January 2009
“PARIS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of strikers marched through French...”
– French strikers march for job security, pay rises | International | Reuters
I’m trying to think of a less provocative word than “idiocy” for this.
I can’t.
EconTalk →
The link above takes you to an excellent edition of the EconTalk podcast. Description below:
“EconTalk host Russ Roberts talks about the role of empirical evidence and bias in economics and why economists disagree. Roberts talks about how his interviews with various economists at EconTalk have forced him to reassess the role of empirical evidence in various debates in economics and...
“I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of...”
– Barack Obama, spying a “collection of decorative green and white plates” that the Bushes added to the Oval Office.
Even though it’s entirely about inconsequential things, I really enjoyed reading the article that supplied the quote: White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code -...
Sarah Palin in the eye of the beholder - Josh... →
The link above goes to a rather fascinating collection of differing interpretations of Sarah Palin’s politics. What accounts for the diverging views? I think it’s a combination of her relative inexperience and the fact that she neither exhibits nor adheres to a clear political ideology.
I can’t help but be reminded of another inexperienced politician that professes no clear...
ABC News: Another Lobbyist Headed Into Obama... →
southpol:
jeffmiller:
Has any other President so blatantly and so quickly violated his most sanctimonious campaign promise?
There will be a knee-jerk compulsion among his supporters to excuse these appointments. And that is more depressing than Obama’s broken promise.
How about a knee-jerk compulsion among his detractors to gleefully tell his supporters what they’re going to do? Allow me...
ABC News: Another Lobbyist Headed Into Obama... →
Has any other President so blatantly and so quickly violated his most sanctimonious campaign promise?
There will be a knee-jerk compulsion among his supporters to excuse these appointments. And that is more depressing than Obama’s broken promise.
"With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not... →
“Craig Silvertooth, the president of the Center for Environmental Innovation in...”
– Stimulus Bill Near $900 Billion - WSJ.com
There is sheer comedy in how our government works (the “shoe lobby,” for example), but it’s worked this way for so long that we’re numb to it.
Libertarians and the Poor
Ilya Somin writes:
[A]n underemphasized aspect of the case for limiting government is the tendency of big government to benefit the politically powerful at the expense of the poor and disadvantaged. This issue has been a theme of much of my own work on property rights (e.g. here and here) and political ignorance (e.g. - here). Glaeser’s view and mine go against the still-dominant...
“Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era wrote...”
– SSRN-From ‘White Christmas’ to Sgt. Pepper: The Conceptual Revolution in Popular Music by David Galenson[1]
Although he was always a brilliant architect, Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest architectural feats came in the last half of his long life. Fallingwater. The Johnson Wax...
Predicting health and mortgage expenses
squashed:
Jeff Miller, responding to Olivia regarding the relative costs of healthcare and morgages, wrote,
[U]niversal healthcare has less of an internal check to keep down costs. People can alter their lifestyle to minimize risks—by quitting smoking, say—in exchange for lower rates. But people can’t alter their lifestyle to rid themselves of all risks. When Olivia says that health is...
Re: Health Care and Banking
oliviaisferosch:
jeffmiller:
This article argues that “health care reformers should look to the banking collapse as a cautionary tale,” but it gets the analogy all wrong. Here’s the right analogy:
Our government was upset that banks wouldn’t lend money to people who were bad credit risks, so it established policies and institutions that incentivized banks to lend to people that they couldn’t...
Health Care and Banking
This article argues that “health care reformers should look to the banking collapse as a cautionary tale,” but it gets the analogy all wrong. Here’s the right analogy:
Our government was upset that banks wouldn’t lend money to people who were bad credit risks, so it established policies and institutions that incentivized banks to lend to people that they couldn’t...
“Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other...”
– Fair’s fair - Bart Wilson, The Atlantic Business Channel
An Early Observation About Obama
Every president adopts a posture, and it seems like Obama has decided to adopt a scornful disappointment with his opponents—a sneering kind of disgust with what he purports to regard as mere politicization and partisanship. He acts like his opposition is simply impeding essential efforts to fix the economy, and this will fly with some people for a short period of time. But this feint...
A Few More Thoughts About Billy Joel
After I wrote my recent defense of Billy Joel, I thought about why I was motivated to post such a defense. Here are a few reasons why I’ve always liked Billy Joel.
1. I’ve written before about my long Elvis period, which was shattered when my dad forced me to like Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But Billy Joel was an exception to my Elvis-exclusivity. We used to take long...
Scary Graphs →
Crazynutjob puts our monetary policy in perspective.
In Defense of Billy Joel
I just read the following:
Which brings me to Billy Joel—the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop music—and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes, whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak versions. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin crawl in a way that other bad music doesn’t? Why is it that so many of us feel it is possible to say...
“In 2009, looking out over the largest crowd ever assembled in Washington, D.C.,...”
– Obama still hasn’t told us what he thinks government should do. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine
Playing The Beatles Backwards: The Ultimate... →
Someone ranked all of the Beatles songs and provided detailed reasoning for the placement of each. I don’t agree with all of his rankings (Good Day Sunshine as the fifth worst? Octopus’s Garden at 36?), but I admire the effort.
WatchThe new administration … a lot like the last one. More here.
“When you set very tough rules, you need to have a mechanism for the occasional...”
– A Senior White House Official, explaining why the Obama administration is violating its No Lobbyist in the Obama Administration pledge
I would suggest that it isn’t a very tough rule if you start handing out exceptions.
beautifulordinaire:
Townes Van Zandt - Snake...
Size Matters
I know I’m beating a dead horse, but I’m still thinking about this quote from Obama’s inaugural address:
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works … .
Not surprisingly, this quote bother my libertarian sensibilities, as I care very much about the question of whether government is too big. (Although I thought...
Mario Y Maria—Butch Hancock
Just a...
Obama signs executive order to close Guantanamo... →
squashed:
Also, he banned torture. Happy January 22. As I understand, the unicorns start shipping on the 27th.
I’ve been hard on Obama, and I’ll keep being hard on Obama, but I have to give credit when credit is due. This is a good thing.
Guantanamo might have been a difficult question if it really were, as Dick Cheney often claimed, a depository for those swept off the battlefield....
Matt Tauber: THE OBAMA-LINCOLN INAUGURAL TRAIN... →
My friend Matt corrects the record.
Best Lines
Here are some of the best lines from Obama’s inaugural address.
We have a place, all of us, in a long story — a story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to...
"Whether it Works"
I’m thinking again of that quote from Obama’s speech: ”The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works …”
Yesterday, I expressed some of my frustrations with this quote. Today, I just want to ask: Could Obama possibly mean what he says?
Let’s test him. Could he possibly think that the War on Drugs...
Obama's Mistake (or one of them, anyway)
squashed:
“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”
—
...
“12:01 p.m., PST: Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, age 91, reportedly also had...”
– The inaugural timeline
I always figured that the sight of a black man as president would be the only thing that could kill off Senator Byrd. For this alone, the election of Barack Obama may be worth it.
I know this is mean—meaner than anything I’ve written or anything I’ll ever...
“Now, I’m cynical about the romantic personality cult around Barack Obama because...”
– MLK, BHO, and Moral Progress—Will Wilkinson
Thoughts in the Face of History
I live in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington D.C. If I go up to the roof of my building, I can see the monuments and the Capitol. Tomorrow’s inauguration will happen two miles away, and yet I couldn’t feel farther from it. Some thoughts:
1. I went to Giant the other day to pick up some groceries. At the entrance, there was a table with all kinds of...
Tracking US Airways Flight 1549 - Interactive... →
This interactive graphic, like most of the NYT’s interactive graphics, is fantastic.
Prostitution
Last year, I wrote a post about prostitution. Recently, someone left a rather unkind comment to this post:
Dear self righteous Idiot, Please get off your holier than thou high horse while I give you the news. Here it is, many of these women are forced into prostitution. Now, while that may not mean a whole hell of a lot to an amoral scumbag like you, I am sure it means quite a bit to the people...
“As the Bush presidency draws to a close, portrait artists can expect a surge in...”
– Official Portraits Draw Skeptical Gaze - washingtonpost.com
Equality of Opportunity?
squashed:
While I agree that the country as a whole has cared about equality of opportunity over equality of result, I think the push for equal opportunity is being lead by the Democrats. Are there any issues where Republicans are the ones pushing to increase equality of opportunity when it means changing the status quo?
School vouchers.