by Peter | 13 Nov 2008 |
Toward the end of the Cold War, Georgi Arbatov, the top America analyst in the Soviet Union, told his American interlocutors that the USSR was doing a terrible thing to the US, it was depriving it of its enemy. In a letter to the NY Times in 1987, he wrote:And here we have a ''secret weapon'' that will work almost regardless of the American response - we would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the military...
by Peter | 13 Nov 2008 |
Michael Lewis's account of the collapse of Wall Street is a must read for insight and understand of what was going on that led to the current mess.I know it won't, but it should, end this foolish notion that markets are self-organizing, self-regulating, rational entities where rational actors maximize value and where self-interested firms don't lie, cheat, and steal. Markets are social entities, perhaps best studied as networks governed by...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Nov 2008 |
Alex Tabarrok explains why government employees should be considered unemployed.Some of you will, I expect, object that Tabarrock is actually referring to those employed by receiving money from workfare programs, specifically those, uh, affiliated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the New Deal. Yes he is. But I fail to see why one class of government employees is actually "unemployed" while every other government employee is...
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Nov 2008 |
by Dan Nexon | 8 Nov 2008 |
As of this morning, Norm Coleman is beating Al Franken by a scant 221 votes. If the trend continues, he may come to rue his strange his claim that "too much is at stake" for a (legally mandated) recount.
by Charli Carpenter | 7 Nov 2008 |
Michelle Obama is doing something very interesting. She is taking back family values from the right.According to Reuters: Michelle Obama brings the skills of a corporate lawyer to the White House as first lady to President-elect Barack Obama, but she says her priority will be her role as 'mom-in-chief' to the couple's two daughters. Michelle Obama, 44, was a passionate advocate for her husband's candidacy, but she says she would not want a...
by Charli Carpenter | 6 Nov 2008 |
I have no idea what this tells us about anything important. But I do like it. McCain's concession speech Wordle is below the fold.Of course, what I'd really like to compare to Obama's victory speech is McCain's victory speech, the one we'll never hear. And I'd be interested to see how Obama's concession speech would have looked compared to the image you see above.
by Randy Waterhouse | 6 Nov 2008 |
Last time I checked, 7M is twice as large as 3.5M. Therefore, if a 3.5M margin of victory is somehow a 'mandate', wouldn't it stand to reason that 7M is twice as emphatic a mandate? Or if nothing else, falls into the category of 'mandate'? I'm not saying that every conceivable progressive policy should now be rammed through, but let's be realistic here about what we saw Tuesday night.
by Dan Nexon | 6 Nov 2008 |
If current leads hold, I will have correctly predicted a 364-179 electoral college outcome, with Obama winning either IN or MO, but not both.
by Dan Nexon | 5 Nov 2008 |
I would be doing our readers a great disservice if I failed to point them to James' fascinating discussion of the future of the conservative movements after 4 November 2008. A taste: Politically, on the right, nobody is dead now. Nobody is discredited. Everyone will decide for themselves. The wagons could be circled even tighter. But the herd is being thinned, and it is hard, for instance, to think of exactly why, say, Elizabeth Dole should...
by Peter | 5 Nov 2008 |
(or why Patrick shouldn’t worry just yet)This is morning, one thing is clear: Barack Obama has won a clear majority of both electoral and popular votes. The polls were not all that far off on the final total, ending up with a respectable record of what states went for which candidate.But to read nearly every major news outlet, publication, and blog this morning, you’d never know it—in an instant, everyone has moved on to the more important...
by Dan Nexon | 5 Nov 2008 |
Exhibit A: Donald's post-election screed, in which he interprets the price mechanism effects of a cap-and-trade system (also advocated by Donald's hero, John McCain) as a threat to tear down ideologically nonconformist energy companies, continues to believe that think tanks such as the Center for American Progress are radical leftist organizations, and may or may not threaten violence against our own government in the context of accusing Obama...