The details of roquefort's problem [aside], the key issue is that in a "trade war" like this, everyone loses:...
6. At which point everyone is even more worse off.
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The we'll have to think of further measures to hurt their producers. And much the same would apply to Japan and Chinese.
Results tagged “four-in-one” from YGLESIAS errata
The Decemberists "The Bagman's Gambit" is a noteworthy recent DC-located song....
So the House of Representatives including Mall refurbishment funds in their stimulus bill. But know-nothing conservatives decided that fixing up important national landmarks sounds funny, so they've spent a week mocking the idea. And instead of punching bask and asking if the right-wing intends to just let the whole country fall apart for the sake of a sound byte, the Obama administration is backing down and getting the provision removed.
I have mixed feelings about reporting on these kind of findings. On the one hand, I don't actually think that elected officials' future has very much to do with the public's opinion, such as it is, on this kind of question. I think, for example, that Obama's re-election prospects will be based much more on whether or not living standards are increasing in 2012 than on whether or not the policies he pursued in 2009 matched up with at-the-time public opinion. So the politically smart thing to do is more-or-less ignore year-one opinion and just do things that you think will work out in the medium-term (of course the wise and moral thing to do is to also think about the long term) irregardless of the polls. But on the other hand, there's lots of reason to believe that people's beliefs about short-term public opinion do influence how they act so it's important to spread the information around when it points in the right direction.
Editor's note: Grammarians prefer not to use irregardless, as it is a made-up word with the same meaning as regardless.
Elliot Spitzer uses his most recent Slate column to call for a renewed spirit of competition and innovation in American business....
And I think there's a lot of sentiment that punishing people for consensual acts is wrong, and also that criminalizing prosecution leaves women exposed to violence, abuse, and rape at the hands of pimps and cops alike.
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So what's former prospector and former state attorney general Elliot Spitzer think about this?
Update: Thanks to willie for pointing out the "prospector" mistake.
Mistake of the week winner, January 18-24, 2009
That difference is important, because because there's several months' worth of difference between the time span "two years after President's Day Weekend" (the target date for stimulus signing) and the end of FY2010 on October 1, 2010....
The White House has release to the press a letter form OMB Director Peter Orszag making these points:
The beginning of the Obama administration is good for the world, but probably bad for the progressive blogosphere. Fewer conservatives in positions of power equals fewer wingutty policies to complain about it. Fortunately, here comes Big Hollywood to the rescue with a fine wine from Dirk Benedict who played Starbuck on the old Battlestar Galactica. Benedict's hilariously insupportable thesis is that the old BSG was better than the old BSG and that the specific reason the old BSG was better than the old BSG was the old BSG's tendency toward simplistic storylines and retrograde gender politics
