Month: March 2009
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German High School Shooting
A shooting spree at a German high school has killed at least 10 people and wounded untold others. This tragedy will come as a shock to most in the United States, as our media treat rampages by gunmen as a uniquely American phenomenon made possible only by our lax firearms laws. AP‘s timeline, though, reveals…
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Rick Moran Show
I’ll be appearing from 8-9 Eastern this evening on The Rick Moran Show to talk about the Obama administration’s foreign policy. To join in the conversation, call in at (718) 664-9764.
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Quote of the Day – Bernanke Edition
“Y’know, you can’t wish these things into being.” – Dan Drezner, commenting on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s “eliding of the international dimension of policymaking.” Much of the commentary I’m seeing on responding to major crises — whether we’re talking about the global financial crisis, energy, climate change, or Middle East peace — these days ignores…
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Obama Starving Congress
Taegan Goddard passes on word that, Members of Congress from both parties are grumbling about the “tiny little portions” of food served at White House functions. While some speculate the lack of food could be due to money constraints, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was overheard saying it might be about President Obama’s love of exercise…
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Twitter Problems Solved
Conor Friersdorf is, like most of us, a Twitter skeptic. He predicts “within a year or two, either the wider Twitter frenzy will die down, or else all these people will switch to a Twitter replacement that is more exclusive, or at least provides a better way to separate ‘Tweets’ one actually wants to get…
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Broadband Gap: Why America Lags Behind
Saul Hansell details the fact that broadband Internet access is faster, cheaper, and more universal in most of the developed world, if not as much so as many think. The explanation as to why is rather obvious but continually overlooked in just about any comparison ever made between the United States and other countries: Urban…
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Army Strong
Jim @ The Unholy Rouleur makes a trenchant observation in a post mostly about something else: There was a good Army recruiting ad a little while back in the “Army Strong” recruiting campaign that summed up the Western soldier’s ethos better than anything I have ever heard before or since. The ad’s argument, paraphrased, was,…
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Joe the Plumber Now John Galt
Seen on the drive into work this morning: A Lexus GX470 sporting a bumper sticker reading, “I was Joe the Plumber. Now I’m John Galt.” I’m not sure what to make of that but it’s quite a transition. One wonders what he was driving when he was Joe the Plumber.
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From the Department of Banging Your Head Against a Wall
Former U. S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky has an op-ed in the Washington Post in which she points to a re-emphasis on global trade as the path to economic recovery. In the op-ed Ms. Barshefsky identifies three specific tacks: Negotiate multi-lateral trade agreements. Revive the Doha round. Support economic development in some of the world’s…
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More on the Incident in the South China Sea (Updated)
There have been further developments in the incident that took place in the South China Sea I posted on yesterday. China and the U. S. have filed conflicting complaints over the matter: BEIJING (Reuters) — China said on Tuesday that a U.S. Navy ship involved in a confrontation with its fleet off the southern island…
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Obama His Own Hero? (Updated)
Kate McMillan has discovered a treasure trove of photos at whitehouse.gov placed in a sub-subdirectory called “hero.” All of the photos in that subdirectory include a certain resident of the White House. Bob McCarty and Jeff Emanuel discovered the same thing independently. Now, I’m pretty sure Obama doesn’t have time to upload photos to the…
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French Surrendering in Afghanistan?
French defense minister Bernard Kouchner said yesterday that “We should accept the result of the forthcoming elections whatever it is,” adding, “If nationalist-minded Taliban come to power through the ballot-box and respect the constitution, that is the Afghans’ business.” To be sure, he added an important caveat: “What we reject is support for international jihad.” …
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Academic Hiring: Year of No Jobs
For years, there’s been talk of a wave of Baby Boomer faculty retirements that would finally break the logjam that has made it difficult for newly minted PhDs to find jobs. The waiting continues: Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D.…
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Health Care Costs Crippling U.S. Business?
Not so says CBO’s Doug Elmendorf. CBO director Douglas W. Elmendorf explained this last week to the Senate Committee on Finance, which is chaired by Max Baucus, a leading proponent of government health care. The point is that for employers, health care is merely a part of total compensation: It reduces cash compensation for employees…
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World Bank’s Bleak Economic Forecast
The World Bank has indicated that the world economy will continue to shrink in 2009, that world trade will shrink for the first time since 1982, and that the decline would be the largest since the 1930s. Until now, even extremely pessimistic forecasters have predicted that the global economy would eke out a tiny expansion…
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Quote of the Day – Drinking Republicans
“There’s a lot of interesting data in the NBC/WSJ poll, although much of it is good news for the Dems and sobering news for the GOP (there’s been so much sobering news the last four years I feel like drinking). ” – Glen Bolger Glen’s a founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, which employs my…
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Moderate Taliban an Oxymoron?
In my New Atlanticist piece “Who Are the ‘Moderate’ Taliban?,” I round up the reactions to President Obama’s weekend promise to “reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban” and note that they’re almost uniformly negative. On the surface, “moderate Taliban” sounds as nonsensical are “nonviolent terrorist” or “tolerant Nazi.” Still, as Steve Hynd recently…
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Working Hard – Or Hardly Working?
Matt Yglesias challenges Lisa Schiffren‘s assertion that “The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians).” Matt counters, reasonably enough, that guys who move furniture for a…
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Impeccable Impeded
The United States naval surveillance ship USNS Impeccable has met with some “harassment” by Chinese vessels in the South China Sea: WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Pentagon said Monday that Chinese ships harassed a U.S. surveillance ship Sunday in the South China Sea in the latest of several instances of “increasingly aggressive conduct.” During the incident,…
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Recovery Is Around the Corner. No, It’s Not!
The World Bank is offering a very pessimistic economic forecast. In a bleaker assessment than those of most private forecasters, the World Bank predicted Sunday that the global economy would shrink in 2009 for the first time since World War II. The bank did not provide a specific estimate, but bank officials said its economists…
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The Impossibility of an Export-Driven Recovery
There was an article in yesterday’s New York Times that caught my eye on the flight of capital to U. S. government bonds: As the world is seized with anxiety in the face of a spreading financial crisis, the one place having a considerably easier time attracting money is, perversely enough, the same place that…
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Obama ‘Working the Refs’
Barack Obama is taking great pains to reach out to opinion journalists, Michael Calderone reports for The Politico, and it’s paying off. After some anecdotes about Obama personally calling pundits who wrote negative things with respectful explanations of why they were wrong, Calderone observes, The communications team for President George W. Bush would have been…
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Grading Papers without Reading Them
This one from PHD Comics certainly rings true: Not that I actually graded papers without reading them, of course. But, after having done it a while, you get a pretty good sense of what you’re going to encounter. Shared by Steven Taylor via Google Reader.
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Apocalypse Lame?
Dan over at A Blog Named Sue complains about his disappointment over the current economic crisis. You know, in every movie I’ve seen about the end of the world, civilization collapses because of something wicked cool happening – an asteroid hits, nuclear war, a supervirus, an ape revolution, whatever. If civilization collapses over credit default…
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The End of Hard News?
Via Taegan Goddard, I see that Harry Jaffe is proclaiming an age of fluff in the newspaper business. Today’s news is there is no news on the front page of today’s Washington Post. Not one of the six articles on page A1 begins with a hard news lead that imparts real news to readers. Welcome…
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Limbaugh, Failure, and Media Distortion
Commenter Bithead alerts me to a cross-blog debate that I somehow missed between Patrick Frey and Jeff Goldstein over Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope Obama fails” line at CPAC and the ensuing media frenzy. Essentially, Patrick argues that conservatives should be more careful about what they say so as to avoid being distorted in the media…
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The Punditry Economic Indicator
For over a year now, we have been told consistently by the vast majority of talking heads and pundits that “things aren’t so bad” or “it’s looking up” or “the market/economy/housing market has bottomed out and will go up now” etc etc etc. Obviously, none of these things are true. For the past few weeks,…
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Supplying NATO Forces in Afghanistan
I see that more attention is being paid these days to the subject I’ve been talking about for several years now, the difficulties of supplying a large force in Afghanistan: The U.S. military is laboring to shore up a vulnerable supply chain through Pakistan and Central Asia as it seeks to expand the flow of…
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Hillary Pushes the Button
This AP Photo is priceless. For some background, see my New Atlanticist roundup, “Hillary Clinton Goes to Russia.”
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Negotiating With Iran
Yesterday there was a development on the foreign policy front that I found interesting and I thought I might throw it open for discussion here. During a gathering of NATO foreign ministers Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that Iran be invited to a high-level conference on Afghanistan to be held later this month: BRUSSELS,…
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Unemployment Hits 8.1 Percent
Really bad news on the jobs front: The nation’s unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the highest since late 1983, as cost-cutting employers slashed 651,000 jobs amid a deepening recession. Both figures were worse than analysts expected and the Labor Department’s report shows America’s workers being clobbered by a wave of layoffs unlikely…
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Rush Limbaugh: Not That Influential?
Jonathan Last offers a long retort to the notion that Rush Limbaugh is a significant influencer of American politics, much less the de facto leader of the Republican Party. He rejects, for example, the notion that having a large audience necessarily matters: Consider television. From 1998 to 2005, Everybody Loves Raymond was among the top…
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This Blogging Life
Kevin Drum confesses, “I like articles that have a clear takeaway which I can excerpt and comment on. If there isn’t one, I sometimes put the piece aside and then never get back to it. Bad blogger.” Au contraire. This quality has made Kevin one of the best bloggers out there for more than six…
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Blue Chip Penny Stocks
Barry Ritholz has a depressing list of companies the were going gangbusters quite recently and are now damned near worthless. A partial list: AIG (39 cents) Citigroup (98 cents) E*Trade (66 cents) Unisys (37 cents) Ford ($1.83) GM ($1.83) For those of us who don’t buy individual stocks, here’s some perspective: The bankrupt New York…
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The End of Print Media
Mark Dillen‘s precis of recent developments in the news media is staggering: The news out of Philadelphia is that there is no news — no newspapers, that is. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News have joined the swelling ranks of American print media that have gone bankrupt. Last month, it was the Star…
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Quote of the Day: Mad Malaprops Edition
“Like Simon, I am quite concerned with what a certain foreign minister has called the ‘existentialist threat‘ to Pakistan. In fact, I doubt any country could stand up long in the face of a determined onslaught by existentialists.” – Matthew Shugart
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Ruth Madoff’s Ill-Gotten Gains
Megan McArdle is angry to the point of thinking profane thoughts over the idea that Bernie Madoff transferred some $69 million in assets to his wife’s name to shelter them from the Feds. She, quite reasonably, feels that “those investors certainly deserve it better than Ruth Madoff, who has been living high off of ill-gotten…
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Palin Too Sexy for White House?
A new report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology finds scientifical proof that Sarah Palin’s hotness was a drag on the Republican ticket. The study by University of South Florida researchers Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg, cleverly titled, “Objectifying Sarah Palin: Evidence that Objectification Causes Women to be Perceived as Less Competent and Less…
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Stewart Slams CNBC’s Financial Reporting
For those of you who don’t regularly watch The Daily Show, let me just say that last night, Jon Stewart and the writers there spent about four minutes completely devastating the nature of CNBC’s financial reporting. It was hilarious and awe-inspiring, and really goes to show how awful TV financial reporting really is. Here’s the…
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The Flip Side of Globalization
Add Singapore to the list of Asian economies flagging as exports dry up: But as the world enters a period of deglobalization, Singapore is a window into the reversal of the forces that brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor. With world trade plummeting for the first time since 1982, the long-bustling…
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Zeke’s Magic Pony
In a feature in the March GQ that’s apparently not available online, Zeke Emanuel, brother of Ari and Rahm and senior counselor on health matters to President Obama, describes his vision for a new health care system: I think there are three main goals: get everyone covered, serious and meaningful cost control, and improving the…
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Megan McArdle: Full Frontal Disclosure
Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about Megan McArdle’s relationship with Peter Suderman.
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Obama Going Gray!
The Old Gray Lady has another of the epic scoops that made them the Newspaper of Record. Ace correspondent Helene Cooper breaks the news in a piece of journalism titled “For Young President, Flecks of Gray.” Well, that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray. It happens…
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Protests Don’t Work
Brian Knapp has a good roundup of critiques of protest rallies and concludes that they have outlived their usefulness. Another problem with public protests is that fact that they are generally annoying. Protests, rallies, and other outdoor events that are organized to accommodate large swaths of people also must accommodate their bathroom breaks. They also…