Good News The latest news is that Saddam Hussein may have been captured. Clearly, that would be unambiguously good news. But it leads me to wonder whether the opposition is driven by pro-Saddam loyalty or anti-American sentiment. If the former, then things could take a turn for the better; if the latter, then we’re likely […]

Yet Another Miserable Failure From today’s Washington Post: KIRKUSH, Iraq, Dec. 12 — More than half the men in the first unit to be trained for the new Iraqi army have abandoned their jobs because of low pay, inadequate training, faulty equipment, ethnic tensions and other concerns, leaving the nascent 1st Battalion dramatically understaffed just […]

How Do You Decide on a New Constitution? It’s not easy. Just take a look at what the EU is going through this weekend as they try to write their first Europe-wide constitution. The biggest issue is how much representation in the Council of Ministers to give to each country. They have to be careful […]

Into the Breach Again I Go… Fight it… Fight it… No… Can’t… Resist… Must… Bring up… Trade… Again… It’s not my fault. Blame Brad DeLong. He put up a provocative post yesterday about this week’s Economist piece (subscription required) on white collar jobs in the US being outsourced to places like India. DeLong’s point is […]

Uncompetitive and Unmonitored Josh Marshall has a lovely follow up to Kash’s earlier post on the likely impact of the administration reducing competition for reconstruction contracts in Iraq (illustrative example of this effect: importing gasoline from Kuwait costs $2.64/gallon). Here’s the news from Marshall: When Congress voted the $87 billion for military expenditures and reconstruction […]

Medicare, continued Reader and commenter Greg refers me to this important story on Medicare in the Boston Globe. It’s an oped by two professors, Jacob S. Hacker, assistant professor of political science at Yale and Theodore R. Marmor, professor at Yale School of Management. There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, some of […]

Best Lefty Blogs Wampum is now taking nominations for the “Koufax Awards,” a set of awards for various outstanding achievements in the field of excellence by lefty blogs. In most of the categories, the competition is likely to be fierce (but friendly). Best Blog: Likely to be a close race between Atrios, Marshall, CalPundit, and […]

Real or Parody? I really can’t tell. Read No More Mr. Nice Blog’s for an (alleged) exchange between Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton on the subject of her being the nominee and see if you can tell whether it’s a parody or if Russert is that much of a moron. AB P.S. Sure, I could […]

Thoughts on Campaign Finance I used to be a huge supporter of campaign finance reform. I love the ideal of reducing the influence of money in politics, and the unseemly quid pro quos that it engenders. But I’m starting to wonder. So far, the efforts to temper the importance of money in the political process […]

Be Famous! Not really, but you can be famous for fifteen minutes, or more accurately, famous for fifteen people. For various vacation and job-related reasons, Kash will be posting rarely from around 12/25 to 1/8 and I won’t be able to post much during the first week in January. But you can. My first guest-blogging […]