MICKEY KAUS HELPFULLY OFFERS a new business plan for The Atlantic.
Archive for 2009
October 15, 2009
CONSTANT-DOLLAR DOW: Today’s 10,000 is really 7,537. Or, in another metric: “It cost about 30 ounces to buy the 10,000 Dow last time. Now it costs less than 10.”
UPDATE: A reader sends this Bloomberg screen grab showing Dow over CPI. “In
real terms, we’re near the bottom of the dozen year range.”
THE FIVE FACES of Jerry Brown.
LIMBAUGH FANS STARTING A punt the NFL campaign? “I have cancelled my DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket package (including the Supercast). I will not watch ONE MINUTE of NFL games or coverage this season—including the Super Bowl.”
I’ll take that pledge too! [You never watch NFL football anyway. — ed. Oh, right. Never mind.] I’ll bet there’s a big overlap between Limbaugh fans and NFL fans, though, so it’ll be interesting to see who wins out in a battle for loyalties. . . .
According to the data, not all races are considered equal in the college admissions game. Of students applying to private colleges in 1997, African-American applicants with SAT scores of 1150 had the same chances of being accepted as white applicants with 1460s and Asian applicants with perfect 1600s.
The results of the study come three years after Jian Li, a rejected Princeton applicant, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. He alleged in the complaint that he had been discriminated against based on his race when he was denied admission to the University.
Read the whole thing.
5’10” AND 120 LBS is too fat for Ralph Lauren?
Related: Ralph Lauren goes after Web site BoingBoing.net after it mocks heavily Photoshopped ad. I admire BoingBoing’s “up yours, Ralph” response. As a famous man said, punch back twice as hard!
GATEWAY PUNDIT: More Than 85 Days After Public Beating Of Ken Gladney Charges Still Not Filed Against SEIU Thugs …Update: Media Matters Mocks Gladney. Maybe this means there’s nothing to the story. Or maybe it means the fix was in. But this is clearly true: “Could you even imagine if this would have happened to a black Obama supporter? It would have been all over the state-run media.”
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, KID: Enjoy this organic, gluten-free lollipop!
TIM CAVANAUGH ON ELIOT SPITZER ON THE ECONOMY: When Your Neighbor Loses His Job It’s A Recession. When You Screw A Whore Behind Your Wife’s Back, Get Caught, And Lose Your Job, It’s A Catastrophic Economic Meltdown. “Spitzer’s purple and unmanly overdescription of the Great Recession does remind us of what is most loathsome about Spitzer.”
SO DON’T WORRY, YOUR HEALTH RECORDS WILL BE SAFE: Former police association contractor charged with snooping on ‘Joe the Plumber’. “A former contractor for the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police has been charged with rummaging through state computers to retrieve confidential information about ‘Joe the Plumber.’ . . . The State Highway Patrol says that Gerke used a law-enforcement computer network on Oct. 16, 2008 to access personal information about Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. . . . The Dispatch revealed several questionable checks of state computer systems for confidential information about Wurzelbacher after the presidential debate. Helen Jones-Kelley, then director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, authorized several computer checks on Wurzelbacher that the state inspector general concluded had no legal purpose.”
VIDEO: SOUTH PARK goofs on ACORN.
THOUGHTS ON guarding assets against hyperinflation.
You could write more than one.
UPDATE: Some firsthand advice from a friend who was a year ahead of me at Yale Law:
For the past 3-4 years, I managed a clinical trials project in Zimbabwe and so have had personal experience in doing business in a hyperinflationary economy. I changed USD daily in order to stay ahead of nearly daily price doubling of all commodities, and so hauled around suitcases full of currency. In any case, real estate never lost its value there- I negotiated to buy a headquarters for the project and such dealings were always done in Rand or USD, not in local currency, and in fact, the experience was that real estate actually increased in real value, as cash fled to it as a hard asset. Smart money also went into shares of “Old Mutual” – a publicly traded private insurer that had exceptional cash management skills, and so purchases were often denominated in shares of that company rather than in Zim dollars, since the shares kept pace with inflation. Old Mutual shares’ real value could be measured, because it was traded not just in Harare but in London as well.
Bottom line – minimize cash, maximize real estate and shares in critical product consumer companies.
Well, real estate is cheap right now.
HEALTH CARE TO BANKRUPT STATES? Bredesen warns cost to state could exceed $3 billion.
Gov. Phil Bredesen warned Tuesday that pending federal health care legislation could cost Tennessee far more than the $735 million “best estimate” his administration previously has cited.
The $735 million would stretch over five years, but “in addition, there are huge unknowns for the states in this reform,” Gov. Bredesen said, estimating that those costs, if realized, could exceed another $3 billion from 2014 to 2019. . . . “I’m glad they’re trying to do it without increasing the federal deficit, that certainly is important,” said Gov. Bredesen, a Democrat who has been critical of the plan’s impact on states. “But to turn around and increase the state deficits as the way to handle it that does not seem a very appropriate way to do that.”
Nope. But they’re hoping that no one will notice in time.
8 EXPERTS LOOK AT the future of U.S. spaceflight.
October 14, 2009
IF YOUR RIGHT TO BUY THIS SORT OF THING DEPENDS ON YOUR POLITICS, then why expect that health care will be any different?
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “This should be all over Fox all day long. It should also be all over the internet. We’ll see if right leaning journalists are smart enough to figure out it is dynamite. Most right leaning journalists are sort of like the Palestinians though, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
CAMILLE PAGLIA ON OBAMA AND THE MEDIA. “The mainstream media’s failure to honestly cover last month’s mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.”
THE DOW’S AT ITS HIGHEST POINT IN A YEAR, but the dollar’s at a 14-month low. If you priced stocks in constant dollars, would they be up?
PAYOLA? “Why did Olympia Snowe vote for Obamacare? One reason could be that Maine has a ‘public option’ insurance plan that is going broke, and state officials are hoping Obamacare can save it.”
I just admire the name “DirigoChoice.”
MICKEY KAUS: I knew they’d find a way to punish Ford. “The new UAW contract with Ford apparently does not give America’s surviving non-bankrupt automaker parity with GM and Chrysler, reports Bloomberg. . . . Ford, GM and Chrysler workers used to have more or less equal status within the UAW. Now the union has a reason to give GM and Chrysler an edge wherever possible.”
A SALE ON men’s boots and shoes.
I DON’T SEE A DOWNSIDE TO THIS: GOP senator’s protest grinds Senate to a halt. “At issue is one of Coburn’s top issues — greater transparency in government — as well as his sworn enemy, the powerful Appropriations Committee. Coburn had added to the energy and water bill a provision requiring reports that agencies are required to send to the appropriations panels be made available to other lawmakers and to the public. It’s part of his drive for greater transparency in government.”
MSNBC calls this a “pet idea” of Coburn’s by way of diminishing it. It might more accurately be called “another broken campaign promise” on the part of Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership.