Archive for March, 2011

March 13th, 2011

The State Department spokesman who spoke out on the maltreatment of Bradley Manning is forced out.

March 13th, 2011

The completeness of the destruction wrought by a tsunami beggars words.  These pictures are almost beyond belief, but there they are, in some ways more amazing than the videos of cars and houses washing down the street.

March 13th, 2011

Trying to make the political process serve the public interest is hard work, and most of the time, good people will fail. Whether at the level of town councils or national governments, I have seen many people who entered as idealists and left cynical as they were crushed by experienced lobbyists, deceived, saw their message [...]

March 13th, 2011

Jack Lew cleans Charles Krauthammer’s clock.

March 13th, 2011

Picking up on Michael’s post, here is an article written by a thoughtful economist on why there could be $20 bills lying around on the streets.   In my Los Angeles, water is cheap and even electricity prices are low.  If consumers faced higher water and electricity prices, we would see a faster diffusion of the products [...]

March 12th, 2011

The great CFL debate is back!  And the Tea Party stalwarts, along with the always-entertaining Joe Barton, are plunging in to defend us from overweening governments that have the nerve to tell us which side of the road to drive on and what color taillights cars should have. As usual, the lamp (lightbulb, in common [...]

March 12th, 2011

As a group, political reporters are far more secular than the rest of the country, leading them sometimes to misrepresent or underappreciate the impact of religion on voting. I think there is some informative shoe leather reporting undone about how Mormons are perceived by GOP voters. When I talk to Christian Evangelical friends who are [...]

March 12th, 2011

Starting with FDR and moving forward in history, the White House staff has become larger and larger and exerted more control over once-autonomous cabinet departments. A friend of mine who was deputy budget director for JFK related that the White House was still so small in the early 1960s that when there was a policy [...]

March 11th, 2011

Asked about the extraordinary conditions imposed on Bradley Manning and the even more extraordinary remarks of the State Department spokesman dumping on DoD for that mistreatment, Barack Obama sounds completely clueless. Clueless at the Bush level: I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his [...]

March 11th, 2011

The official spokesman for the State Department isn’t happy about the torture of Bradley Manning.