Politics Roundtable
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Some folks are defending President Obama's decision not to say anything positive about the substance of the Iraq war in his Tuesday speech on the grounds that Obama simply doesn't believe any good came out of the project. And, although I certainly haven't defended this aspect of the speech, ...
The Wall Street Journal editorial staff dug up some New York Times letters to the editor by the imam behind the Ground Zero Mosque. The Journal editorial reports:
In a letter published on November 27, 1977, Mr. Rauf commented on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's historic trip to Israel and ...
The emergence of Joe Miller as the Republican senatorial candidate in Alaska is one of the most surprising results so far in an already surprising year. Miller's defeat of incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary must be attributable in substantial part to the support of Sarah Palin, ...
Dean Mark Schissel makes me smarter by emailing to say that I am working off of wrong and out-of-date information. It looks as though at least one of my fears is groundless: insurance companies are not likely take genetic information about folic acid metabolism and use it to ...
I didn't watch any of the TV commentary on President Obama's speech last night. But J.E. Dyer at Contentions informs us that the "TV commentariat rose up to advance the narrative that Obama had no obligation to acknowledge Bush's surge decision, because there was never a valid ...
I expect November 2, 2010 to be a very good night for Republicans. But for me, it won't be a fully satisfactory night unless Sen. Barbara Boxer goes down to defeat.
To understand why, consider Sen. Boxer's exchange with then-Secretary of State Rice regarding the troop surge in Iraq, which ...
Christina D. Romer says goodbye to Washington:
Not My Father’s Recession: The Extraordinary Challenges and Policy Responses of the First Twenty Months of the Obama Administration: The first recession I really remember was that in 1981-82. I began graduate school just as the economy peaked. Over the ...
Three audio files of the first Econ 1 lecture: Lecture 1, August 30: Introduction to Macroeconomics.
One at:
Economics 1, 001:The others at:
Download 20100830 Econ 1 LS | Download 20100830 Econ 1 SPComments on audio quality?
The consensus seems to be ...
This poll finding is not just stunning, but important: if you run a presidential race between Barack Obama and George W. Bush in Ohio, it's Bush by 50-42:
We'll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there's one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it ...
It is remarkable how little it takes, on the Left, to earn a reputation for intellectual acuity. Stanley Fish is an academic of some renown, although I'm vague as to what he has actually written or accomplished. Now he has an occasional op-ed column at the New York ...
Courtesy of Brian Caplan:
Bill Dickens versus the Signaling Model of Education: I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I've seen leads me to believe ...
Economics of Contempt:
The Unofficial List of Pundits/Experts Who Were Wrong on the Housing Bubble: 1. Alan Reynolds 2. Kevin Hassett 3. James K. Glassman 4. Jude Wanniski 5. Jerry Bowyer 6. Nicolas P. Restinas 7. Jim Cramer 8. Christopher Flanagan 9. Neil Barsky 10. Chris Mayer ...
George performes a great service here, and so does Mark Thoma by putting it up on his Economist's View:
Economist's View: The Dynamic Properties of New Keynesian Models with Learning: [This one is, as they say, wonkisk.] As James Bullard noted in the previous post, we "have ...
Air Vice Marshall Keith Park:
September 1st 1940: Contrary to general belief and official reports, the enemy's bombing attacks by day did extensive damage to five of our forward aerodromes and also to six of our seven sector [radar] stations. There was a critical period when the ...
The first in a new cycle of Spain economy related podcasts I am doing with Matthew Bennett is now up.
Here’s a sort of summary from Matthew of what goes on.
The short version: market reaction so far this year has, as always, been irrational, underlying indicators are not in a ...
In a recent FT Op-ed, entitled “Estonia’s recovery defies economists and academics“, columnist John Dizard argued that “the “internal devaluation” policy, which means cuts in nominal costs such as wages and rents, was very hard on the population, but appears to have worked ahead of even the Estonian ...
Not seen on the newswires from the Federal Reserve retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming –
“The world of economics was rocked to its foundations yesterday when European Central Bank President Jean Claude Trichet urged countries to run huge structural budget deficits and massively pro-cyclical fiscal policy while creating huge contingent liabilities ...
Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen was a German baron born in Bodenwerder in the eighteenth century. Made famous by the Hollywood director Terrence Gilliam, the baron first came to public attention for his ability to recount outrageously tall tales about his adventures while fighting abroad in the Russian army. ...
Well, having just posted a lengthy study of the German economy on this blog, I started to lazily browse my way around today’s economic news headlines, and Lo & Behold, what did I find over at the FT, a contrarian voice. That of Wolfgang Munchau. In his comment ...
Not only is the French economy the grateful recipient and beneficiary of sustained German export growth, so too is Poland (I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear that in Warsaw!). According to the FTs Jan Cienski:
German recovery boosts Polish GDP
Poland’s economy grew by an unexpectedly strong 3.5 per cent ...
The current generation of policymakers seem to be like Captains of large ocean liners, out there on the high seas, bereft of either compass or adequate charts, trying hard to calm there worried passengers by telling them nothing is amiss. But the charts are there, if only they would look ...
Well, as we all well know one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one data point doesn’t swing an argument one way or another, but the latest retail sales PMI reading for Germany is far from being either uninteresting, or (for my part) surprising. Basically after only two months (in ...
Spain’s EU harmonised seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate (which is the interesting number) went up again in July, according to the latest data from Eurostat. It rose to 20.3% from 20.2% in June.
The modern world moves at a breathtaking pace, even when most of us find ourselves on holiday. No sooner do we receive, read and start to digest one set of economic data than we find ourselves pushed to think about what the next set will look like. The clearest recent ...
Gallup's weekly tracking poll of 2010 congressional voting preferences for August 23-29 has Republicans leading Democrats by 51 percent to 41 percent among registered voters. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP's largest of the year and, in fact, is its largest lead in Gallup's history of tracking ...
At a charity auction in 1994 or so I won the opportunity to have Mark Dayton take me and a friend to "power lunch for two" at the Minneapolis Club. The lunch occurred toward the end of Dayton's tenure as the Minnesota state auditor. The lunch was extremely unpleasant because ...
It wouldn't be fair to say that President Obama is dumb, but I think it is accurate to say that he is a goof. Thus his style, formerly described as analytical...cerebral...aloof...now appears deer-in-the-headlights clueless. The Drudge Report, in the unfair but funny style that it sometimes adopts, contrasts ...
Like most nostalgia, the excessive coverage this weekend of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina signified a yearning for happier days from the past. In this case, it was the yearning of the MSM and President Obama for the happy days when Republicans were the ones having their competence ...
As John has noted, America remains unclear about President Obama's religious affiliation. Thus, in a Pew Research survey, 43 percent (a plurality) said they don't know which religion Obama practices.
John has offered some good explanations for this uncertainty, especially the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. But ...
The video below is an investigative report on the the June 2009 fundraiser for Hamas held at Masjid Al-Rahman mosque in Orlando, Florida. Featuring "that tool" George Galloway, the fundraiser was intended to raise money for Galloway's Viva Palestina, then funneling money openly to the Islamist terrorist movement ...
Last year I went to New York to take my daughter to see Steely Dan perform The Royal Scam and selected favorites at the Beacon Theater. My attorney friend Kirk Kolbo ...
Sarah Palin celebrated the Jewish sabbath among friends Friday night before her appearance at the Restore Honor rally on the Washington mall on Saturday. Benyamin Korn reports:
By evening, the halls of the Hershey Lodge were filled with the aroma of chulent, the traditional Sabbath stew....My colleague Sheya, director ...
Many people view Republicans and especially their leaders as being fixated on the past, and that perception is not entirely unjustified. Just last week, at the Lincoln Memorial, Sarah Palin spoke of the need to restore America rather than to transform it. And not that long ago, as ...
We have been reporting on the Minnesota gubernatorial race among Tom Emmer, a solid conservative; Mark Dayton, a deeply flawed and wackily liberal Democrat; and tax-raiser Tom Horner playing the traditional spoiler's role as the representative of the Independence Party. Republicans have been dispirited by an early poll showing ...
President Obama's speech from the oval office, only the second of his presidency, was surprisingly limp. With three momentous subjects to cover - Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. economy - Obama struggled to say anything new or interesting. It isn't just that the soaring rhetoric of ...
Yesterday Van Morrison -- singer, songwriter and world-class artist -- celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday. Van is an artist who has absorbed all the strains of American popular music and recapitulated them in his own unique voice. As such, he stands shoulder to shoulder with the greats in the ...
President Obama's Oval Office speech on the termination of combat operations in Iraq was so half-hearted and detached, it was a little hard to discern its true meaning. I don't think anyone has captured the nature of Obama's discussion of President Bush better than Paul Mirengoff. Paul ...
Haley Barbour is the Governor of Mississippi, now serving his second (and final) term in office. Governor Barbour distinguished himself for his leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Earlier this week, Ellen Ratner saluted Governor Barbour as one of the heroes of Katrina. "I've been ...
As I see it, the nation's current economic woes translate, under normal political practice, into a net gain of roughly 50 House seats for the out-of-power party. The perception that President Obama won the presidency on false pretenses, is governing from too far to the left, and needs to ...