No, Mr. President, it is not a demand problem.
Operation Fast And Furious
Three questions that the media can’t be bothered to ask. It’s quite clear that wrongdoing in the White House will only be investigated by the press when a Republican is in it. With Democrat presidents, they’re lap dogs instead of watch dogs.
Passing Out Of Living Memory
The very last WW I veteran has died. It was a woman.
Stuff The Obama Campaign Says
…versus stuff that’s actually, you know, true:
The Obama campaign has a consistent story about the nature of its fundraising and the administration’s relationships with lobbyists and special interests. That story is consistently false.
Picky, picky, picky.
Taking Moon Mining Seriously
…over at the WaPo. Moon Express gets a prominent mention.
February 7th Birthdays
John Deere was born on this day in 1804. He industrialized agriculture.
And on a personal note, my mother, who died in 1990, would have been ninety today.
A Fistful Of Bailouts
Thoughts on Clint Eastwood, Obama, and the auto bailout fiasco.
Culture Of Corruption
Every legislator in this story should resign, but they won’t, so this should be a major issue in both a primary and the general election. We shouldn’t accept it as the natural order that congresspeople somehow become wealthy after a few years in Congress.
A Stunning Space Station Video Of Earth
…and a new paper on urban heat islands/a>:
The debate over whether urbanization and related socioeconomic developments affect large-scale surface climate trends is stalemated with incommensurable arguments. Each side can appeal to supporting statistical evidence based on data sets that do not overlap, yielding inferences that merely conflict with but do not refute one another. I argue that such debates can only be resolved in an encompassing framework, in which both types of results can be demonstrated on the same data set, in such a way that apparent support for one conclusion occurs as a restricted case of a more general specification that supports the other, and where the restrictions can be tested. The issues under debate make such data sets challenging to construct, but I give two illustrative examples. First, insignificant differences in warming trends in urban temperature data between windy and calm conditions are shown in a restricted model whose general form shows temperature data to be strongly affected by local population growth. Second, an apparent equivalence between trends in a data set stratified by a static measure of urbanization is shown to be a restricted finding in a model whose general form indicates significant influence of local socioeconomic development on temperatures.
You don’t say.
I should add that every time I see a video of earth from space like this, I just shake my head in amazement at the people who think that there’s no market for people to go into space.
Ending Unionism As We Know It
Mickey Kaus says that the Employee Rights Act doesn’t cut it:
The problem with Wagner Act unionism isn’t necessarily that unions aren’t democratic. It’s that they are granted a power–mainly the power to go on strike as the sole and exclusive bargaining agent of a firm’s workers without the strikers getting fired–that maybe they shouldn’t have. The UAW is a democratic union. That didn’t stop it from crippling the auto industry. The problem is that the wrong people voted in the UAW’s democratic elections–not the suppliers who would be hurt when UAW members decided democratically to win themselves inefficient work rules, not the mayors whose towns were decimated, not the taxpayers who had to bail them out (in part to save the suppliers and mayors), and certainly not the customers. Making even entrenched undemocratic unions more democratic might have the perverse effect of validating those unions’ exercise of their Wagner Act power. According to Barnes, Sen. Hatch “insists the ERA isn’t antiunion.” That’s not a feature. It’s a bug.
Indeed.