Have the inhabitants of Bizarro World finally broken through to Earth? Krugman offers, with no apparent sense of irony, a column proclaiming the virtues of the modern welfare state and a Times magazine article explaining the collapse of the modern welfare state. It's two Krugmans in one!
As they say, read it all. The one REALLY good thing about all of this, is that it speaks to the absolute end of Paul Krugman. The power-hungry Nobel nerd's thirst for attention and influence is finally catching up with him (as it almost always does with academics suffering from severe envy of people who actually work for a living and are (gasp!) successful at it).But never mind that, because the Left’s sudden talk about incendiary political rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shooting isn’t really about political rhetoric at all. It’s about the real-world failure of leftist policies everywhere—the bankrupting of nations and states by greedy unions and unfundable social programs, the destruction of inner cities by identity politics, and the appeasement of Muslim extremists in the face of worldwide jihad, not to mention the frequently fatal effects of delirious environmentalism. Europe is in debt and on fire. American citizens are in political revolt. Even the most left-wing president ever is making desperate overtures to his right.
But all that might be tolerable to leftists if they weren’t starting to lose control of the one weapon in which they have the most faith: the narrative. The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can’t ignore.
According to the New York Times, many consumer advocates thus fear Obamacare will have the perverse effect of reducing competition and driving up costs.
The story of Philadelphia’s bloggers illuminates an issue that every city will grapple with soon. Technology enables city dwellers to engage in sophisticated, small-scale entrepreneurial activity as never before. That anyone can easily become a publisher enhances aggregate output and innovation, as do new opportunities in other industries where barriers to entry are falling. Too often, however, city ordinances that arose in a pre-digital economy stymie these efforts.
It is amazing how few people understand the damage that boys who are abused by women can suffer. However, given how little our society cares about the psychological lives of men in general (and thus, most men and boys don't care either), it's amazing these women were arrested at all.
Ezra Klein made the biggest mistake that can be made by a liberal — progressive — socialist — communist — no labelist — whatever the heck they call themselves on the 31st of the month.
He was being honest.
He does not believe in the Constitution.
Berkowitz, in analyzing what he calls the “new progressives,” helps explain one of the distinguishing features of the Obama presidency: its disdain for the people’s preferences and the lengths to which Mr. Obama goes to disguise his elitism and contempt for the views of the public.
For bad op-eds, it's tough to beat the New York Times' Friedman, whose columns are hot, flat, and crowded with mixed metaphors, famous name-droppings, and juvenile political ideas.
During last summer's "Did you plug the hole yet, daddy" frenzy over the BP oil spill, Friedman urged President Obama to "think like a kid." "Daddy, why can't you even mention the words 'carbon tax'?" the 57-year-old columnist wailed.
The burden of freedom arises from the possibility that what we do might actually matter. That were a weight far greater to lay on a child than the sheer awe-inspiring size of the physical cosmos.
But however well or badly we handle our guns, woe will befall he who thinks he can conquer America. 500 years ago, Machiavelli compared ancient Persia with then-modern France. Persia was highly centralized, so the emperor was firmly in control of all parts of his realm, and could muster enormous numbers of men to any part of the country. But if you could defeat that army and the central authority that raised it, then you would almost immediately control the whole nation, as Alexander showed. Medieval France, on the other hand, was very decentralized, with petty dukes controlling small centers of power throughout the country. Because of this, the king of France had only marginal control over vast swaths of his country , but no invader could stand a chance at conquering France because of all the small bands of local opposition
Whether you're a recently displaced 23-term committee chairman or a formerly smug unemployed staffer with $180,000 of Georgetown student loans, it's important not to give in to despair. Psychological studies tell us a lost re-election campaign is the single most stressful event in the life of a congressional incumbent, even topping the indictment of a campaign contributor or an appearance at an unscripted town hall meeting. Also, a ballot box layoff is, next to death, the second-leading cause of leaving Congress. The good news is that there are positive, proactive steps you can take to reduce stress and smooth your transition to your new life in the great unknown outside I-95.
And that's where this brochure comes in. At Iowahawk Congressional Outplacement Services our primary goal is to orient, retrain, and mainstream former employees of Capitol Hill for productive careers outside Washington. While we can't get you back your seniority, your perks, or your mahogany-paneled office in the Dirksen Building, we can give you the tools you'll need after your ignominious rejection by those bastard ingrates you'll soon be living among. Follow this step-by-step guide and you'll be back on your feet in no time! Probably.
Christmas has been a contentious holiday at least since then. St. Francis introduced the manger scene hoping that it would draw attention away from gift giving and secular celebrations to the religious meaning of the season. This does not seem to have worked very well; the last time I checked, the score at the mall seemed to be Santa Claus ten million, St. Francis zip.
I will stop referring to it as ObamaCare when we stop calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich. It is an effective shorthand for a law that is otherwise unwieldy to describe.
"Nearly halfway through Mr. Obama’s term, the dearth of business and Wall Street types in his administration rankles many executives, if only as a proxy for their unhappiness with his policies and occasional antibusiness political speech. And the White House has struggled to find such a person to fill the one spot about to open in Mr. Obama’s inner circle, the director of the National Economic Council, the job being vacated this month by Lawrence H. Summers."
"So what happens if the mandate is gone? Well, then Congress must either repeal the law or come up with another way to balance the books, and Obama must go along. And what if they can’t get this done? Things are not exactly going well on the taxation front, are they? So what if they don’t pass it.
Oh, and what if the entire health insurance industry implodes? Will the Democrats hope to argue that this proves that we need a public option?
And could that have been the idea all along?
"We have lowered the marginal rates on high incomes four times since the inception of the income tax — in the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2000s. In each case, the result was a much more prosperous national economy, lower unemployment, and higher tax revenues for the government. If you do A (lower marginal rates) four times, and four times, despite differing economic circumstances, B (increased prosperity) happens, a rational person might conclude, at least tentatively, that B is the result of A. Not liberals.
As I said, high tax rates on the rich is a religious principle with the left. If the poor have to suffer because of it, so be it."
"Next to the bureaucrats and the White House, the real winners are the climate change skeptics. If you think that climate change is a myth or a naturally occurring phenomenon, Cancun helped you out. The UN process of endlessly negotiating a treaty which will either be so weak it is pointless or so controversial the US Senate will never ratify it (and will quite possibly be both) consumes time, money, energy and political capital that would otherwise go towards green efforts that might actually accomplish something.The “success” of Cancun is a best case scenario from the skeptic’s point of view. The cost of funding endless UN gabfests in exotic tourist locations (next up: South Africa in 2012) is trivial compared to the cost of any serious efforts to deal with carbon emissions on the scale current scientific theory suggests would be needed. Bureaucrats will dance, journalists will spin and carbon will spew, and the greens will be unable to escape this dysfunctional UN process for years and maybe decades to come. More, the fact that axis of ankle-biter countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia use these conferences to flaunt their anti-American credentials — and seek to maximize their influence by threatening to veto the proceedings — ensures that both this process and anything it produces will be unpopular in the US. The more that the radical anti-American gasbags get mixed up in this process, the easier it will be to find 34 senators ready to kill a climate treaty. If you are a climate skeptic, a global warming hand-off to the UN is the best thing since the Hummer.
No sane green would want this result, but the greens have run up against a force stronger than climate change, more insidious than the desertification of the Sahel, more inexorable than the rising of the seas: the bureaucratic instinct for process. Processes and institutions once initiated cannot be allowed to die."
