I mulled the question quickly in my head, considered and dismissed Talking Points Memo and The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal (both good picks, mind you), and settled in to discuss Matthew Yglesias, who now blogs for ThinkProgress and is often referenced in my posts.

Alas, there was no discussion. The question was designed, I surmise, that the HR screener might review the answer at a later date, if at all. I suspect that neither my resume nor my off-the-cuff answers during the screening call precisely answered the criteria the firm was looking to match.

There’s a point to all this, though, and that’s that Matthew Yglesias is probably my favorite blogger writing about politics today because he’s so damn tight.  Take this two-paragraph post from last Sunday. Yglesias identifies the main idea:

It’s nothing new to learn that there are quality-control problems at the Washington Post op-ed page, but Kevin Carey’s demolishing of Lamar Alexander’s op-ed on SAFRA is really something to behold.

Yglesias pays a nod to another blogger’s takedown of a hotly politicized policy issue. As a bonus, Yglesias takes a swipe at a media institution he loves to hate, the WaPo op-ed page. Not bad for a mere 30-odd words.

But that’s just the first sentence. The rest of the first paragraph goes on to skewer the Post’s editorial page editor *and* remind readers that Lamar Alexander is a senator on a soapbox with a malignant agenda and a pack of lies to share.

Therein lies the pivot that makes the rest of the blog post work so well. Yglesias conflates The Post op-ed page with the general unreliability of the contributor. Then, in the second paragraph, Yglesias nails the problem behind the problem.

Meanwhile, I take it that if Lamar Alexander had something false he wanted to tell people about the SAT—like if he wanted to say it was bad test-taking strategy to guess randomly even if you’re able to narrow it down to two options—that Kaplan wouldn’t let him write that in one of their test prep books. Their feeling, as I understand it, is that if they expect people to pay money for test prep books then the information in the books had better be reliable and not just reflect something or other some powerful person happened to want to say.

Emphasis mine. Yglesias argues, and this is pretty much airtight as far as I can tell, that The Washington Post and its parent company The Washington Post Co. are being irresponsible by publishing fallacious op-eds that wouldn’t pass muster as content for sale under the Post’s meal ticket, Kaplan Test Prep, which accounts for over $2 billion a year in Post Co. revenue and keeps the newspaper branch afloat.

All that in a mere two paragraphs. I wish I could have accomplished as much in so little space here.