Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Richard Williamson and John Bolton are Jewish! Recent converts, apparently. [Updated.]

Are Richard Williamson and John Bolton—two of Romney’s three main foreign-policy advisors, and reportedly the two most influential—Jewish?  Really? Or are they simply under the influence of Dan Senor and other manipulative neocon Jews?  Sorta like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were. Oh, please. —- WARNING: Every word of the above post except the last […]

Outsourcing, Education, and Thinking about the Future

I was hopeful that some of our better-known companions would be smart enough to ignore the attempt by McMegan (University of Pennsylvania, Bachelor’s in English Literature, mid-1990s) to argue, in a magazine that aspires to be People, that going to college—and most especially getting a degree in the Liberal Arts—is not cost-effective. We can forgive […]

How can You be so Obtuse

Adventures in cyberspace. My 15 year old daughter Kathy has to buy a TI-84 calculator for school.     So she was on Amazon.com.   We have recently semi moved and I didn’t exactly know the address    where I am typing.   I asked her if she knew our zip code.  She said, “How […]

 Atrios is an economist and reminds us of an option not taken: I don’t think Bernanke can legally start mailing checks tous, though I think when he hits the “emergency powers” button he canprobably do just about anything, but it isn’t said often enough by theright people that there are alternatives to giving free money tobanks, such […]

Deregulation Without Cultivating Better Rules

Top bank lawyer’s e-mails show Washington’s inside game at Bloomberg shares insights into how regulation is impacted when regulators and the industry regulated share too much. Pruning Hedge Fund Regulation Without Cultivating Better Rules By Jesse Eisenger, ProPublica at Dealbook, NYT also writes on the SEC and de-regulationscommercial water slides for sale.

My email correspondence with Glenn Kessler

An email correspondence between Glenn Kessler and me yesterday afternoon and evening, which I’m publishing here in full, speaks adequately for itself, I think.  But first, this, because I think it’s relevant: NEW YORK – Mitt Romney on Friday denounced an anti-Muslim film that is stirring unrest in the Middle East, even as he stood […]

Did Romney’s Foreign Policy Team Indicate That He Would Try to Establish Autocratic Puppet Regimes In the Middle East?

The headline on the Washington Post’s opening Web page was irresistible: “Romney aides: No Mideast turmoil if he were president.”  The headline of the actual article, by Philip Rucker, though, is headlined “Romney team sharpens attack on Obama’s foreign policy.”  Both headings are accurate. Romney’s foreign policy team—drawn, apparently, entirely from the farthest-right faction of […]

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Should Stick to Checking Facts [Edited for clarity]

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, wrote last evening: The controversy over a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo is an interesting example of how words and context matter. State Department officials reportedly tried to dissuade the embassy staffer who wrote it from posting it, but he did so anyway. Nuland’s comment on Thursday […]

Public and Private Investment

One not particularly cute graph; no analysis, explanation, nor editorializing. GDPI is gross domestic private investment. NDGIC96 is Real Federal Nondefense Gross Investment. SLINVC96 is Real State & Local Government Gross Investment. Source page at FRED. Note that private investment runs at about 7 times the total of government investment at all levels. Make of […]