Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Byron York: Hack, racist, or both?

You decide.

David Weigel gets out his beatin' stick.

Arlen Specter, D-PA

Some responses from the De-Nile:

Jim DeMint: The GOP Lost PA Because of "Forced Unionization" (Rebuttal: Union membership in PA is flat or has dropped the last few years)

Losing is Winning!: Bill Kristol and Jim Inhofe, among others. (Rebuttal: None needed here, really. Let's make it a party of say, 25 dudes, then. Now that's winning!)

Michael Steele: Specter is ungrateful--his mamma would be embarrased. (Rebuttal: I guess the GOP thought Specter was their bitch forever.)

My own belief is that Specter looks out first for Specter, and he saw the writing on the wall. But the GOP made his switch awfully easy. Ths blocked quotes from Specter at this post about his press conference about sums it up. The far right GOP members worked very hard and were very up-front about getting rid of Specter. For them to be whining now about his switch just shows how amateur they all are.

Monday, April 27, 2009

A Federalist Case for Gay Marriage

Steve Chapman makes the case.

How it should work when questioning people

First, no blood splatter, yes? That photo Andrew Sullivan uses all the time is just crazy gross.

How it should work.

Alec Baldwin writes!

Daniel Adel review:

“I never wanted to write this book,” he tells us at the outset, in a hangdog advisory that we shouldn’t expect too much. It was also a book I never wanted to read, but here we are, Alec and I, making the best of a bad situation.


HT: The Millions

Friday, April 24, 2009

Barcelona!

Spent half my honeymoon there (one week). Beautiful town--one of the prettiest cities in the world. Nice piece in the NYT on it.

Time, dammit

Running for Mayor has sucked up nearly all my blogging time, sorry. Will work harder at it!

Friday, April 17, 2009

The story, from El Paso

The border city weighs in on the drug war, "border warriors," and media breathlessness.

I've always thought that we need to be listening to those who actually live on the border when developing border strategies. You know, kinda like listening the the Iraqis when developing Iraqi strategy, the economy when developing economic strategy, or science when developing climate strategy.

Silly me.

One would have thought giving local viewpoints a bigger voice in this issue would be right up the GOP alley, particularly coupled with obvious-to-point-out media overreach. Heh. Philosophical consistency isn't a GOP strongpoint, it seems.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Mall operator files for bankruptcy

Operates over 200 malls in the US.

This is all needed, but I'm hopeful we'll come out of all this with a change in how we view success in the economic sphere. No longer should success be defined by continuous and overexcited growth, but rather by steady returns and profits.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Some counterintuitive information on trade deficits from PPI

Trade deficits are down (way down)--that's a good thing, right? Maybe not.

"Higher imports (and usually, therefore, higher trade deficits) have usually been indicators of falling unemployment, while lower imports and trade deficits [as in 1982, 1991 and 2001] go hand-in-hand with rising unemployment."

Monday, April 13, 2009

Obama derangement syndrome

At least Democrats were behind Bush before they turned on him. The Republicans seem to have no trouble turning on a dime when a Democrat gets elected:

Jonah Goldberg taking some heat for mentioning Obama but not accompanying it by making a devil-warding sign and spitting.

Meanwhile, conservative media has already shot its wad over doomsday predictions.

Monday, April 06, 2009