To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state’s initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it. The hope is voters will be enticed by promises of thousands of local jobs, increased tax revenue and investments in infrastructure like parks, a performing arts center, shopping, dining […]

Update: Noahpinion takes on the same in How to win arguments by pretending to be stupid.  The comments section offers other points of view. Ron T. aka Jazzbumpa received an unusual thank you from Paul Krugman for this post on a Mish Shedlock post about debating PK. Krugman recommended Beverly Mann  on January 15th this year […]

Angry Bear contributor Rebecca Wilder has begun writing her own column, The Wilder View, at the internationally prestigious Economonitor (Nouriel Roubini). The Wilder View at Economonitor Europe: Why the One-Size-Fits-All Solution Won’t Work and Linking sovereign risk to corporate credit spreads in Europe …and is interviewed and quoted by Floyd Norris in the New York […]

The NYT moves deeply into delusion: The rolling real estate crash that ravaged Florida and the Southwest is delivering a new wave of distress to communities once thought to be immune— economically diversified cities where the boom was relatively restrained. In the last year, home prices in Seattle had a bigger decline than in Las […]

I try not to pay attention—and not provide a direct link—to the NYT’s Stupidest Conservative. It’s one of the greatest advantages of having Susan of Texas around: you can go there and see anything I might write, done better, and (in this case) with cute graphics. But when Brad DeLong falls down on the job—dealing […]

Floyd Norris discovers a mathematical impossibility: Asked to rank, on a scale of one (excellent) to five (poor), the ability of their board’s compensation committee to “effectively manage C.E.O. compensation, 83 percent of the directors chose one or two, and only 4 percent picked four or five. But asked, “In general, do you believe U.S. […]

UPDATE: Tristero piles on the details that I assumed. And Bloix in comments there makes it clear that the diagram which has the Generals’s panties in twists is relatively straightforward compared to a car’s electrical system (as anyone who has used Erwin or Visio or even Powerpoint to build data flow diagrams can tell you). […]

Edmund L. Andrews (most recently of the NYT and being pilloried by Megan McArdle for having the gall to marry a woman whose previous marriage ended in bankruptcy) has joined Andrew Samwick, Stan Collender, Pete Davis et al. over at Capital Gains and Games. His first post, “Hopes of a Chastened Capitalist” is here.

Charlie Stross talks about liquidity: What we’ve just seen, hidden in the euphemism here, is a confession that drug cartels and other organized criminals have gone on a $352Bn asset-buying spree — and the banks and regulators, world-wide, turned a blind eye to this because the alternative was to allow the banks to collapse. And […]

NYT headline: Audit Finds TARP Program Effective. Paragraph six of the same article: The Treasury’s lack of clarity about the program’s goals, the oversight panel said, made it hard to assess its overall effectiveness. Mr. Geithner is scheduled to testify on Thursday in his quarterly appearance before the five-member panel. [emphasis mine] Clearly. one of […]