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Given the influence of the Texas textbook selection process on textbooks available for schools nationwide, the decision of the Texas board to adopt even-nuttier-than-usual standards, on a straight party-line vote has national importance. If I were Barack Obama, worried about mobilizing the pointy-headed part of the base for November – and especially the schoolteachers, some [...]
Archive for March, 2010
March 12th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
Some owners of empty buildings with big shop windows are allowing them to be used as temporary art-gallery space. The alternatives seem to be leaving them vacant and renting them out essentially as billboards. Whether or not the gallery-space option is preferable for the owner of the building, it’s clearly better for the owners of [...]
March 12th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
Given a fairly bad compromise in the Senate, why not go the administrative route instead?
March 12th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
I don’t often agree with Brooks, and he’s fundamentally an Obama opponent while I’m enthusiastically an Obama supporter. Brooks seems the same reality I do: a serious, pragmatic, tenacious center-left President trying to optimize over a difficult set of constraints. In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a [...]
March 11th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
Apparently a deal is now in place to do it through reconciliation along with the patches to the health bill. That should help reassure House Democrats that they’re not going to get left in the lurch if they pass the Senate bill. But it also transfers tens of billions of dollars from banks (and the [...]
March 11th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
No more Mr. Nice Guy: Eleven months ago, I wrote you to share my expectations for the coming health reform debate. At the time, I expressed Democrats’ intention to work in good faith with Republicans, and my desire that – while we would disagree at times – we could engage in an honest discussion grounded [...]
March 11th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
The chief exorcist at the Vatican says that some bishops are “linked to the Demon.”
The Pope. of course, is the Bishop of Rome.
March 11th, 2010
A child dies in Rio in a storm: your and my responsibility.
March 10th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
“On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Or an FBI agent.