UPDATE: Greg Sargent (via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed) notes that I am hardly alone in my concluding pargraph. The last even semi-useful part of health care “reform” (and that was of dubious value) is dead: The idea of letting people ages 55 to 64 buy into Medicare, announced just last week, had threatened to explode […]

The Shrill One (tm – Brad DeLong) as Optimist: The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right […]

Floyd Norris is Shocked! Shocked! to Find Goldman Sachs controls Congress as well as the Treasury. Where has he been for the past three years? Imagine the reaction if, perhaps during the 1998 Asian financial crisis, a group of Republican legislators had threatened to block legislation unless a contributor to their campaigns received special treatment. […]

Rick Perry famously declared that there was no recession in Texas, even though the only way they balanced the budget was through emergency funding. Rick Perry and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas appear not to talk with each other: Texas factory activity showed the first signs of bottoming out in September, according to the […]

Once of the things that was clear at CGI this week is that the power companies that have looked into alternative energy sources have quickly realised they are not only good publicity but profitable (i.e., lower cost when used to scale). Florida Power & Light (discussed here) expanded an already major commitment, mostly in FL […]

This one’s going to be long because a lot of general themes get presented. Those looking for the shorter version may want to just go to the website and watch the videos.* William Jefferson Clinton (WJC) introduces the proceedings by giving a background on the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). CGI began in 2005, and required […]

It’s true that I have been a bit nastier than usual with some posts (especially this one and this one—though the latter was rather justified by preceding events, as Tom detailed.) The sight of economists who should know better saying “Ewww, tariffs” in the manner of second grade boys who think girls have “cooties” is […]

WalterJon finds a brilliant judge’s response to a “birther” case: The Court observes that the President defeated seven opponents in a grueling campaign for his party’s nomination that lasted more than eighteen months and cost those opponents well over $300 million. Then the President faced a formidable opponent in the general election who received $84 […]

Andrew Samwick: Government bureaucrats don’t reduce costs. Market competition reduces costs. The challenge for health care reform is to get the market competition into the places where we want it — providers and insurers competing to deliver better services at lower prices — and out of the places where we don’t want it — insurers […]

Or at least why the best case for BarryO and Co. is that I’m just not going to bother to vote for the next several years: Apparently, the American swing voter tends to think, “If I’m going to get screwed over, I want it to be by someone who is aggressive as possible about it.” […]