Damaging your enemies, no matter how enjoyable it may be, doesn’t really help you unless you either are able to directly constrain their actions, or demonstrate your capacity for inflicting further harm. Viewed in this context, I don’t see how Blago’s appointment of Burris was the masterstroke the media is making it out to be. [...]
There’s no way Feinstein, after enabling Mukasey, gets away with derailing Panetta.
Just when we all thought we could turn from Illinois to whether Lizard People is going to cost Al Franken his senate seat, the Rod Blagojevich scandal took a turn for the bizarre last week. The comically-corrupt governor of Illinois appointed ethically clean but judgmentally challenged Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. For [...]
While traditional economic indicators are grim, there are a few signs that the panic that drove the early stages of this crisis are subsiding. The
TED spread, a normalized measure of how willing banks are to lend to each other, is way off of its mid-October panic highs, and is approaching levels not seen since Lehman [...]
A week or so ago I mentioned that I pay attention to where politicians are willing to spend political capital, not just what their stated policy positions are. By this metric, Jim Webb just jumped a ton of positions in the Senatorial Badass Rankings. To take a pro-prison-reform stance that can be caricatured easily by [...]
In an op-ed for the NYT on Sunday, Bob Inglis (R-SC) and Arthur Laffer (R-Reagan Administration) argue for a large carbon tax offset by equivalent payroll (as in Social Security) or income tax cuts. I think this is an outstanding idea, especially if done via cuts in the payroll tax. The one issue I have [...]
Maybe it was the Chinese who should have been checking what we were exporting to them a bit more stringently.
Sarbanes-Oxley sure is working as intended, eh?
Tagged deep thoughtI’ve been noticing recently how many parallels there are between the field of computer security, and the problems that face government policy in general. The two domains both seek to solve the same problem: how do you set up a system of rules that will be somewhat resistant to motivated, creative adversaries? The core problems [...]
Representative Brad Miller takes issue with the “Mexican strawberry picker making $14,000 getting a $750,000 loan” story, comparing it as a symbol to Reagan’s welfare queens. This anecdote, if true, should actually be promoted by advocates of reform. The dynamics of power between “housing boom-era bank” and “$14k/year agricultural worker” are indisputable. I really [...]