN’09 in Pittsburgh last year, and we talked briefly about the birthers. He provided very good coverage of the birther movement early on, and knows more about the conservative movement than most of us.

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