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…are about the same size and shape. It’s an iron law of sound household management, ignore it at your peril, and I know you will recognize its absolute unvarying truth, that you can put a baseball in your fruitbowl only if you’re willing to take one apple out of it. So what? Does any sane [...]
Archive for July, 2010
July 31st, 2010
Category: California Politics, Education policy, Policy Analysis, Prisons and penal policy, Taxation
July 30th, 2010
There’s enough money in the prison budget to get it done. The trick is having fewer prisoners.
July 30th, 2010
Category: Rhetoric and Framing
You can say it, Mr. President: the bad guys are called “Republicans.”
July 30th, 2010
Brad Plumer in The New Republic rightfully celebrates the emergence of the Western Climate Initiative, which establishes a cap-and-trade system among several US states and three of the most important Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. “Cap-and-trade is coming to the United States,” he notes, “and there is nothing that the Senate can do [...]
July 30th, 2010
On Elizabeth Warren, Charles Fried gets what “libertarian” politicians don’t: it’s no favor to “markets” to let fraud run rampant.
July 30th, 2010
Category: Secrecy in government
What the heck were the people at WikiLeaks thinking when they apparently posted identifying information about Afghans fighting the Taliban?
July 29th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
Is a 40% phytoplankton dieoff over half a century enough to shake the global-warming denialists? How about a report showing that 10 out of 10 indicators are moving in the predicted direction? No.
July 29th, 2010
Category: Energy and Environment, Handbasket, world going to hell in, Journalism (Online and Otherwise), Wayward press
Spoiler alert: if this post doesn’t spoil your week, or worse, you and I don’t share the same reality. What makes human life worth living? Content, obviously: news, art, music, conversation – social intercourse in all media. What makes it possible? Food and drink, broadly defined: fresh water and all the plant and animal products [...]
July 28th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
For the first time since Richard Nixon declared War on Drugs, Congress has cut back on a mandatory drug-sentencing provision. The amount of crack necessary to trigger a 5-year mandatory will increase from 5 grams (about $500 worth) to 28 grams. The change – not, alas, retroactive – would influence about 2900 sentences per year, [...]
July 27th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
Of course, I wouldn’t expect a sense of irony among people devoid of ordinary decency and intellectual honesty. But it does seem strange to observe the colossal message discipline with which the rightwingnutosophere is attacking the Journolist list-serv project for … attempt to create some message discpline.