Category: Politics
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Collapse. Best time for a vacation.
So, the U.S. House has discarded the plan to save the U.S., and really by some extension, the world economy. The markets have collapsed. It was never an ideal plan in the first place. The insane right wanted changes that had nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with Bizzaro World ideology. So…
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Survey says…. $700 billion!
I somehow missed this a few days ago. From Forbes: In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large…
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Who’s voting a blank check for those #*%)%(
Here’s the silver lining to global financial collapse. It’s kept me from obsessing about Sarah Palin and McCain’s latest whopper for the last week. Except in the context of financial collapse, for which there’s been plenty of material. What’s fascinating is watching this in the blogging era. Roughly a billion serious economists are online, and…
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Obama, energy, and getting the whole story
I’ve been a casual reader of news the last few days. I’ve skimmed. I’ve been busy. But I think I’m not alone in that. Regardless, the point I’ve gotten about Obama’s energy policy is that he’s backtracked on offshore drilling, and is now willing to support it. I was a little pissed about this, until…
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Evolving economics
I know, I haven’t been blogging lately. I’ve been traveling, in the States for the first time since moving to Berlin (more on that later, but it was only in going back that I finally felt like an expat). Also reading, evolutionary theory and sociobiology. Which leads to this point. Reading this article on the…
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Save the planet. Buy meat-offset credits
Because I am a fervent believer that the unrestrained free market has the best possible answers to all problems, I would like to propose to the Internets at large a solution to the problem of meat, and a way of reigning in the pork and cattle industries that have become nothing less than environmental disasters.…
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Obama: Fairy tale or American exemplar?
I’m thrilled about Obama’s win in Iowa. I’m not as surprised as maybe I should be, reading the headlines, but maybe this is one of the advantages of being overseas, and not steeped in the daily horse-race reporting. From here, the story emerging after Obama’s win — that Democrats are more focused on the prospect…
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Will Durst on the falling dollar
From this column here, which sorta gets inflation and falling currency valuations mixed up, but it’s funny anyway: Dubyah has turned us into a third world banana republic. We’re Costa Rica to the rest of the World. With lousier snorkeling. Who can blame the hordes of Eurotrash from clogging the aisles of our Tiffany franchises…
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Is Cheney planning a new Middle East war?
Juan Cole and a few other bloggers are reporting chatter from D.C. that the administration will launch a pre-war sales effort after Labor Day, much as before Iraq, softening up the public for an attack on Iran. Ugh. Could they be so ludicrously, criminally stupid? Please tell me Americans would see this as irresponsible, impeachment-worthy…
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Beating a dead Marx
I fear the good people in the Republican party are getting desperate. Not only are they bringing up the specter of communism once again,they’re even going all the way back to Marx (minus, of course, anything like fidelity to Marx’s actual ideas): Mitt Romney’s comments on Hillary Clinton: “Hillary Clinton just gave a speech the…
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Globalization’s ills, from the left and (even) the right
Economists these days are buzzing about addressing globalization’s problems, and particularly a growing income inequality in the United States that’s taken us back to 1928 levels — a particularly foreboding statistic, given 1929’s banner economic news. This has long been an issue on the left, but recent economic data, and the rising power of protectionist…
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Slippery slope: from the big bang to netpr0n
The Economist writes about the new Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY, where bible-believing parents can give their tots a look at dinosaurs set into the context of creation; because everyone knows (or should) that the Tyrannosaurs were created in 4004 BC along with Adam and Eve, and that there were a few, probably young adults…
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Down the economics rabbithole, pt. 1
For anyone with a little soft spot for economics arguments, whether of the strictly WSJ type or the bearded (post-)Marxist variety, the discussion going on here is worth reading. Long story short: Nation writer Chris Hayes published an article a week or so ago (also worth reading, here) arguing that the current orthodox trend in…
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Already breathing easier…
So, it’s out already, the U.S. is going to reject most of what the Europeans and the rest of the world want to accomplish on the environmental front at next week’s G-8 meeting. But not to worry, Bush has his own plan. The U.S. takes this very seriously, his spokeswoman says. We’re going to lead…
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(Year old) quote of the day
Stolen from the Pharyngula blog, while reading links to it elsewhere. A quote worthy of Wilde, or at least Thomas Reed. On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify. At the end of…