I’ve been meaning to link to Voteview for a while now. It’s a project of Keith T Poole, now at UCSD, that ranks congressfolk on a liberal-to-conservative scale based on their voting history. There’s lots to browse, but the rankings themselves are as interesting as anything on the site. Check out the 110th Senate, for [...]
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy [...]
David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things
A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, [...]
Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman’s latest declaration of war
So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we’ve finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War … may try to point out that it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and [...]
Dean Baker on one of his favorite subjects, the attribution of ideological motivations to political actors, quoted here mainly for its fine last line.
Frank-Dodd Bailouts: Arithmetic, Not Ideology
It is remarkable how often reporters/columnists feel the need to assert that political disputes are about ideological issues. Why do they feel the need to make assertions for [...]
James Hamilton speculates on the consequences of a US move to a gold standard in 2006.
What if we’d been on the gold standard?:
If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That’s a question my friend Randy Parker recently asked me. Here’s how we both [...]
Deep Antarctic waters freshening
April 18, 2008
Sydney Daily Telegraph
Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world’s climate and ocean currents. . . Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica [...]
Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Washington Post. No comment is really required, is it?
The pharmaceutical industry, long an ally of Republicans, has increasingly worked itself into the good graces of the Democratic Party and by doing so has helped block the Democrats’ top prescription-drug initiatives.
In the year since they took over on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders [...]
Aidan Hartley in the NY TImes.
John Stuart Mill addresses this problem in Representative Government, sounding, to our ears, more than a little paternalistic. But surely it’s also true that elections are a necessary but not sufficient element of a democratic society.
Democracy by Other Means
Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe [...]
A while back, Dean Baker wrote a piece in response to a NY Times review of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capital. It’s all worth reading (as usual), but along the way Baker touches on the claim, made in the context of various attempts to “reform” Social Security, that the [...]
From EFF: Judge Voids Election Because of E-Voting Snafus .
Good news from California’s Alameda County — a judge has voided election results after the county botched its response to a contested race conducted on Diebold electronic voting machines. The judge ordered that the disputed Measure R — an initiative addressing the operation of medical [...]
Via Eduwonk, the NCLB discussion draft. All in all, an incremental improvement. See for example the sections on ELLs, growth model, and school improvement.
Jack Balkin is not best pleased with the congressional Democrats:
The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power.
They stand for nothing at all.
Edward Wong, writing in the NY Times. Interesting, if depressing, reading.
Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.
President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have [...]
Gregory Djerejian of The Belgravia Dispatch posts on the “increasingly alarming situation” between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds. Quoting the Financial Times:
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, and other Turkish leaders have warned repeatedly that the gerrymandering threatens to make a fait accompli of a referendum on Kirkuk’s status later this year that Turkey will [...]
George Monbiot, in the 10 April Guardian:
The Real Climate Censorship
It’s happening, it’s systematic, and it is precisely the opposite story to the one the papers are telling.
The first in a series from The Nation: an article by James K Galbraith, toward a new progressive economic agenda.
In a debate over the Democratic future, no one should confuse the Hamilton Project with the Republican past. Robert Rubin and his associates have invited a broad dialogue on economic inequality and strategic investment, and on [...]
Both Paul Krugman (via Mark Thoma) and Dean Baker have nice things to say about the universal health care plan advanced by presidential candidate John Edwards.
It’s not the cleanest plan in the world (there remains a substantial role for private health insurance, for example), but on the other hand it has some features that set [...]
Marc Cooper:
Hillary Clinton is out on the campaign trail attempting to make a pivot on the war in Iraq.
…
Oh, says Hillary now of the notorious vote for war: “I accept responsibility.”
…
This, of course, begs a burning follow-up question from some enterprising reporter: “Senator Clinton, just exactly for what are you accepting responsibility? For the [...]
Fred Kagan last December, quoted by Gregory at Belgravia Dispatch.
Conducting Tal Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would require concentrating all available forces in the area and a “surge” of about 80,000 U.S. soldiers–a large number, to be sure, but very far from the “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions” generated [...]