Over on Swampland, Ana Marie reports from the Great and Economically Struggling State of Michigan that Romney and McCain have made economic policy a focus of their primary battle there, even though their ideas to help the state are pretty much the same:
As small government conservatives, neither man supports the kinds of targeted
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You’ve heard the talk about a possible fiscal stimulus package to counteract the recession we may already be in.
Maybe we need it. It’s important to note, though, that the Bush administration has had a fiscal stimulus package of sorts in place ever since the middle of 2001. That’s when the federal government started spending more than …
I’ve had it. As a conscientious voter who hasn’t missed a presidential election since I came to this country, I am declaring that I am up to here with the candidates’ campaigns. There’s nothing more tedious than watching people you like and admire go at each other like, well, …
I was fascinated by Lisa Belkin’s article yesterday in The New York Times’ Style section. Titled “Planning a Life With Room for Debate,” she views the new Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters and recalls her own adventures in youthful argument. She writes,
I was also a young debater, and although I can’t say that it helped me
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Back when Bank of America paid $2 billion for a stake in Countrywide in August there was talk about how the “strategic investment” would put to an end all the worries that the nation’s biggest mortgage lender might go under. The worries subsided only temporarily; over the past week they turned into a mini-panic that send Countrywide …
I’m weighing in late on the whole Hillary Clinton tearing up in New Hampshire thing because the brouhaha just dumbfounded me. (Read this analysis by Joe Klein for the deets.) Here she is, the first viable woman presidential candidate, in the thick of a brutal campaign that so far had showed few dividends, getting pummeled from all sides …
Steven E. Landsburg has a piece in Slate proclaiming the FairTax (yes, I’ve decided to give in and go with the no-space version for now) to be “brilliant.” After all the discussion here about difficulties with enforcement and transition, along with questions about whether progressivity over people’s lifetimes is just as good as (or …
I just got an URGENT e-mail from the Office of Champagne U.S.A. informing me that
Belgian Customs authorities seized and destroyed a shipment of over 3,200 bottles of André sparkling wine. The shipment was seized at the port of Anvers, Belgium, on Tuesday. It is the latest in a series of seizures in the last four years, representing
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My folks returned to Japan yesterday after three weeks here with their four kids and 10 grandkids in New Jersey. As many of you know, my mom is in the advanced stages of cancer. They made the trip against the advice of her doctors, though her oncologist had finally acquiesced: “You can’t live for your cancer,” he’d said.
One issue we …
A reader writes:
I recently read your article ["Reward the Good Guys"] in a September 10, 2007 issue of Time. It certainly makes me curious why you believe the tightening of money for mortgages is a good thing; also, why you think that it might better be in the domain of banks and thrifts? Do you own more than one piece of property? If
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I live in an immigrant-rich community in northern New Jersey. My Asian-American friends who grew up in this country tell of being informed from a very early age that their parents wished them to become either doctors or lawyers. Oh, okay, or concert violinists. It had to do with the comprehensibility of those jobs; while the workings of …
Were any of you surprised by Hillary’s win last night? I was. I was getting that pit in my stomach I had all throughout 2004, from the moment John Kerry’s candidacy was declared. Not that Hillary Clinton is John Kerry; far from it. But after her stunning loss in Iowa, I thought, Oh, no: doom is nigh.
But dangit if she didn’t pull it …
