Category: Uncategorized
-
Atlantic Council Honors Clinton, Bono, Ackerman, Mattis, and Abrial
Posting will be exceedingly light this morning, as I’ll be writing lots at New Atlanticist about the Atlantic Council’s annual Awards Dinner, which was held last evening. It together more than 900 leaders from over 50 countries to honor individuals who have made exceptional and distinctive contributions to the strengthening each of the four pillars…
-
The End of the Euro Will Be Blogged
We haven’t posted much about it here but it’s certainly receiving a lot of attention on the other side of the pond. The ongoing fiscal problems of a number of the members of the European Union—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, not so affectionately being referred to as “the PIIGS”—appear to be reaching the boiling…
-
2010 Bigger than 1994? Ctd.
To piggyback on James’ comments below, it’s important to point out some other important metrics that make a Republican takeover of Congress in November pretty unlikely. 1. The hard right turn in the primaries cuts against the GOP. The biggest group of voters who are angry and anti-incumbent can be found among the most conservative…
-
Pennsylvania Loses Seats 9th Census Running
Pennsylvania is Reapportionment’s version of the Biggest Loser. If projections hold, Pennsylvania will lose Congressional seats for the ninth straight Census. Smart Politics: Several projections have been conducted by experts during the last few years – with Texas and Arizona universally considered to be the big winners of multiple seats, with the remaining gains coming…
-
Two Blogospheres: Left and Right
It has long been an article of faith that — in terms of authorship, comment policy, other user interaction, and linking policies — Left-leaning bloggers are more communitarian and Right-leaning bloggers more individualistic. At the same time, however, several studies have found that neither side does a very good job of linking to and discussing…
-
Loch Ness Monster Real!
A senior police officer in the 1930s thought the Loch Ness monster existed. QED: It did. Thus, apparently, is the logic behind a new book on the mythic creature which sees evidence of a decades-long conspiracy. The revelation that a former Scottish police chief believed in the Loch Ness monster and was concerned for its…
-
Why ‘Washington, DC’?
Most of us who live in the area call the nation’s capitol “DC” or “the District” or, less often, “Washington.” But, officially, of course, it’s “Washington, District of Columbia” or “Washington, DC” for short. The Constitutional origins of the “District” part are well known and the “Columbia” part isn’t all that interesting; they had to…
-
Markets in Everything
Will Wilkinson sees Yale’s ban on faculty-student sex as an unwise distortion of the free market. The ban will have a predictably “disparate impact,” and mostly put the kibosh on relationships between male faculty members and female undergraduate student[s]. . . . Moreover the rule is, in effect, a subsidy to male Yale undergrads. On…
-
2010 NFL Draft Grades
While OTB Sports editor Bill Jempty handled the pick-by-pick analysis of the 2010 NFL Draft, below is my annual compilation of draft grades handed out by the media gurus who do this sort of thing. While it’ll be three to four years before we really know how any of the teams did — it just…
-
This Is Alabama. We Speak English.
Tim James’ ad promising that, if he’s elected governor, he’ll save the citizens of Alabama some money by cutting out foreign language drivers’ license exams under the theory, “This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it” is making the rounds. Like my fellow Alabama expat, Stacy McCain, I get…
-
OTB Latenight – The Tragically Hip
-
Do-It-Yourself Virtual Universities?
Anya Kamentz has written a new book titled DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. She gives us a taste of the argument in a piece for TAP: Since 2001, a growing movement — from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and hundreds of other universities worldwide to insurgent bloggers and…
-
Breaking News: Who Cares?
Responding to a defense of shoddy journalism on account of the need to be “15 minutes” ahead of competitors, Matt Yglesias retorts: But there are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be broken. A Type 2 scoop is a pure race…
-
OTB Radio – Tonight at 5:30 Eastern
After a brief hiatus, the next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. Dave Schuler and be joined by special guest Arnold Kling of EconLog to talk about the Iceland volcano and its economic and regulatory fallout, financial reform, the value added tax (VAT) debate, and goodness…
-
Americans Giving Up Citizenship Over Taxes
A small but growing number of Americans are renouncing their citizenship because the tax burden outweighs their perceived benefit: According to government records, 502 expats renounced U.S. citizenship or permanent residency in the fourth quarter of 2009 — more than double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. And these figures don’t include the…
-
Generals Against Obesity?
Some retired military officers have formed something called Mission: Readiness to highlight the impact of our unfit youth on national security. A group of retired military officers says high-calorie school lunches are threatening national security. A study by the group Mission: Readiness finds that school lunches are making American kids so fat that fewer of…
-
Americans Fat . . . But Not THAT Fat
Adam Ozimek, Alex Tabarrok, Andrew Sullivan, Miss Cellania, and others post this picture of “Human Freight Car” Chauncey Morlan (1869-1906), one of the freak show fatties who traveled with the Barnum & Bailey Circus: Alex wonders, “What would the circus goers of 1890 have thought if they were told that in the America of 2010…
-
What’s a University, Anyway?
The juxtaposition of two stories this morning both amused and bemused me. First, the state of New York has forced Donald Trump to change the name of Trump University on account of it not being, you know, a university. In a strongly worded letter obtained by the Daily News, the state Education Department slammed the…
-
Really High Alcohol Beer Gets You Really High
Consumerist’s Chris Morran asks, “Are You Ready For Beer With 32% Alcohol Content?” Well, it’s a wee bit early in the day. But, philosophically speaking, I am! He points us to “Super-High-Alcohol Beer Heads to the U.S.,” the sort of helpful article that, if Time published them more often, it wouldn’t be in danger of going…
-
Misinformed on Taxes
Fellow conservative apostate Bruce Bartlett points out that, not only do Americans wildly overestimate their tax burden but that Tea Party supporters are especially likely to do so. This poll sampled all Americans for their views on taxation and oversampled those who claim to be tea party supporters. Question 54 (page 25) is reproduced below.…
-
Password Security Waste of Time
Company policies requiring you to constantly change your password? Almost certainly more harmful than useful. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the form of user effort and time expended. “Most security advice simply offers a…
-
Jeb Bush: Still Running Florida?
AP’s Martin Merzer notes that it seems that Jeb Bush, who left Florida’s governorship four years ago, still seems to be running the show. Ease class-size limits — check. Cut corporate income taxes — check. End tenure for new teachers and link teacher raises to student performance — check (for now). All of those measures,…
-
Larry King Divorce #8
Septugenarian talk host Larry King has just filed for divorce. For the eighth time. Larry, 76, and Shawn, 50, were married back in 1997 — they have two sons together. Back in 2007, Shawn had bragged about being the only one of Larry’s wives to have made it into “the two digits.” She is the…
-
Why People Don’t Like Cilantro
A highly touted story in the NYT explains why a lot of us don’t like cilantro. Apparently, it doesn’t taste good to us. Who’d have guessed?
-
Neil Armstrong Attacks Obama Space Plan
Neil Armstrong has led a pretty quiet life since becoming the first man to set foot on the moon four decades ago. But he’s going public with his displeasure over President Obama’s rumored plan to cancel the next generation space vehicle. The first man to walk on the moon blasted President Barack Obama’s decision to…
-
The Recession Is Over, Right?
Bruce Bartlett is “astounded” that some financial journalists are taking the fact that the National Bureau of Economic Research hasn’t told us when the recession ended as an indication maybe the recession hasn’t actually ended. No, Bartlett explains, he is “100% certain that every member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee knows perfectly well that…
-
DC Woman Killed In Collission With Security Vehicle
A 68-year-old DC woman was killed last night as her bicycle collided with a 5-ton military truck providing security for the attendees of the Nuclear Security Summit. ABC7: “Our assignment was to block the intersection as motorcade came through,” stated Major General Errol Schwartz. D.C. National Guard moved in to block 12th Street at New…
-
Six Dead in Pakistan Name Change Riot
A decision to change the name of our of Pakistan’s border provinces has yielded tragic results: Six people were killed Monday and more than 200 were injured following protests over plans to rename Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province. The Pakistani Parliament sent a decision to a committee on constitutional reforms April 1 to change the name…
-
Customize Your Blog Reading
Like many of us, Jim Henley reads blogs through a feed reader. Now, he’s working on customizing his reading experience by creating some “edited feeds” via Yahoo Pipes that eliminates recurring posts that he doesn’t like: Open-Thread-Free Eschaton, Outside the Beltway — Substantive (no caption contests or music videos), and Poliblogger Gringofied (no Latin American…
-
Tennessee Ousts Grad Student Over Driving Conviction
The University of Tennessee is holding a 60-year-old graduate student in academic limbo over a reckless driving incident that occurred hundreds of miles away from campus. Even at 60 years old Suzanne Glen is a fighter. She fought through an agonizing childhood disease that resulted in the loss of her colon, divorce, the loss of…
-
America: Economically Unfree?
When the Heritage Foundation announced this week that it had moved the United States to “mostly free” for the first time in the history of its Index of Economic Freedom, I took it as a flaw in the index rather than a useful statement about freedom in this country. Like many libertarian-leaning conservatives, I frequently…
-
Tiger Shoots Two Eagles
I’d say Tiger Woods is back. In his first tournament back after months of scandal and “rehab” for his “sex addiction,” he showed up and shot two eagles in his first round. At the frickin’ Masters. The only way I could shoot two eagles in one afternoon is to take my 12-gauge to the…
-
Alcohol Awareness Month
An interest group sent me an email to elicit my help in letting readers know that it’s Alcohol Awareness Month. Which reminds me: It’s time for another beer.
-
DC Shuts Down for Nuke Summit
A huge chunk of downtown DC will be closed for three days to accommodate next week’s Nuclear Security Summit. A memo went out sometime yesterday and a colleague passed it on late in the afternoon. As Josh Rogin notes, this will be incredibly inconvenient in a city whose infrastructure is already stretched to capacity: If…
-
Reagan’s Tax Increases
Conservative renegade Bruce Bartlett agrees with Alan Simpson and me that today’s doctrinaire tax-cutters misunderstand or distort Ronald Reagan’s record. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Simpson, like almost all Republicans in the Senate in the 1980s, probably voted for the many tax increases supported and signed into law by Ronald Reagan, which eventually…
-
Virginia’s McDonnell Declares Confederate History Month
My governor has opened up an old wound, declaring April Confederate History Month. Anita Kumar and Rosalind S. Helderman seem to have broken the story for WaPo’s Virginia Politics Blog: Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark…
-
Coffee Conservatives
When I first read about the Coffee Party movement a few weeks back, it was a lark that started on Facebook to “promote civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engage the government not as an enemy but as the collective will of the people, push leaders to enact the progressive change for which 52.9 percent…
-
Hamid Karzai’s April Fools Rant
On April Fools Day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out at “foreigners” who have been criticizing his corrupt, inept government, leveling bizarre charges that the rampant fraud in the recent elections was perpetrated by UN officials, the European Union, and other non-Afghans. It was, alas, no joke. In my New Atlanticist post, “Is Hamid Karzai…
-
Why College Tuition is Growing So Fast
Artificial intelligence guru Patrick Henry Winston, who has been involved with MIT as either a student or faculty member since 1961, notes that tuition increases at the venerable technical school have radically outpaced inflation during that period. So relative to the rest of the economy, MIT’s educational productivity has lagged behind by a factor of…
-
Is Karl Rove Conservative?
Reagan apostles Craig Shirley and Donald Devine take to the WaPo editorial page to argue that Karl Rove is not a conservative. From William F. Buckley Jr. to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, the creators of the modern conservative movement always taught that excessive concentration of power in government leads inevitably to corruption and the…
-
Internet Future From 1969 (Video)
This video clip from 1969 predicting a future of electronic shopping, online bill paying, instant communications and the like is rather fascinating: It’s apparently from some longer documentary film, although I can’t nail down more specific details. (Or, perhaps more accurately, I’m not curious enough to devote the time.) It’s been making the YouTube rounds…
-
How People Use Firefox
Jason Kottke points to Alex Faaborg‘s interesting discussion of how people use Mozilla’s Firefox browser. In the heat map we can see that the menu items that are used vastly more than all others are the user’s bookmarks, copy and paste. I use copy and paste all the time, of course, given that I spend…
-
Fixing CNN
CNN, the company that invented 24/7 cable news but now finds itself fighting for relevancy, should abandon it’s “View From Nowhere” model of telling viewers what’s important, Jay Rosen argues. Rather than try to compete with Fox and MSNBC as an ideological-driven outfit, though, CNN should instead re-invent the genre. He even has a prime-time…
-
Grade Inflation in Education Colleges
It’s common knowledge that “grade inflation,” the lowering of standards that leads to ever-higher student grades for the same performance, is rampant. Matthew Denhart and Christopher Matgouranis note that, “It has been estimated that there has been at least a 0.1 percent increase in average student GPA in every decade since the 1950s. In 1991,…
-
Jaime Escalante Dead at 79
Jaime Escalanta, the inner city Los Angeles school teacher made internationally famous by the movie “Stand and Deliver,” has died of cancer aged 79. Elaine Woo has a long tribute to him in the LAT: Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master…
-
Take Turns Traffic Sign
Ezra Klein points us to this Gary Lauder TED Talk on making driving more efficient: He correctly points out that roundabouts are much more safe, efficient, and cost effective than stop signs or traffic signals. He acknowledges that sometimes they’re not practical and illustrates in amusing fashion why stop signs cost us a lot of…
-
Misery Loves . . . More Misery
Matt Yglesias points to David Brooks’ assertion that “The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting” in order to tout a congestion pricing tax. Brooks doesn’t pivot from this into any real policy specifics. But the upshot of the commuting point is very clear—we should charge people a fee to drive on crowded roads…
-
Political Sex Scandals
Prompted by the RNC expensing trips to bondage clubs, the folks at the Daily Beast took a look at all “58 scandals over the past 20 years involving all politicians or major candidates for city mayor and above” using a “a methodology that accounted for whether a crime was committed, versus inappropriate behavior; whether the…
-
Marriage and Happiness
NYT columnist David Brooks points to the case of Sandra Bullock, who found out that her husband was having a sleazy affair shortly after she won an Oscar to illustrate his contention that, “If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you…