January 2010
11 posts
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If You Don’t Slow Down, What’s the Point of...
Elizabeth & the Catapult: “Taller Children” Discovered via thesixtyone, possibly the best music site to appear since Pandora.
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So Much for Question Time
Lots of bloggers are cheering President Obama’s impromptu debate with House Republicans in Baltimore today: Besides the thrill of seeing Obama parrying the usual GOP attacks with aplomb, the whole exchange was reminiscent of the highly entertaining Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK. But it looks like that won’t happening again, as the GOP is now regretting having cameras at...
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Friday Video
La Roux: “Bulletproof” For comparison’s sake, here’s the new Tron trailer:
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The Federalist and the Filibuster
When talking about the filibuster, it should be noted that the Articles of Confederation, which preceded the Constitution, were eventually thrown out in part because it had a supermajority requirement in order for Congress to do anything. Alexander Hamilton excoriated the defenders of this practice in Federalist 22:To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where...
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Take It to the Floor of Congress, Look into the...
I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised at the State of the Union last night. Certainly, President Obama’s ability as an orator was never in doubt, but it was heartening that he didn’t take the “Clinton and school uniforms” approach of abandoning his major initiatives, but instead tacked on ideas like the spending freeze to his calls for financial regulation, clean...
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Ceding the Argument
During the Bush years, there was a saying that went something like this: Republicans can’t govern, and Democrats can’t get elected. We may have to revise that second part, as it seems like Democrats can’t govern either. The Democrats’ freakout over the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts last week was awful enough, and the possibility that they might yet give up on health care...
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Social Cohesion and Natural Resource Limits
It’s not about the environment, but this FT column raises some important points about the ability of societies to live within limits:Some observers blame that on Japan’s obsession with maintaining cultural harmony; many Japanese point to the fact that they live in an island with constrained resources. Either way, this emphasis on sharing pain in an equitable manner is likely to shape...
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China and Per Capita Emissions, Cont.
A while back, I blogged about the difference between China’s per capita carbon emissions as a country and those of its most industrialized regions. At the time, I wondered if there was any data for comparing the per capita emissions of cities around the world, or at least between Chinese and Western cities. As it happens, some people have actually done the work on this: a NBER paper (via...
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The Virtue of Enforced Minimalism
So last weekend, my laptop’s hard drive died. I had just recently gotten an external hard drive, but didn’t get around to actually backing up my data until it was too late; as a result, there’s a better than even chance that about three year’s worth of data has been lost. So let that be a lesson to you.1 On the other hand, starting from scratch (and upgrading to Snow...
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Quote of the Day
Mike Konczal:It’s worth noting that the biggest benefit of the large bank mergers for consumers as pointed out in this celebratory song is that there are more credit card logos to choose from. That’s an argument not brought up enough, and I’ll grant it to them. A political science friend pointed out to me in gchat that “you can’t get just any logo; you probably couldn’t get a card with a Tamil...
