Politics
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American Popular Opinion: Its Irrelevancy
Polling about attitudes on issues that concern Americans is close to irrelevant, because the only opinions that matter are the opinions of Beltway Insiders who stay in place from administration to administration, no matter which party gets elected. People like Greenwald complain about how Beltway media types talk about their own opinions as if they
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Good Luck with That (Updated)
From today's WaPo: Roger T. Cole, the central bank's head of banking supervision, told Congress two weeks ago that one lesson among many is that regulators must no longer be lulled by good times or put off by industry arguments. "When bankers are particularly confident, when the industry and others are especially vocal about the
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If Not Geithner, Who?
What can be realistically expected in a society as complex as ours run by elites, including most Democrats, who since Reagan, if not before, have lost any vestigial sense of what the common good is? What can be expected of a class of people who have got to the positions that they hold by caring
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Missing It and Battlestar Gallactica Farewell
I've not been writing because I've been busy with other things, and I am very much in this slack water mode. It seems as though events outrace anything I or anyone else has to say about them with any hope of writing anything truly insightful or helpful. Almost everything I read seems idiotic or at
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American Perestroika
I came across this comment I wrote last August. Seems even more germane today: Perhaps the best analogy for what I hope for Obama is that he could be a transformatiive figure, not like Reagan in reverse, but more like Gorbachev. MG had to become a trusted member of the Soviet system in order to
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The Rich Are Different from You and Me
Because they have the resources to live in a bubble world of their own creation. Frank Rich today: The once-lionized lifestyles of the rich and infamous were appallingly tacky. John Thain’s parchment trash can was merely the tip of the kitschy iceberg. The level of taste flaunted by America’s upper caste at the bubble’s height
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Centralization and Subsidiarity
I was listening to something the other day, and the guy was making a point I had never considered. Empires for the most part, whether ancient or modern, are not particularly intrusive regarding local cultures and customs. Empires more often than not live with local cultural pluralism so long as locals pay their taxes and
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CPAC
Should the stuff these people are saying just be just laughed off or should it be worrying? I'm not sure. Some describe it as the Conservative movement's implosion, but I'm not so sure of that. If we were living in a time of relative economic stability, I'd be less bothered by CPAC antics. As long
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True Believers (Updated)
Mark Kleiman: Brooks fears that Barack Obama's ambition is leading him into what Oakeshott called "rationalism in politics." But thinking of it that way just shows how hopelessly off-base Brooks's criticism is. Obama isn't working out the details of some grand vision; he is doing what Machiavelli called "temporizing with accidents." He has specifically referred
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Obama’s Address to Congress
First thoughts: I listened from beginning to end, which I can't ever recall doing when listening to a president address congress–not Clinton, not Bush I, not Reagan. I didn't find my self cringing or rolling my eyes after listening to the expected cheesy, patently false formulaic, political bloviation. Even if you disagree with everything he