If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. I hope you enjoy. Today’s is from Gail “The Colander” Collins, who in her column “The Trends of August,” writes: This...
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Morning Constitutional – Thursday, 26 August 2010
Good morning, folks. Miley and Liam broke up. Now, your morning constitutional: An aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who is being investigated for corruption is actually paid by the C.I.A. The Security and Exchanges Commission has approved new rules giving shareholders of companies more power to nominate board members. Food inflation is unexpectedly low, despite the rise in commodity prices. Will Wilkinson: How Reason Imperils Our Fake Libertarian Heritage. Choice passage: There is no form of libertarianism that simply falls out of our cultural endowment, as American moral culture has never been remotely libertarian. The average Tea Partier...
Continue reading...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day – 24 August 2010
If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. I hope you enjoy. Today’s is from David “Yawny Pants” Brooks, who in his column “A Case of Mental Courage,” writes:...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Good morning, folks. It’s primary day in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont. But now, your morning constitutional: Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia has blocked President Obama’s executive order that expanded embryonic stem cell research. At least 33 were killed after Somali insurgents disguised themselves as police officers and stormed a Mogadishu hotel. According to an American aid worker and a Congolese doctor, Rwandan and Congolese rebels gang-raped nearly 200 women and some baby boys over four days within miles of a U.N. peacekeepers’ base near remote eastern Congo...
Continue reading...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day – 23 August 2010
If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. I hope you enjoy. Today’s is from Paul “The Little Professor” Krugman, who in his column “Now That’s Rich,” writes: [I]t’s...
Continue reading...Why didn't the stimulus work as expected?
With 500,000 new people applying for unemployment last week, the most number since November, it appears that the economy, propped up by temporary census workers and last year’s stimulus package, is falling again. The Right is saying that the stimulus was a waste of money, the Left is saying it wasn’t big enough. The truth is, even if it helped a little, it’s not doing enough. Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings does a great job of pointing out one of the most important reasons: Further weakening the effort, a self-styled group of “moderates” in the Senate pared...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Friday, 20 August 2010
Good morning, everybody. Steven Tyler will be a judge on American Idol. Now, your morning constitutional: Israelis and Palestinians are expected to resume direct negotiations for the first time in 20 months. More donors are pledging money for Pakistan, which has suffered devastating flooding, after an emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly. The election season in Australia comes to an end today with the two rivals in a virtual tie. Conservative leader Tony Abbott is challenging Labor’s Julia Gillard, the first female prime minister. Labor lost its very close lead in polls in recent days. Now...
Continue reading...Private buses and the government as a business
Yglesias suggests that the future maybe should involve privately-owned intracity bus lines: Bus lines don’t have the power to transform neighborhoods that rail construction possesses. But buses are by far the cheapest and simplest way of adding mass transit, and municipal leaders should always have their eyes on potential ways to improve things. One possibility that naturally suggests itself is to let entrepreneurs start private intracity bus lines just as we have inter-city buses running from New York to DC, Philadelphia, Boston, etc. Unlike the barbering field I would want to see regulation of this kind of activity...
Continue reading...Why Muslims
Mark Silk knocks it out of the park: In recent years, the wise guys in the Republican Party have cottoned to the fact that the U.S. of A. has become a good deal more Latino than it used to be, and that it might not be such a good idea for the future of the GOP if it embraced (at least publicly) such anti-Latino-immigrant laws as Arizona passed a few months ago. Why not find a less politically potent body of Americans on which to vent one’s nativist animosity? I give you: The Muslims. Unlike the Latinos,...
Continue reading...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day – 18 August 2010
If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. I hope you enjoy. Today’s is from Maureen “Dowdy Doddy Piper” Dowd who, in her column “Our Mosque Madness,” writes: Some...
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