Archive for May, 2009

May 21st, 2009

Now it’s the haredim of Agudath Israel defending clerical pedophilia.

May 21st, 2009

“Testimony” is evidence given by a witness.
A “testament” is a compact.

May 21st, 2009

President Obama and his administration should consider three actions to stanch the political and international bleeding over Guantanamo, by immediately transforming its nature for however long it stays open.

May 21st, 2009

This post has the hidden agenda of motivating Bob Frank to keep up his recent stream of green posts. Like all smart people of good character, Bob is best activated by arguing with him, though the best I can do on this one is to note that he’s implicitly accepting a known optimal level of [...]

May 21st, 2009

Its contribution to global warming is only a fraction of the damage done by burning a gallon of gasoline: to that add pollution, congestion, accidents, sprawl, and the vehicle-weight-and-horsepower arms races. So we should tax gasoline specifically as well as carbon emissions generically, and fix the resulting distributional issues with annual rebate checks.

May 20th, 2009

Both good ideas. The differences are more in the optics than in the outcomes.

May 20th, 2009

A half century of government-subsidized child abuse and torture by religious institutions (over-the-top-ironically called the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy), and nine years of rearguard obstruction to prevent the story from getting out. US governments were mainly asleep at the switch; the Irish state delivered children to these wolves by the busful. Wow. [...]

May 19th, 2009

…are the cynical object of Gingrich’s most despicable exploitation, especially as he had to splash the shirt with ketchup before waving it around. Hilzoy is on him, and for them, with all four feet here, here, and here. The last (earliest) post so appalled me I left a comment framed as ridicule because there seemed [...]

May 19th, 2009

The question isn’t how much the government spends, it’s the rate of return on that spending.

May 18th, 2009

“I was only giving orders.”