Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Tennessee's Democrat governor weighs his, and the state's, options: Tennessee could reject a portion of the $787 billion economic stimulus package out of concerns that it would force the state to raise taxes on businesses in the future. At the National Governors Association meetings in Washington, D.C., Gov. Phil Bredesen said this week that he …
Continue reading "Maybe That’s Why Obama Didn’t Ask Phil Bredesen to be Commerce Secretary"
Jethro Tull fans will remember the line "slowly upstairs/faster down" from Stand Up's "We Used to Know," and that's pretty much what Obama and Democrats are trying to accomplish in their current program. To use another line from the same album, nothing is easy. On the one hand, Obama knows that Americans expect their government …
Continue reading "Selling Upward Mobility, Delivering Downward"
Evidently I'm not the only one who has doubts about this: Left to their own devicies with the investment opportunity set now available the banks will earn their way out of the hole over a period of years. Miserably run as the banks are, this is preferable to handing a nationalized system over to the …
Continue reading "It’s Not What School You Went to, It’s The Kind of Person You Are, Part II"
The new Attorney General pulled no punches on this one: In a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month, Holder said the workplace is largely integrated but Americans still self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives. "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things …
To some people at least: As the Obama administration begins to deploy US troops back to the Iraq or Afghan war zones for their fourth or fifth tours of duty, I remain amazed at the silent complicity of my country. Why have we been so quiet? Is it because the Bush administration was, in fact, …
Chuck Colson is trying to making things complicated for Evangelicals: So do we retreat into our sanctuaries? Political columnist Cal Thomas, among others, says we should forget the idea of changing culture through politics and just be the church: help the poor, visit those in prison, and so on. To that I say an emphatic …
An old high school classmate pointed me to this, at the Huffington Post of all places: Administration officials were greeted with sarcasm and laughter Monday night when they briefed lawmakers and congressional staff on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's new financial-sector bailout project, according to people who were in the room. The laughter was at its …
Continue reading "Just Think of the Reception If the Republicans Had Been in Control"
David Brooks' piece on Ward Three Morality has me thinking: The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought …
Continue reading "Ward Three Morality: Too Poor to Paint, and Too Proud to Whitewash"
Those of us who were confronted back in the 1960's and 1970's with books like Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb have heard this whining before: Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says …
Continue reading "It’s Not How Many Children We’re Having, But Who’s Having Them"
Or at least that's the way it looks: On the heels of Treasury Secretary Geithner's apparent designation of China as a currency manipulator at his confirmation hearing last week, President Obama called President Hu over the weekend to try and calm the waters. We at this time have no more information beyond confirmation of the …
Positive Infinity 