Problems ahead for Obama

Posted by | 11:11 AM
A new Pew Poll is out, and here is what it shows: * 43% of Americans, a plurality, say Obama is "not tough enough" on foreign poli...

Wanted: less brown kids

Posted by | 10:31 AM
Writing in The Nation , Kathryn Joyce says that conservatives' hysteria over low fertility rates in Europe is primarily due to their de...

Dems, NAFTA, trade, etc.

Posted by | 10:31 AM
Someone recently asked me what I thought about the Democrats' " NAFTA spat ." I didn't see the debate in which Obama and C...

Symbolism and reality

Posted by | 9:20 AM
Well so much for Obama's biography healing our foreign relations . Guess he'll have to do it with his policies instead. In other new...

Why political movements die

Posted by | 4:18 PM
I've long maintained that the liberal movement in America fell victim to a combination of its own wild success (minority rights) and cle...

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and stupid

Posted by | 7:59 PM
One thing that really annoys me is when Republican hacks get to write editorials in the supposedly dispassionate Financial Times . This woul...

Conspiracy Theory List

Posted by | 11:32 AM
The Economist has a neat graphic ranking popular conspiracy theories by number of Google searches. I thought I'd go through the big one...

Why "conservative economics" is BS: Reason #857

Posted by | 5:03 PM
Paul Krugman points to a study showing the negative effects of poverty on mental development: As the article explained, neuroscientists hav...

General equilibrium

Posted by | 6:28 AM
Just a reminder that economics matters, and that there are real people behind the equations: Even when experts were declaring the economy h...

Troops home now

Posted by | 11:05 AM
In an email to me about the most recent case of U.S. Marines raping a teenage Japanese girl , Japanese news reporter Renge Jibu notes: On y...

Valentine's Day Post - The Math of Monogamy

Posted by | 11:09 AM
I've noticed the Huffington Post has lately been posting a lot of news stories championing the virtues of a polygamous lifestyle ( this...

Apartheid is not multiculturalism

Posted by | 5:10 PM
Few in the U.S. may have been paying attention to the " sharia row " in Britain, but it's kind of an interesting story. A few ...

Fire & brimstone, we hardly knew ye

Posted by | 9:40 AM
As I predicted - not that it was at all hard to predict, mind you - the Religious Right is taking a middle path between splitting off from ...

Back to farming and mining

Posted by | 11:54 AM
What is the American economy's core competence? That is, what are we the best at? Technology? Finance? Those sectors have taken big hits...

My thoughts exactly

Posted by | 6:02 PM
I have an Obama sticker on my computer. I'm an Obama supporter on Facebook. I've repeatedly said that I think he'd make the best...

Sunday Morning

Posted by | 4:49 PM
Don't take it from me that the U.S.'s binge-spending party is over. Take it from Brad Setser : Adjustment -- real adjustment -- requ...

The downside of democracies at war

Posted by | 11:47 AM
Here's a good article by Fred Kaplan about the faults of Bush administration foreign policy. Kaplan's main thesis is that Bush ...

Return of the Islam-bashing!

Posted by | 10:04 AM
I've had less cause lately to rant against hardline Islamism, but every once in a while a story like this catches my eye: An Afghan cou...

Interesting

Posted by | 9:42 AM
If you've read the news in the past 7 years, you'll know the "China story" - low-paid Chinese workers, low-cost Chinese go...