Hat tip to Robert’s Stochastic thoughts for this link to Steve Benen. The bet is on for 100 flip flops before election time. What is a flip flop versus reasoned change of viewpoint?

Aguanomic’s David Zetland is collecting great sources on the rights and economic of water. My time is restricted currently, but think it is worh passing on as it stands. TP1: Favoring Farmers This week, we have a few rants from an anonymous guest (The Teal Pimpernel?). Here’s the first: There is a water conservation bill […]

The always smart Kevin Drum writes The windfall profits tax is a dumb idea, and I wish Obama didn’t support it, but I guess politics is politics. It’s not the biggest deal in the world. I asked in comments what’s so dumb about a windfall profits tax. I haven’t checked how many commenters responded to […]

Bloomberg reports: ExxonMobil bought back $29 billion of its own stock in 2006, $28 billion in 2007 and has already bought back $16 billion in the first half of 2008. Even so, it reports $39 billion in cash on hand and is all but certain to report more than $40billion in profit, along with $32 […]

Hat tip to Economist’s View for this post from Vox EU: Obama, the optimist on trade, by Susan Ariel Aaronson, Vox EU: Around the world, the press has portrayed the 2008 US presidential election as a choice between freer trader John McCain and “protectionist” Barack Obama. That traditional paradigm has helped the media simplify the […]

Did you notice. Obama mentioned selling oil out of the strategic oil reserve and the price of oil fellalmost $5. That is a bigger drop than suspending the federal gasoline tax would produce. Man, I wonder how the Republicans are going to give Bush credit for this drop. Of course, It could not have happened […]

hat tip Old Vet McCain, who’s obsessed with skinny blond women, made a stupid ad equating Obama with a vacuous young blond Paris Hilton and also Britney Spears. Pure celebrity based on nothing but hype and looks. Wait a minute! Let’s talk about vacuous blond rich girls for just a minute, and who has them […]

by reader ilsm From the comments, CoRev states: “ILSM, breaking the rqmts [requirements] into bite sized chunks (design or parts of it) can work if the rqmts are reasonably well defined. Buying an entire Weps [weapon system], even with a fly-off, is/was ludicrous. Every engineering change and there will ALWAYS be many open/re-opens and re-re-opens […]

Soc Sec XXXVI: $17 Trillion Backward Transfer was a response to a comment by Jim Glass (scrivener.net) to a post by Andrew Biggs. Andrew responded with a new post attempting to rebut my argument. You can see the whole thing at Responding to Angry Bear: Where does $17 trillion come from including my response to […]

Time to knock this one down before it gets started. Over at Andrew Bigg’s blog he has a post up called Academy of Actuaries: Raise the Retirement Age. I am not particularly concerned with the text quoted which actually amounts to some AP guy’s take on an advance copy of what the Academy will actually […]