UPDATE: NYT Obituary here. Some book cover images added. Two years ago at Readercon, I found myself doing some hero-worship in the Green Room. Friday, we had discovered that my piece on Jorge Luis Borges was the first of the appreciations of that year’s Memorial Guest of Honor. (I assume this was because of its […]

Barack Obama has been reading the Wall Street Journal.

But it’s difficult to argue with the rest of this piece. Now I qualify as Gloom and Doom member?

Infrastructure – The Next Big Deal? #1 Reuters carries a report on an infrastrucutre concern: The worst Midwest flooding since 1993 has generated images of swamped towns, cracked roads, washed-out bridges, overwhelmed dams, failed levees, broken sewage systems, stunted crops and water-logged refugees. The losses are in the billions of dollars and still mounting, as […]

He’s more of an optimist than I am—but that isn’t difficult. Then again, he is also well aware that, were Hillary to drop out today, it wouldn’t be all peaches and cream from now until after the nominations are in place. People are saying that Hillary is “race-baiting” because she mentioned “blue-collar whites.” Save the […]

As I read Brad DeLong fulfilling the plea from Jonah Goldberg: Well, we want to put up more quotes from the pages of NR, past, present and future there I had to wonder. Brad is a very good economist and yet he provided quotes about NR’s racism and love for Joseph McCarthy but nothing on […]

David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal is feeling bearish this morning: Every so often, economic forces and financial markets collide in ways that make for a tumultuous year — the stock market crash in 1987, the Asian financial crisis and bond-market paralysis in 1998, the bursting stock bubble in 2000. Suddenly, this year has […]

Brad DeLong pays tribute to the late Lloyd Bentsen as does David Rosenbaum. While it was not the purpose of his post, Daniel Drezner pays a very nice tribute to Bill Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary: The White House seems to view the Treasury Secretary as a salesman’s job, as opposed to a position where that […]

Bruce Bartlett and Brad DeLong note that even the Washington Times is challenging the credibility of our Treasury Secretary: According to Mr. Snow’s own numbers, which Mr. Frank had to drag out of him, over the past 12 months average nominal wages, for production and nonsupervisory employees, who account for 80 percent of private-sector employment, […]

The latest op-ed from David Brooks is entitled From Freedom to Authority and includes this spin: In the 1970’s and 80’s, conservatives felt the primary threat was the overweening nanny state. Ronald Reagan tried to loosen the structures that restricted individual initiative and led to national sclerosis. He and Margaret Thatcher deregulated, privatized, cut tax […]