On the train ride back from Washington Tuesday night, I did some of the reading that Brad DeLong assigned me after my first attempt at writing about neoconservatism. The first thing I got out of Irving Kristol’s Fall 1995 Public Interest article on “American conservatism 1945-1965″ was that Brad was overdoing it when he said [...]

Yesterday afternoon, Karen Tumulty over at Swampland e-mailed to ask if I had anything to say about Toyota passing GM in global sales in the first quarter of 2007. I tried but I really couldn’t. Anybody who reads the business press has known for a couple of years that this was about to happen. Also, [...]

Says Wal-Mart boss Lee Scott: “Our goal should be for every man, woman and child in this country to have health insurance. The $2 trillion question, literally, is how do we get there?” You can get his whole speech here, so no point in running more quotes from it. Scott also announced here at the [...]

Now I’m listening to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden do a Q&A here at the World Health Care Congress in D.C. “The employer-based health system is melting like a popsicle on a summer sidewalk,” he says. Wyden unveiled his plan for universal health insurance in December, and he feels like the wind is at his back. [...]

I just got finished moderating a panel at the World Healthcare Congress in Washington, featuring Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, GE Healthcare CEO Joe Hogan, and futurist/consultant/Scotsman Ian Morrison. A major conclusion was that we should all be more like Australians (Liveris is a native of Darwin; Morrison has spent a lot of time Down [...]

Despite the best efforts of the Financial Times and just about everybody who works at the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz is still in charge of the global lending (and ostensibly poverty-fighting) institution. He’s also hired Bob Bennett (Bill Clinton’s lawyer back in the day) to joust on his behalf and has promised, in the helpful [...]

Swampland emigrant Tom T (I love it that so far I’m only getting the cogent and nonabusive Swamplanders) wants to know, in a comment to my post about politicians’ ties to Wall Street: [W]hy is it that these “entanglements” are only a problem when the one entangled is a Democrat? Why didn’t we hear more [...]

Karen Tumulty over at Swampland has a question (spurred by this Washington Post article on John Edwards’ work for Fortress Investment Group) on politicians’ ties to big hedge fund and private equity money: Is this going to be an issue as the campaign moves forward? My own business writing days ended long ago, when derivatives [...]

Economist Brad DeLong, as part of his long-running campaign to persuade the world that journalists are flawed (and many are; unlike academic economists, who are right about everything and also smell great!), had a post Saturday tearing into the Economist for allegedly mischaracterizing the neoconservative movement. Brad apparently thinks Daniel Moynihan and Daniel Bell weren’t [...]