But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away....
There will be a proliferation of niche media, and there will also be a handful of global English-language news media brands offering video, test, and audio coverage.
Results tagged “two-in-one” from YGLESIAS errata
Great power conflict, by contrast, merely ensure than any actual or would-be dictator or revolutionary can always count on the support of one or the other external players.
To extrapolate a bill, more Charlie Crists and fewer Bobby Jindals....
If I had a more serious job, I would prefer Excel despite its ugly charts, but for the blogger in your life get Numbers[.]
And you sometimes do see him cosigning these kind of manifestos....
If you [are] genuinely interested in Russian democracy, you don't crowd the US-Russian bilateral relationship with counterproductive hostility.
Clearly, a new VP was needed, and Roosevelt tapped Wallace, a reliable liberal, in part to ensure loyalty and in part because FDR new full well that he was turning away from the New Deal and toward national security and wanted to keep the New Dealers in the tent.Wallace went back to farming, [and]supported the Korean War in 1950.
I think everyone understands the human phenomenon whereby we mistaken deem our own personal experiences to be more typical than they are....
Update: As detailed here, my facts are a bit off as college attendance rates.
Felix Salmon comments on the stock market dropping below its November lows:The fact is that prospects for the economy are much worse than they were in November. As such, it stands to reason that stock prices should be lower than they were in November: if they were much higher, and the Dow was still above 9,000, that would be the real news, since it might imply that the November lows were panic-driven rather than rational.
That's right, but I think people's Dow-driven anxieties point to a larger pathology that started at the policy level and has now infected the media and the general public's understanding of how the economy works.
...
And the increase in value was driven by a combination of speculation, and buy the fact that consumption was creating economic activity.
Rosenbaum knows this because it wrote about it in his book, but for the purpose of this article he's glossed over it....
In Prussia, for example, Otto Braun's SDP coalition was happily in power through democratic means until July of 1932 when the federal Chancellor Franz von Papen decided to abrogated constitutional government, kick Braun out of power, and start running the state himself.
If someone charged Matt from every typo he made, would that discouraging him from being so careless?
A VMT tax just discouraging driving as such....
So I'm not sold. When it comes to pricing driving-related activities, it makes sense to charge people from things that actually impose costs on others--burning gasoline, and taking up space on crowded roads--not the mere act of driving.
Not only is Canada very high on the list of our trade partners, but due to the nature of the geography, the trade volume belies on unusual level of actual integration whereby Canadian and American business enterprises are completely intertwined....
A day-trip to Ottawa early in the administration is the least we can do and Mexican-American voters can be quoted with other means.
You also get innovative proposals like James Capretta['s] vision of recycling
John McCain's substantively unsound and wildly unpopular health care plans.
Nowhere in the works of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, for example, is there anything about how if science indicates that [a] certain form of human activity that was long thought to be harmless to others is, in fact, doing massive, hard-to-reverse damage to the long-term interests of billions of people that the correct response is to retreat into dogma and ignorance....
Now as [you] probably know, the media sometimes hypes up bogus trend stories with no real basis in evidence.
But by the same token it's also true that the Republican Party is dominated by its upscale wing. Johnny Isakson may in some sense "represent" a middle-and-working class constituency but his personal fortune is valued in the $8-24 million range. Mitch McConnel who likes to play a Europe-hating rube in TV is in the $3-13 million range.
Back in late January, I praised Rep. John Micah of Florida for calling for the inclusion of more passenger rail funding in the stimulus bill. ... And what did Rep. Micah do?
Editor's note: When Matt blogged about Mica in January, he got his name right, so this isn't a "Ron Blagojevic" situation where it appears Matt doesn't know the correct name.
The technical term involves something I've mentioned previously, the "velocity of money" -- the speed through which economic activity moves through the system....
But perhaps a bigger issue is that the didn't actually clean up their banking system.
Eighteen months ago there were lots of social welfare [projects] that Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or Bill Richardson) could have embraced to endear himself to Democratic Party primary voters except advisers would come back and say "Senator, that'll cost $350 [billion] over ten years--we can't do it." But it's a much smaller number than $2.5 trillion.
The other thing I've noticed about this, however, has been the sad, albeit understandable, tendency of these kind of media outlets to respond to the fact that their old gurus all turned out to be full of shit by attempting to anoint some "new gurus."...
He argued that risk models were inherently flawed; they systematically neglected the possibility of blowups and then were used to argue that investments strategies based on the impossibility of a blowup were safe.
Perhaps the most obvious thing to do in fiscal policy terms is to extent the automatic stabilizer effect that you see on the federal level down to the state level....
And in the most severe cases, cutbacks in assistant to the severely impoverished will have a decades-long impact on the well-being of their children.
But that species wouldn't have heavy smokers dying of cancer, problems with overreating and sedentary lifestyles. Voters belonging to that species would condemn governors who take advantage of boom times to cut taxes and hike spending--there would be massive popular pressure to sock it all away in a rainy day fund.
The real heyday of American newspapering came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the United States features a literate population and no broadcast media. The rise of radio and television had a devastating impact on the industry and caused massive shrinkage in the volume of papers. This shrinkage then led to what journalists consider the heyday of American journalism when the industry had fallen so far that most papers faced little-to-no competition and could serve as authoritative "objective" sources of information. We're now once again amidst and era in which technological change is going to kill off a lot of existing business models. But all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
"K Street" is a synedoche for the influence peddling business, but it's also an actual street and one you get east of 9th Street it takes on a much humbler character.
For person reasons of petty vengeance, the details of which I won't bore you with, ever since The New Republic was acquired by a Canadian firm I've been hoping they would knuckle under to the demands of their hockey-loving overlords and run an article making the case that Americans should pay more attention to Canadian politics. For quite some time now, it appeared that my dreams were not to be satisfied, as the proportion is so absurd that even a Canadian-owned enterprise wouldn't embrace this thesis.
Basically, they like the corporate tax cuts to which worth projects like mass transit have had to take a seat, but they want even more business tax cuts....
Any $800 billion bill split between tax and spending provisions is going to include some stuff people like, and some stuff people don't like, and therefore a lot of members who could conceivably go either way.
The reality, as Joby Warrick reports for The Washington Post is that when American leadership is popular and respect, al-Qaeda keeps on keeping on. But they have a much harder time getting anyone to follow them:
The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.
ad_iconWith Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.
No surprise to see the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passing the Senate, but unquestionable a good thing.
Editor's note: we're interpreting the intended wording as "but it's unquestionably a good thing," although it's by no means certain exactly what Matt had in mind here.
He doesn't have a background negotiation disarmament deals, and he's not an Iran expert--he doesn't speak Persian as far as I know....
That seems to call for putting in charge someone who's skills and background are more closely tailed to the ask.
Noone Could Have Predicted...
Which I think mostly goes to show that the vote counts for bills in congress ultimately has very little to do with whether or not there's a general spirit of comity in town.
I think this comment from tsg sums it up best:
"Noone" is atrocious, even for Yglesias. Everyone makes mistakes, but "noone" featured so prominently shows outright contempt for the English language. Totally unacceptable.
Additional consideration that are important is that ideally the stations will be close enough together to create not just pockets of density but whole corridors of density, even if the corridors are surrounded by pretty traditional suburbs.
One kind find out, fairly definitively, what the institutional prerogatives of different officeholders are and therefore what the significance of their views and attitudes are....
It might seem like an inability to lie would be a problem in life, but in a lot of ways if it was impossible for you to know and possible for you to signal this credibly that could be a huge asset.
LATE UPDATE: Thanks to Neil "The Ethical Werewolf" Sinhababu for noticing (and blogging about) the second mistake. It almost escaped our attention.
Via Tyler Cowen, Robert Barro tries to calculate fiscal multipliers involve in the second world war:...
The question is whether you got a decent multiplier out of the first 5-10 percent of GDP you spend on stimulus.
It puts one in a mind of the time when it was impossible with Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it was run by a corrupt and incompetent Fatah.
...
Taken in isolation, each of these positions has a patina of reasonableness but the overall pattern is of a government that's much more interested in finding reasons to forever-forestall negotiations--expanding settlements all the while--than in finding a route to peace.
Whether or not you think progressive economic works in practice, and whether or not progressive economic policy is popular in practice at any given time, the progressive idea is that we're setting about to make sure that prosperity is more broadly shared--to improve the material condition of the broad mass of people. That's something that ought to appeal to people. So progressives cling pretty dearly to the notion that our views can and should be made broadly popular. Conservative thinking doesn't really have that element. It appeals, on both a theoretical and practical level, to the idea of the natural right of the wealthy to their wealthy.
It must have been a day or two later when I was inside the Fleet Center and randomly ran into a guy I knew who, unbeknownst to me, had moved to Illinois to work for Ron Blagojevic (this was back when Blago was a progressive rising star) and he told me that I just had to get into the arena to hear this guy Barack Obama speak.
For months now, everywhere you go you see articles speculating about what Barack Obama will do once he's in office. And speculating about the consequences of Obama's policies, but speculating about their content.
...
Parliamentary government offers basically two alternatives to the mysterian nature of the American system.
Like Kevin Drum, I haven't yet posted on the Oscar Grant case. In part that's because this seems so open-and-shut that there's not much to say. As you can see on live video, officer Johannes Mehserle pulls out his gun and shoots an unarmed, subdued man in the back for what looks to be no reason
Famously, the radio proved to be a hugely effective communications medium for Obama. But then the pendulum swung back in the age of TV. And now in the internet age, it's swinging back again in an interesting way....
The internet is famous for the way it fragments attention, but one of the ways in which it does that is by making it possibly to narrowcast more content to interested parties than would ever be viable to push through the crowded pipes of cable television.
Mistake of the week winner, January 11-17, 2009
One of the great blunders of US and Israeli policymakers alike was the decision to simply ignore the 2002 "Arab peace initiative" putting forward a vision for comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a context that would have normalized relations between the US and Israel....
And while Ehud Barak has taken the view that what he put on the table back that is now magically off the table, Saudi Foreign Minister Al-Faisal was at pains Wednesday to say that's not the case with his government's initiative:
When I was a colllege freshman in 1999-2000, there were nutty dot-com firms handing out huge salaries to people for no reason. Consequently, it relatively easy to get into a prestigious law school's class of 2003 and guarantee yourself a nice salary when you finished.
Apparently there's an organization called One Jerusalem dedicated to "keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty" and therefore making any pace deal between Israel and the Palestinians impossible. And according to this email someone forwarded me, it lovesNetanyahu and US conservative bloggers
Benjamin
The Israel policy right-wing still has an incredibly hold over the US Congress with only a few exceptions such as Rep. Donna Edwards. But to an interesting extent that's not the case in the media. Despite the effort to anathematize John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, for example, I saw Newsweek run Mearsheimer's take on how the US should approach the whole region and and one of the things the Washington Post Company did after buying Foreign Policy was hire Walt.
Not so J.D. Foster and William W. Beach who argue in a new Heritage Foundation paper that more Bushism than every before is needed:
At a certain point, it became clear to the apartheid leaders that there system was untenable. But they were still more interested in the upholding the interests of white South Africa than in abstract considerations of justice.
It seems unlike a realist to cite domestic political dynamics as the cause of national security policy, but clearly this is correct. And I would note the last point about the think tanks has implications that go beyond the budget. People don't like to be dishonest -- to advocate for policies they disagree with purely in order for money. And actually the think tank lifestyle isn't very lucrative. Which means that if people and firms who profit from high levels of military expenditures want to support think tanks that support high levels of military expenditures they need to identify individuals who genuinely believe that high levels of military expenditures are good and properly. Naturally, people who think that kind of thing tend to be people who have a somewhat paranoid attitude toward foreign countries and who are strongly predisposed to favor aggressive use of military force by the US and our allies alike.
Human beings, being fragile creates who evolved on the planet earth, turn out to be hard to send into space. They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extremely long trips even though many interesting things in space are very far away. Under the circumstances, it's just not very practical to send human beings into space unless there's something important that only human beings can do. And in recent decades, there just having been the sort of compelling projects that justify the difficulties of manned space flight. Instead, we've been making up missions -- most recently the preposterous idea of a manned mission to Mars -- in order to justify the human-oriented space program.
