
A fun, if ultimately meaningless, question.
This is a serious problem for America's poor. Our social safety net is in tatters. (Note, at the link, that food stamps haven't fully covered the cost of the "thrifty" plan since 1996. THANK YOU CENTRISTS! WE LOVE WELFARE REFORM!)
With all the focus on ground organizing, it's easy to forget that Obama's running a massive air attack as well. If Obama wins, political scientists will probably debate for years which factor was more important.
A smart and tasteful documentary about Crawford, Texas, the town that George Bush appropriated for his Texan mystique. Definitely watch this if you have 90 minutes to spare.
For a non-economist like me, this article is right at the top end of what I can reasonably understand, and it illuminates a lot of important things about how the government is desperately trying to keep a handle on the value of risky assets (i.e. bad loans). You should read it carefully.
Not that it will stop the right wing from pretending otherwise. ("OMG SOCIAL SECURITY IS GOING TO IMPLODE! Better convert everything to private market-based pensions, which will provide a handsome profit for our I-banker friends, immediately!)
Interesting and sound argument. (If you've never heard of the Bradley -- alternately, Wilder -- effect, see here.)
One of the all-time greats -- Billmon, the mercurial genius whose blogging would often stop and start before definitively ceasing to exist at the end of 2006, has unexpectedly popped up at DKos with a brilliant essay on the political history of John McCain's brand. PLEASE STAY BILLMON
The clock is ticking, meanwhile, for national banks (cough*WACHOVIA*cough)...
Financial crises manifest slightly more directly in the Third World.
A slightly more nuanced take than Jarret's from last week.
Read all of this. JUST GO READ ALL OF THIS. It is worth it.
I was convinced that the greatest calamity that ever befell the benighted nations of the ancient world was in their having passed away without a knowledge of the actual existence of Duluth; that their fabled Atlantis, never seen save by the hallowed vision of inspired poesy, was, in fact, but another name for Duluth; that the golden orchard of the Hesperides was but a poetical synonym for the beer-gardens in the vicinity of Duluth. I was certain that Herodotus had died a miserable death because in all his travels and with all his geographical research he had never heard of Duluth. I knew that if the immortal spirit of Homer could look down from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand, if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Ilion it had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in deathless song the rising glories of Duluth. Yet, sir, had it not been for this map, kindly furnished me by the Legislature of Minnesota, I might have gone down to my obscure and humble grave in an agony of despair, because I could nowhere find Duluth. Had such been my melancholy fate, I have no doubt that with the last feeble pulsation of my breaking heart, with the last faint exhalation of my fleeting breath, I should have whispered, “Where is Duluth?”
Read all of this. I don't sympathize with Crandall's call for less labor rights (obviously) or much of his argument, which seems to boil down to "Please, government, increase our profit margins!" but his recognition that unfettered competition in his industry doesn't help anyone is a significant thing, and a big slap in the face to conservative free-market ideology. Also, his points about how regulating more direct flights would increase efficiency AND lower carbon emissions is interesting.
An important article detailing how the conservative fervor for "school choice" has suddenly vanished in the last couple years, in the face of both right-wing organizational difficulties and the increasingly obvious fact that voucher programs don't work.
The conclusions of this article are consistent with the impression I got in Politics of American Education fall semester -- although this author is much more willing to call a spade a spade than Professor Peterson, who was evenhanded to a fault in his teaching.