Where markets work well--primarily in the field of producing consumer goods--they create incredibly efficiencies.
Editor's note: This is the second time in two days he's made the exact same mistake.
January 2009 Archives
But that species wouldn't have heavy smokers dying of cancer, problems with overreating and sedentary lifestyles. Voters belonging to that species would condemn governors who take advantage of boom times to cut taxes and hike spending--there would be massive popular pressure to sock it all away in a rainy day fund.
Reporters ask questions that they know perfectly well won't be answered, and then the press secretary does his best to dodge him.
Glenn Beck's HLN Replacement Allready Beating Him in the Ratings
If you ask me, one of the most disturbing trends in American public discourse is the incredibly provincialism and solipsism of a lot of our policy debate.
This smear gang used to be extremely effective across the board, but in recent years there's been a lot of decline in its efficacy as regards the punditsphere, though it still succeeds in generating near-uniformity in the states views of elected officials and politicians.
The details of roquefort's problem [aside], the key issue is that in a "trade war" like this, everyone loses:...
6. At which point everyone is even more worse off.
...
The we'll have to think of further measures to hurt their producers. And much the same would apply to Japan and Chinese.
Just about everywhere, you need a special license of some kind to see booze.
The looking budget crisis isn't a reason to delay action on health care, it's a reason to avoid delay.
I'm skeptical of the merits of these scheme at any price, but at $4 trillion surely it's time to canvass alternatives in the most thorough way possible.
It's not like Matt to miss an opportunity to use a pretentious Latin pluralization. I hope everything's okay.
The real heyday of American newspapering came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the United States features a literate population and no broadcast media. The rise of radio and television had a devastating impact on the industry and caused massive shrinkage in the volume of papers. This shrinkage then led to what journalists consider the heyday of American journalism when the industry had fallen so far that most papers faced little-to-no competition and could serve as authoritative "objective" sources of information. We're now once again amidst and era in which technological change is going to kill off a lot of existing business models. But all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
It's also clear that our policies don't reward more-effective teachers in a manner that's consistent with the importance of retaining highly-effective teachers to building a highly effective school.
Been busy. I think of a real blog post soon.
In my admittedly brief experience talking to him, his inability to grasp the basic contours of policy question was obvious and overwhelming.
This was followed by a small disquisition on Marx and the reserve army of the unemployment.
Editor's note: Just to confirm that this is indeed a mistake, compare these two google searches:
"K Street" is a synedoche for the influence peddling business, but it's also an actual street and one you get east of 9th Street it takes on a much humbler character.
The Decemberists "The Bagman's Gambit" is a noteworthy recent DC-located song....
So the House of Representatives including Mall refurbishment funds in their stimulus bill. But know-nothing conservatives decided that fixing up important national landmarks sounds funny, so they've spent a week mocking the idea. And instead of punching bask and asking if the right-wing intends to just let the whole country fall apart for the sake of a sound byte, the Obama administration is backing down and getting the provision removed.
For person reasons of petty vengeance, the details of which I won't bore you with, ever since The New Republic was acquired by a Canadian firm I've been hoping they would knuckle under to the demands of their hockey-loving overlords and run an article making the case that Americans should pay more attention to Canadian politics. For quite some time now, it appeared that my dreams were not to be satisfied, as the proportion is so absurd that even a Canadian-owned enterprise wouldn't embrace this thesis.
The Congressional Budget Office produces a lot of sober-minded, sensible, reality-based policy analysis. Consequently, 99 days out of a 100 conservatives ignore what it says.
According to Glick, European governments have adopt a wide-ranging pro-jihad stance "in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them."
Tax reform, meanwhile, is intrinsically difficult to point out as you can tell if you read the excellent account of the 1986 tax reform Showdown at Gucci Gulch.
It occurred to me, incidentally, to wonder if I wasn't overlooking a major Commerce Department role in Prohibition during the 1920s, but it seems that Volstead Act enforcement was lodged inside the Treasury Department (initially subordinate [to] the IRS' precursor agency, later as a freestanding Treasury component like today's BATF) rather than Commerce or Justice.
Basically, they like the corporate tax cuts to which worth projects like mass transit have had to take a seat, but they want even more business tax cuts....
Any $800 billion bill split between tax and spending provisions is going to include some stuff people like, and some stuff people don't like, and therefore a lot of members who could conceivably go either way.
The giveaway phrase in ordinarily English seems to be "the money has to come from somewhere" which elides the difference between money just sitting around ("somewhere") and circulating via economic activity.
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, shining star of your liberal media, says:Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiattcalled Kristol "very smart and very plugged in," saying Kristol would be an influential voice in the coming debate over redefining the Republican Party. "It seems to me there were a lot of Times readers who felt the Times shouldn't hire someone who supported the Iraq war," said Hiatt, adding that he wants "a diverse range of opinions" on his page.
Editor's note: I'm the dude quoting a dude who's misattributing a quote by a dude who's quoting another dude.
For Barack Obama to go on Arabic language television to directly address the emerging Arab public sphere.
It's time once again to look back on the past week and highlight those posts that we feel best exemplify Matt's unique abilities. Each of these posts contains one or more truly special mistakes, and each is deserving of recognition. We ask our readers to decide which is the most worthy.
For the week of January 18 through 24, we've selected the following four nominees:
Check them out, and go make your voice heard.
Would it have been so hard for conservative to wait until tonight when we have an actual CBO analysis of the stimulus plan to work with?
All across America families gather around the radio, carefully tuning the dial, listening intently to hear a voice cut in through the static, sitting with rapt attention, hanging on every word of Obama's latest fireside chat. Just picture it. Matt Yglesias has.
And that's why, with a resounding 53 point lead over its closest rival, Matt's January 15 post, "Presidents and Media Change," has won the first mistake-of-the-week award.
Thanks to everyone who voted. The next batch of mistake-of-the-week nominees will be posted soon, so stay tuned.
I have mixed feelings about reporting on these kind of findings. On the one hand, I don't actually think that elected officials' future has very much to do with the public's opinion, such as it is, on this kind of question. I think, for example, that Obama's re-election prospects will be based much more on whether or not living standards are increasing in 2012 than on whether or not the policies he pursued in 2009 matched up with at-the-time public opinion. So the politically smart thing to do is more-or-less ignore year-one opinion and just do things that you think will work out in the medium-term (of course the wise and moral thing to do is to also think about the long term) irregardless of the polls. But on the other hand, there's lots of reason to believe that people's beliefs about short-term public opinion do influence how they act so it's important to spread the information around when it points in the right direction.
Editor's note: Grammarians prefer not to use irregardless, as it is a made-up word with the same meaning as regardless.
As another illustration of the conservative media's human capital problem, consider that some of the people writing for sites like Newbusters are evidently pretty dimwitted...
But more to the point, in 2007 Newbusters "reported" that CAP/AF CEO John Podesta is the leader of the organization? Really? Do this guy even know what reporting means? How on earth does he get these scoops?
Editor's note: Thanks to Rachel for the tip via our tip line. We're especially grateful since she was able to document the do/does mistake before Matt went back and corrected it.
Here's Max Boot, hawkish pundit deems the Arab Peace Initiative "laughable" and says "That this is not actually a solution to the Israeli-Arab dispute should be obvious to anyone with even a modicum of understanding of the region."
The ability to call early elections when incumbents have been discredited is one of the strengths of these kind of systems of government, but you may as well use the power to actually avoid America-style "months of drifting aimlessly."
I'd forgotten about the Bush administration's idiosyncratic take on states's rights and air pollution until I read about how we're going to start heading in a non-insane direction:
A more optimistic way of looking at it would be to say that between Ehud Barak's proposals at the end of his time [as] prime minister and the Arab League's proposals in 2002, the two sides' negotiating positions have never been closer together.
The reality, as Joby Warrick reports for The Washington Post is that when American leadership is popular and respect, al-Qaeda keeps on keeping on. But they have a much harder time getting anyone to follow them:
The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.
ad_iconWith Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.
Stop Reading This Blog on Turn to C-SPAN
And if you go for a long time without major problems, people are bound to get complacent and start not caring that loopholes are being exploiting.
I'll be on C-SPAN tomorrow morning from 8AM to 9AM alongside someone form the Heritage Foundation.
Thanks to Jacob for the tip.
Elliot Spitzer uses his most recent Slate column to call for a renewed spirit of competition and innovation in American business....
And I think there's a lot of sentiment that punishing people for consensual acts is wrong, and also that criminalizing prosecution leaves women exposed to violence, abuse, and rape at the hands of pimps and cops alike.
...
So what's former prospector and former state attorney general Elliot Spitzer think about this?
Update: Thanks to willie for pointing out the "prospector" mistake.
Mistake of the week winner, January 18-24, 2009
Mitch McConnel warns that passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, permitting workers to form unions through a majority sign-up process rather than an election rigged by employers, would "Europeanize America[.]"...
Beyond that, though, there's some nice places in Europe.
Right now, Ron Blagojevich is on television offering the most hysterical extended metaphor I've ever heard.
That difference is important, because because there's several months' worth of difference between the time span "two years after President's Day Weekend" (the target date for stimulus signing) and the end of FY2010 on October 1, 2010....
The White House has release to the press a letter form OMB Director Peter Orszag making these points:
No surprise to see the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passing the Senate, but unquestionable a good thing.
Editor's note: we're interpreting the intended wording as "but it's unquestionably a good thing," although it's by no means certain exactly what Matt had in mind here.
More generally, while I'm obviously not a hard-core free marketers, it does make sense to consider a free market position our default position.
He doesn't have a background negotiation disarmament deals, and he's not an Iran expert--he doesn't speak Persian as far as I know....
That seems to call for putting in charge someone who's skills and background are more closely tailed to the ask.
Noone Could Have Predicted...
Which I think mostly goes to show that the vote counts for bills in congress ultimately has very little to do with whether or not there's a general spirit of comity in town.
I think this comment from tsg sums it up best:
"Noone" is atrocious, even for Yglesias. Everyone makes mistakes, but "noone" featured so prominently shows outright contempt for the English language. Totally unacceptable.
Additional consideration that are important is that ideally the stations will be close enough together to create not just pockets of density but whole corridors of density, even if the corridors are surrounded by pretty traditional suburbs.
The managers of a traditional university may or may not take and opportunity to screw over their students for money, but the managers of a for-profit are obliged to screw you over.
Conversely, you're deliberately going easy on enterprises that are selling drugs out of a house somewhere but making trouble.
One kind find out, fairly definitively, what the institutional prerogatives of different officeholders are and therefore what the significance of their views and attitudes are....
It might seem like an inability to lie would be a problem in life, but in a lot of ways if it was impossible for you to know and possible for you to signal this credibly that could be a huge asset.
LATE UPDATE: Thanks to Neil "The Ethical Werewolf" Sinhababu for noticing (and blogging about) the second mistake. It almost escaped our attention.
Via Tyler Cowen, Robert Barro tries to calculate fiscal multipliers involve in the second world war:...
The question is whether you got a decent multiplier out of the first 5-10 percent of GDP you spend on stimulus.
It puts one in a mind of the time when it was impossible with Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it was run by a corrupt and incompetent Fatah.
...
Taken in isolation, each of these positions has a patina of reasonableness but the overall pattern is of a government that's much more interested in finding reasons to forever-forestall negotiations--expanding settlements all the while--than in finding a route to peace.
This has an odd tendency to leave health a bit out of the picture even though it's fairly uncontroversial to observe that both lifestyle issues and social issues are are more important determinants of health outcomes.
Which is perhaps a more complicated answer than some people are hoping for, but I think that in the real word questions of principle and questions of pragmatism are more intertwined than people sometimes care to admit.
As we catalog Matt's myriad mistakes, it's easy to see that some mistakes stand out from the crowd. We believe it's important to highlight these truly Yglesian errors and give them the recognition they are due. So every week, we'll select four or five of Matt's recent posts that we feel represent the most confusing, humorous, and egregious errors of the week. Then it's up to our readers to decide which is the most worthy.
For the week of January 11 through 17, we've selected the following four nominees:
Check them out, and vote on your favorite.
For example, defense contractors' plans to get a bailout for the financially and strategically absurd F-22 Raptor is gaining steam on the Hill.
Whether or not you think progressive economic works in practice, and whether or not progressive economic policy is popular in practice at any given time, the progressive idea is that we're setting about to make sure that prosperity is more broadly shared--to improve the material condition of the broad mass of people. That's something that ought to appeal to people. So progressives cling pretty dearly to the notion that our views can and should be made broadly popular. Conservative thinking doesn't really have that element. It appeals, on both a theoretical and practical level, to the idea of the natural right of the wealthy to their wealthy.
Israel's Supreme Court is doing the right thing and re-instate the right of Israel's Arab parties to contest the forthcoming Knesset elections.
The beginning of the Obama administration is good for the world, but probably bad for the progressive blogosphere. Fewer conservatives in positions of power equals fewer wingutty policies to complain about it. Fortunately, here comes Big Hollywood to the rescue with a fine wine from Dirk Benedict who played Starbuck on the old Battlestar Galactica. Benedict's hilariously insupportable thesis is that the old BSG was better than the old BSG and that the specific reason the old BSG was better than the old BSG was the old BSG's tendency toward simplistic storylines and retrograde gender politics
We're putting our faith in the idea that the person occupying that office to be guided by the higher law, God's law.
So as far as I'm concerned everyone should mark her words about the idea of a "grand bargain" in which the Obama administration agrees to a business-friendly bank bailout and elites agrees to support a substantial expansion of the social safety net.
And I think the Italian government in more generous with its bailouts of national champions than we are.
But then came the "redeemer" governments using a combination of a terrorist violence and state coercion to institute an apartheid system and for a while black elected officials departed from the federal government.
It must have been a day or two later when I was inside the Fleet Center and randomly ran into a guy I knew who, unbeknownst to me, had moved to Illinois to work for Ron Blagojevic (this was back when Blago was a progressive rising star) and he told me that I just had to get into the arena to hear this guy Barack Obama speak.
Even Steve's post quotes me, I hadn't thought about the Cooper/TPM thing in that light.
Much like in other fields of endeavor the key thing is to not merely increases the quantity of health care, but to increase the productivity of the health care sector by using resources more efficiently.
It's certainly an interesting development that Josh Marshall's decided to break with his previous practice and hire well-established MSM veteran Matt Cooper to head up his new TPM DC bureau and blog rather than the usually crew of scrappy underdogs.
I think I've written some variation on this ever year now for several years, but I do always wish that praise and attention for Martin Luther King, Jr. would pay more attention to his teachings on violence and non-violence.
It's a situation where there's a lot of opportunity for rents, for acquiring quasi-monopolies, and for wracking up huge profits.
For one thing, itt's a mistake to try to generalize about which industries are the ones "in which ex-presidents make easy money."
In light of 30 years with of IT advancement we need to update the law rather than puzzle over its interpretation.
Implementation of a political solution would entail technical aspects, but the idea that a political solution needs to wait for a complete and total resolution of all the technical aspects of Israel's security problems just ensures that neither the politicsl nor the security issues will ever be addressed.
For months now, everywhere you go you see articles speculating about what Barack Obama will do once he's in office. And speculating about the consequences of Obama's policies, but speculating about their content.
...
Parliamentary government offers basically two alternatives to the mysterian nature of the American system.
I've longed maintained that a big part of the reason is simply that there's no way to understand the extent of the Bush administration's misdeeds that doesn't also make a lot of congressional Democrats look ridiculous.
Once again, from reading this homages to the genius of Bush-era counterterrorism you would never know that an order of magnitude more Americans were killed by transnational Islamist terrorists under George W. Bush's watch than under all previous presidents combined.
Matt always seems to struggle when creating images for his posts. Yesterday he provided two examples to illustrate that point.
First, in his post about Poland's voting patterns, Matt provided us with this image:
I added the border to the image above to help draw attention to the fact that Matt also added a kind of border to the image. Just inside the red border above, there are a series of small black dots that were likely added when Matt used some kind of cut-rate process to resize this image. As you can see if you examine the original image, the dots were an addition provided by Matt.
Another example of a bad image appeared in the post about the Bush record, which directly follows the one we discussed above. Here is the image that Matt likely created himself for the post:
As you can tell, it's a graph that was created in Microsoft Excel. As you can probably also tell, Matt simply took a screenshot of the graph while he had the graph selected in Excel, which is why those black squares appear in the middle of the left and right sides of the image. Also on the right edge, just above the graph, is what appears to the the left edge of a tool tip. Admittedly, Excel doesn't make it super-easy to export charts. But if Matt is going to rely on screenshots, he should at least learn to get his screen in an acceptable state before grabbing the image.
And personally while I recognize a lot of virtues to New York City, I prefer living in a smaller city.
It was a reminder of the pettiness of mid-1990s politics, but also a reflection of the fact that the Bartlett administration, like the Clinton administration, and like many other politicians, had a certain imagine in its head of how politics worked.
And it's really striking that other people in the conservative movement seem to take this "accomplishment" very seriously. Here's Christian Brose and here's Dov Zakheim being very referent about the whole thing.
It's been a long time since taking midwestern agricultural products via train to Chicago and then by boat across the Great Lakes, across the Eerie Canal, down the Hudson, and to the port at New York was a major element in the American economy.
We've been acting like a rogue superpower for the past eight years, and sweeping that all under the rug just because it fits Barack Obama's political style doesn't undue that image.
Prosecutors have a lot of discretion, so I believe AG Holder would be within his rights to simply decline to investigate the former Vice President of the United States public admission that he's committed what Holder claims to believe are serious crimes.
Or, rather, that Obama seems health care reform as the centerpiece of his approach to long-term budgetary strategy.
I mean, what are worried about?
Like Kevin Drum, I haven't yet posted on the Oscar Grant case. In part that's because this seems so open-and-shut that there's not much to say. As you can see on live video, officer Johannes Mehserle pulls out his gun and shoots an unarmed, subdued man in the back for what looks to be no reason
Issues such as air pollutions and ocean acidification weren't major topics of concern during the high tide of classical liberalism.
What's more, there's a difference between saying (to use some hypothetical numbers) "here are 1,000 different projects, each costing $1 billion, and each of which is ready to go" and saying "we're ready to go with $1 trillion worth of spending on a 1,000 projects."
The world approximates how these models work, so they're important to shaping our understanding.
And, indeed, how Israel's settlement expansions and growing network of roadblocks and special highways crossing the West Bank are weakening Fatah and the forces of Palestinian moderation.
Dahlia Lithwick and Philippe Sands observe that the Torture Convention, to which the United States is a signatory, "every state has a treaty obligation to criminalize torture, and to prosecute torturers itself or extradite them for prosecution elsewhere."
Famously, the radio proved to be a hugely effective communications medium for Obama. But then the pendulum swung back in the age of TV. And now in the internet age, it's swinging back again in an interesting way....
The internet is famous for the way it fragments attention, but one of the ways in which it does that is by making it possibly to narrowcast more content to interested parties than would ever be viable to push through the crowded pipes of cable television.
Mistake of the week winner, January 11-17, 2009
As the Internet's leading source for all Matthew Yglesias typo news and analysis, we thought we'd share this item from Andrew Sullivan today:
The the impotence of proofreading. Sounds like Matt Yglesias's blog sometimes reads ...
Indeed.
Not only is this barrel full of tax cuts proposed by the Republican Study Committee pretty bad stimulus, but to even call a package of permanent tax cuts a "alternative stimulus" is a serious abuse of the term.
But the do little to change the behavior of either the jaded older faculty member or the harried junior faculty member.
To be maximally effective, I think the United States need to commit itself publicly to this goal as well as raising it privately.
James Kirchick mounts a semi-defense of Israel's move to ban the party's two Arab political parties.
Or thing about the Employee Free Choice Act.
The Tennessee had a 50-49 majority in the state House of Representatives until the Democrats got clever:
They might want to ask some of the people working for the firm on the bottom rungs -- the janitors and so forth -- if they really appreciate these kind of "charitable" efforts to deny poor people any better commuting options than the bus?
Specifically, he takes at Nadhim Khalil, the bossman of a Sunni Arab town called Thuluyah.
But the 40 market-rate units is better for affordability than is letting the site remain as a vacant lot or a very low-density use.
Another provocative thought is that we ought to formally divide the execute.
An interesting related issue that can only be speculated about is to what degree would we see much closer political integration between Arab states if he had more political democracy.
And then there are issues about things like created a grid that's "smart" enough so that a house with solar panels on the roof could transmit energy during surplus (i.e., sunny) hours and get credits that it can "cash in" to receive energy during deficit hours (e.g., night time).Link
This doesn't effect Arab Israelis who are members of Zionist parties or the Communist Party.
UPDATE: NB, a higher ed buddy writes it to warn against conflating the student loan issue and the tax credit issue the way that first article I linked to does.
And of course it buts up against the fact that US policy toward Israel is in part a real aspect of our national security policy and in part an aspect of US domestic politics.
Relieving that congestion will due us enormous enduring economic good.
The influence of this blog and it's humble author cannot be overstated.
And just remember: Jeb Bush will be President of the United States one day. Most likely in 2016, but possibly in 2012 or 2020 depending on the course of events. The Republicans are bound to win one of these days, and they just can't quit to Bush family.
There wasn't enough accountability after Watergate and that helped lead to the lack fo accountability around Iran-Contra.
I would say that surrounding yourself with people who advise bad choices of action, and then letting yourself be manipulated into following their advice rather than the different advice being offered by other people is incompetence.
But obviously it wouldn't have bene right for me to stop, get off my bike, pull a bazooka out of my bag, and blow the houses from which the rock emanated to smithereens while shouting "self-defense!" and "double-effect!"
From a political point of view, there are too things I like about this release. One is that it doesn't overpromise. One of the biggest risks facing progressive politics at the moment is that we inherit a deteriorating situation, take action that ensures things get "bad" rather than "terrible," and that get blamed by the public and the right for creating a bad situation. To that end, it's important not to make unrealistic promises about what you're proposing. Romer and Bernstein are clearly saying he that even if this works, we're going to get to a bad place.
That's about 4 percent points over what we now think is the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU)....
But to build new infrastructure you machines and so forth and we only have so many on hand.
...
Long story short, whatever topline estimate you could do would be pretty uncertain and would run into trouble when you started thinking about implementing it in a micro sense. To make a long story short, the correct answer is a big number but the real limits probably lie in thick in the weeds rather than up in the clouds in a way that makes calculations very difficult.
Instead, Fenty promoted from within and tapped the head of the Office of Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism, a women whose credentials include a thesis on Preventing Terror Attacks in the Homeland: A New Mission for State and Local Police.
I some ways the interesting question is why taxi regulations aren't worse than they are.
In fact, moderation can reflect ideology ever bit as much as extremism can.
I know you'll find this shocking, but The Weekly Standard Michael Goldfarb is lying about J Street.
I think it's important to draw, on a conceptual level, a distinction between the loss of trillions of dollars of wealthy and the serious recession.
One of the great blunders of US and Israeli policymakers alike was the decision to simply ignore the 2002 "Arab peace initiative" putting forward a vision for comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a context that would have normalized relations between the US and Israel....
And while Ehud Barak has taken the view that what he put on the table back that is now magically off the table, Saudi Foreign Minister Al-Faisal was at pains Wednesday to say that's not the case with his government's initiative:
That would offer about $18 billion worth of high-multiplier stimulus, because the beneficiaries would be poor families with a high propensity to consume the marginal dollar rather than wealthy households like to use extra money to try to pick up some bargain investments.
The Abiguity of Talking
In particular, I do believe that it would be a good idea to make these kind of investments.
And then take a look at David Brooks' view that Obaam's stimulus plan is frighteningly audacious.
When I was a colllege freshman in 1999-2000, there were nutty dot-com firms handing out huge salaries to people for no reason. Consequently, it relatively easy to get into a prestigious law school's class of 2003 and guarantee yourself a nice salary when you finished.
We're now up to 2.6 million jobs lost in 2008 and an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, the kind of numbers we haven't see since we pulled out of the early 1990s recession.Link
Apparently there's an organization called One Jerusalem dedicated to "keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty" and therefore making any pace deal between Israel and the Palestinians impossible. And according to this email someone forwarded me, it lovesNetanyahu and US conservative bloggers
Benjamin
The Israel policy right-wing still has an incredibly hold over the US Congress with only a few exceptions such as Rep. Donna Edwards. But to an interesting extent that's not the case in the media. Despite the effort to anathematize John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, for example, I saw Newsweek run Mearsheimer's take on how the US should approach the whole region and and one of the things the Washington Post Company did after buying Foreign Policy was hire Walt.
In particular, you should check out the Streetsblog Network and other avenues to find good urbanism-related sites in your local area -- Greater Greater Washington for DC, and others for other cities.
In a related news, they're doing a recall on civics textbooks that have led generations of schoolchildren to believe that congress just gets to decide what the laws are without "negotiating" with major corporations.
In this case, the high price of parking is keeping customers away from stores and the meter rates are two high.
OIR itself is a sub-part of the Office of Management and Budget and even though nobody's ever heart of it, it has rather sweeping influence across the whole ambit of regulatory activities.
It's just common sense that there are lots of people for whom owning the complete run of a TV show would be worth more than $0 but more than the $100+ prices these things carry in stores.
Not so J.D. Foster and William W. Beach who argue in a new Heritage Foundation paper that more Bushism than every before is needed:
At a certain point, it became clear to the apartheid leaders that there system was untenable. But they were still more interested in the upholding the interests of white South Africa than in abstract considerations of justice.
Will liberals still enjoy shadenfreude over bank failures?
It seems unlike a realist to cite domestic political dynamics as the cause of national security policy, but clearly this is correct. And I would note the last point about the think tanks has implications that go beyond the budget. People don't like to be dishonest -- to advocate for policies they disagree with purely in order for money. And actually the think tank lifestyle isn't very lucrative. Which means that if people and firms who profit from high levels of military expenditures want to support think tanks that support high levels of military expenditures they need to identify individuals who genuinely believe that high levels of military expenditures are good and properly. Naturally, people who think that kind of thing tend to be people who have a somewhat paranoid attitude toward foreign countries and who are strongly predisposed to favor aggressive use of military force by the US and our allies alike.
One assumes demand for cars will get higher than it is right now, but the industry has a whole just has more capacity to build cars than there is demand for new cars.
I don't really want to do an analysis of the short-term of the short term politics, spin, and ethics surrounding this issue beyond noting that back during the "nuclear option" fight I took an anti-filibuster line.
In political terms, meanwhile, it's meaningless. If efforts at creating a strong recovery fail, the opposition will inevitable blame the governing party for the failure irrespective of who voted for what, whereas if efforts at creating a strong recovery succeed nobody will care by what margin it passed.
Todd Gitlin writely calls this "shocking."
Meanwhile, I should say that I'm not normally a strickler for accuracy in these sorts of things.
The smart pay would have been to seize advantage of Iraqi's early 2005 elections...
Probably your can't just hire him, but perhaps he could recommend someone.
Human beings, being fragile creates who evolved on the planet earth, turn out to be hard to send into space. They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extremely long trips even though many interesting things in space are very far away. Under the circumstances, it's just not very practical to send human beings into space unless there's something important that only human beings can do. And in recent decades, there just having been the sort of compelling projects that justify the difficulties of manned space flight. Instead, we've been making up missions -- most recently the preposterous idea of a manned mission to Mars -- in order to justify the human-oriented space program.
If Hamas were to recognize Israel tomorrow tomorrow , Israel would not turn around and renounce settlements;
a big part of the point of becoming a prosperous society is enable people to do frivolous (read: fun) stuff.
But mere improvement isn't, to coin a phrase, the change we need.
I suspect Barack Obama might disagree with Matt's claim to have just invented that phrase.
I was out at a bar in Geneva back in November and people were allowed to smoke inside and generally being all European.
A good friend of mine with general wise views on most matters has, in recent months, started taking the strongly counterintuitive line that those of us with iPods -- a group that includes himself -- are suckers and that the Zune is actually a better product.
The absolutely terrible state of the Wizards has discouraged me form paying much attention to the NBA thus far this season.
The difference is that Ward 3 has the fewest proportion of poor people of any ward whereas Ward 8 has the most.
To me, one of the most frustrating recurring notions that comes up when talking about transportation policy is the idea that bad policies that subsidize auto commuting over all alternatives is a handy way of helping out the poor.
That's probably a decent idea. But I have to say that in my view both the Illinois situation, the Delaware situation, and the New York situation all basically serve to illustrate the over-arching point that states would be well-advised to adopt a rule whereby Senate vacancies will be filled by special election. The constitution lets them do this, they just need to walk through the open door. Meanwhile, as a pure tactic matter I'm baffled that Patterson didn't just act quickly to designate NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. That would have been the obvious thing to do, and nobody would have serious second-guessed it had it been done swiftly. Instead, dawdling created this Caroline Kennedy opening and how Patterson's put himself in an awkward position that he could have easily avoided.
