Archive for 2009
March 31, 2009
NETANYAHU TO OBAMA: Stop Iran — Or I Will.
JOHN TIERNEY: The God-Einstein-Oppenheimer Dice Puzzle.
THE HILL: TARP taxpayer commitment $2.9 trillion.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
UPDATE: Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion.
TOM MAGUIRE NOTES A PAUL KRUGMAN BELLYFLOP on the PBGC story. With a huge supporting cast! “My free advice to my friends on the left – sometimes reporters exaggerate and hype their story a bit (really!), so critical reading skills should be applied even if the reporter is bashing Bush. In the Globe story, to pick an example almost at random, the reporter explained breathlessly that the PBGC had decided to invest in equities but waffled on whether the decision had actually been implemented. Looks like April Fool’s came early for some people.”
BIAS AT THE BAR: I was going to try to work in a “we don’t serve their kind here” joke, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
PJTV: ANDREW KLAVAN on the culture and the argument to “shut up.”
FROST / NIXON comes out on DVD. Plus, staying in character.
HOW WE FELL.
WHAT I GOT WRONG about Bush’s second term.
EEOC: FOX GUARDING THE HENHOUSE? “The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation’s workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled. . . . The EEOC has a much worse record of labor and civil-rights violations than most corporations and agencies with a similar-size workforce.”
Fair employment practices, like taxes, are for the little people.
BLOOMBERG: Home Prices in 20 U.S. Cities Fell by a Record 19%. I think they need to. The people I know who have sold houses lately have done so after cutting the price sharply. I still see a lot, though, who seem to think that they deserve to get more than they paid in 2006. Houses priced on that assumption don’t seem to be moving.
WARDING OFF Asteroid Apophis.
UPDATE: Wrong link before. Fixed now. Sorry!
AFTER MY EARLIER MENTION OF WOMEN AND GADGETS, this is interesting: A man writes Slashdot with this problem:
I recently purchased a 10 inch white MSI wind. As you can see it’s a small computer and it’s good for what I use it for. I get a lot of comments from women saying it is ‘cute’ or ‘adorable.’ Not the good kind of cute that will get me the attention I want though, the kind of cute that says they think I have a different presence than I actually want to portray. So how can I make my netbook more manly, or at least have some witty line to respond to the their comments?
This never worried me. Some good advice in the comments — and some bad!
A ROUNDUP OF affordable fly-fishing gear.
STAYING PUT ON EARTH, but taking a step toward Mars. “On Tuesday, six people will be voluntarily locked into a cloister of cramped, hermetically sealed tubes woven inside a Moscow research facility the size of a high school gymnasium. They will eat dehydrated food, breathe recycled air and be denied conversation with practically everyone else but one another. And they must stay inside for 105 days.” This is good research, but I wonder how realistic such tests are — given that the participants’ knowledge that they’re not really bound for another planet must surely color everything?
VETTING? Nominee For Treasury’s Number Two Helped Draft Legislation Deregulating Banks “Tim Geithner’s new nominee for number two at the Treasury Department, Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us. The law that Wolin helped draft has been blamed by some critics, many of them Democrats, for easing up regulatory pressure on huge financial institutions, tangentially helping create today’s mess — and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings.”
IN THE MAIL: From Gary Reback, of Microsoft antitrust fame, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive.
ECONOBLOGGING FROM Keith Hennessey, formerly of the National Economic Council.
POLICY HUBRIS and the current financial unpleasantness.
IN CQ, BILL PASCOE ON MURTHA AND CORRUPTION:
Murtha’s critics aren’t opposed to his ability to bring home the bacon; as the chairman, and then ranking member, and then chairman again of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee for the last two decades, Murtha’s control over the Pentagon’s purse strings is legendary, and the torrent of cash he has directed back to his 12th District makes the Johnstown Flood look like a spring drizzle.
His critics don’t begrudge him his pork. But they are questioning how close he has come to the line of ethical propriety.
And it’s fair to ask whether Murtha remembers any of the lessons he learned during that big of unpleasantness known as Abscam.
Read the whole thing.
AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB WALKENHORST, who’s now performing Government Cheese again. Excerpt:
Give a man a free house and he’ll bust out the windows / Put his family on food stamps, now he’s a big spender / No food on the table and the bills ain’t paid / ’cause he spent it on cigarettes and PGA / They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please / They’re feeding our people that government cheese / It’s the man in the White House, the man under the steeple / Passing out drugs to the American people.
Read the whole thing.
FINANCIAL TIMES: Europe Spurns The Beloved Obama. “Europeans have long worshipped Barack Obama from afar. Now the beloved one is paying his first visit as US president to the old continent. Yet there is every indication that Europe’s leaders are about to stiff him.” Hey, this isn’t what I was promised by the punditocracy . . . .