Category: Uncategorized

The national debate over economic policy is way off track and the stakes are as high as can be. In every important area of economic and social policy—health care, fiscal policy (deficits, debt, taxes), public investment, retirement security, climate change, education, job growth, income distribution—there’s so much misinformation, so many false assertions, that it is impossible for anyone paying attention to evaluate the choices with which they’re faced.

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Democrats lately seemed to be trapped in a position that amounts to: “sure, we have to cut and shrink—just not as much as the other guys want.”

Jared Bernstein, former White House staffer, on why he left Biden’s office. Thusly does the Overton Window move ever rightward. Bernstein claims he’s come outside to “widen the debate,” but I just don’t see how that’s possible without better Democrats and a major media outlet at one’s behest.
But: welcome to the forever drug addled world of dirty hippie blogs, my friend.

“Exigent Circumstances” Are All Circumstances

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sole defender of your Fourth Amendment rights:

How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

Lawyers, Guns, and Money is particularly trenchant in response:

it’s the latest example of the drift of the exigency exception away from actual emergencies and toward the mere convenience of the police. If the police have time to obtain a warrant and there isn’t an actual emergency, they should be required to obtain one.

Yep. Why is this (seemingly) so difficult to a) understand –and– b) get the general public agitated about? Today it’s suspected drug dealers and suspected terrorists whose rights are summarily discarded in the name of “exigency.” Next it will be suspected whatevers. Some time after that, you’ll have no recourse whatsoever to stop the police from randomly entering your house and ransacking it for evidence of crime, any crime, at any moment they care to do so. Exigency!

When literally everything is an extension of the War on Drugs/Terror/bogeyman-of-the-day, then everything is easy to deem simply too exigent to bother getting a warrant. Indefinite detention without charge, assassination of US citizens (without trial), a gulag off the coast and a chain of secret prisons beyond that gulag, and now further, near-unanimous defenestration of our most basic rights.

Seriously, is any of this, even a hint of it, worth whatever public policy victory we think we’re getting out of it, even using the most optimistic possible reading of (in this case) the War on Drugs? I don’t see how anyone could think so.

Shocking. Overall economic growth and employment were both dramatically higher post Clinton tax hikes than post Bush tax cuts. It’s almost, almost like tax cutting doesn’t guarantee economic boom days. Almost.

This should be sitting behind every Democrat in each and every public appearance until it is indelibly burned into the retinas of each and every voter in the most distant reaches of East Turkmenistan and Americans simply cry a few involuntary tears when it’s brought out yet again. Then you can start cleaning out the tax reforms barn once and for all.

Source: tnr.com

I think every one of these Republican candidates running for the House is going to have a Democratic opponent who’s going to run an ad you can write today. It’s going to start [with] “even conservative Newt Gingrich, the former leader of the Republicans in the House, says ‘It’s radical, it’s social engineering.’”

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Reagan had the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not attack fellow Republicans.’ This is a capital offense against the 11th commandment. He won’t recover.

Charles Krauthammer, making some sense on disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Broken clock, blind pig, and etc…
Disgraced former Speaker Gingrich never had much of a chance to begin with, but taking at least four positions on the individual mandate and the Ryan plan, many of those positions within one day and all easily available on the television would seem to cap it.
However, I don’t believe for one second that The Democrat would actually use disgraced former Speaker Gingrich in this way for messaging purposes. Shrill. Better to assume that voters know all about the GOP plan to destroy Medicare and but also leave a program in existence called Medicare. Talking about that sort of thing is just rank demagoguery. Any Serious Person will tell you so.

Biology is special that way, [with real success often arriving in mid- or even late-career, after a few false starts and fruitless sidetracks]. It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works. Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math. They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.

David Eagleman, aforementioned graduate student, now running his own lab. Presumably with a few bags of potatoes stashed around there somewhere.
But: yep.
Source: newyorker.com

I remember, when he was writing [a computationally modeled neural tissue], he had a sack of raw potatoes under his desk. He would cook a potato in the microwave, put it in a cup, and lean over and bite it while he was typing. It kind of set the tone for my lab for the succeeding decade. It chased away the faint of heart.

Read Montague, recalling his then graduate student David Eagleman and their salad days at Baylor College of Medicine.
I spent many a formative evening which then took the form of seemingly endless years at BCM earning this very same degree. But let’s just say I never saw a sack of potatoes under anyone’s bench. And not because I wasn’t looking.
But: every thesis adviser thinks this way. So you know.
Source: newyorker.com

It’s just sort of sitting there. Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.

Ron Utt, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation working hard every day and putting the “think” in think-tank on selling the gold in Fort Knox.
I’m quite sure gold would stay at peak prices from the first ounce to the 147 millionth ounce. There is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with this brilliant plan. We should begin immediately at solving all Our National Problems.
Heritage is made up of serious people with courageous ideas.

If you replace a system that actually pays seniors’ medical bills with an entirely different system, one that gives seniors vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, you’ve ended Medicare. Calling the new program “Medicare” doesn’t change that fact.

Paul Krugman, reflecting on the Village Edict that Democratic claims that the GOP plans to “end” Medicare are misleading.
The stupidity of our discourse truly knows no bounds. Yes, a program called Medicare exists in the Ryan Plan. But that is where the similarities end. That realizing this requires reading even an executive brief of said Ryan Plan is why the Village will never, ever come to know this.

The Al Gore Problem

Dana Milbank: Romney has what might be called an Al Gore problem: Even if he’s being genuine, he seems ersatz. He assumed a professorial air by delivering a 25-page PowerPoint presentation in an amphitheater lecture hall – but the university issued a statement saying it had nothing to do with the event, for which the sponsoring college Republicans failed to fill all seats. His very appearance – a suit worn without a necktie – shouted equivocation. His hair was so slick that only a few strands defied the product.
Jon Chait: This is a perfect demonstration of an Al Gore problem, but I’d define the problem differently. An Al Gore problem is what happens when the media forms an impression of your character and decides to cram every irrelevant detail of your appearance and behavior into that frame, regardless of whether or not it means anything. Thus Romney’s hair and lack of tie are now evidence of a character flaw, as is his decision to give a detailed policy lecture in a university town without being officially sponsored by a University. An Al Gore problem results in the media ganging up on a candidate like cool kids mocking a geek, with literally everything he’s doing serving as more evidence for the predetermined narrative.
Lemkin: Indeed. I suppose it’s progress that some handful of journalists now see the pathology inherent in forcing everything into a pre-existing media frame come-what-may…and but also we can’t seem to make the media connection between “Clinton is a murderer, Clinton ran drugs out of the governors office, Gore said he invented the internet and etc…” and their modern-day exponents “Obama is from Kenya, Obama didn’t write his books, Obama’s school was paid for by shadowy Mid East backers, and etc…” It’s all the Lee Atwater style of politics, none of it is anything new, we just are forced to live in it Groundhog Day style, over and over and over again anytime a Democrat wins high office. The MSM, apparently, is not and never will be broadly aware of this.