More on the City Council race will be forthcoming as soon as I make it though a busy week (Election is next Tuesday). But for now, an item of local news: The State Senate is considering a bill to fund efforts to boost tourism from foreign tourists. As the 9/11 domestic travel slump has hit […]
I’m not the best at numbers, but I don’t know what William Saletan is going on about:
Dean is in bigger trouble. He wants to repeal all of Bush’s tax cuts; Kerry wants to keep the parts that benefit the middle class….
Part of the problem is that the average middle-class person’s share of the tax cuts, […]
The City Council election is upcoming, this next Tuesday Nov. 4. In preparation, Greater Boston is having a week of coverage of the candidates, both for contested districts and for the at- large slots:
Tonight:Candidates for the Boston City Council District One debate.
Tuesday:An hour long special edition of Greater Boston. A debate among all the […]
The business press loves to fulminate against Attorney General crusaderism and in particular the spotlight-seeking (or so the critics charge) antics of New York AG Eliot Spitzer in playing securities regulator. It’s true that solving the problem state-by-state rather than federally is a recipe for increased legal and regulatory burden on business for no good […]
Calpundit today (or yesterday? sometimes I feel the West Coast is on the other side of some internet International Date Line) shows just how quickly Schwarzenegger is changing his tune from last political action hero to measured big-problems-take-time kind of guy. And the quotes he’s found are remarkable.
It seems that today’s and yesterday’s news cycle has been all about the gulf in the Democratic party: between middle American and coastal Democrats, between Generic Democrats and Real Democrats, and between working-class Machine Democrats and yuppie Reformist Democrats. The New Republic piece on the latter does a particularly good job at boiling down the […]
Everyone has latched onto the “Hollywood Jewish moguls are a disgrace to their people” (not exact quote) bit in Gregg Easterbrook’s New Republic blog. I don’t really have anything new to add to the debate over the anti-Semitic valence of the remarks or over the appropriateness of the outcome. I do feel that what’s gotten […]
Breaking news: the New York Times is changing its typeface choices, or at least streamlining them:
In place of a miscellany of headline typefaces that have accumulated in its columns over the last century, the newspaper is settling on a single family, Cheltenham, in roman and italic versions and various light and bold weights. A narrow […]
The announcement that Clark and Lieberman won’t partipate in the Iowa caucus has renewed debate over the primary process in nomating presidential candidates. The Note complains of the capriciousness of the press corp in deciding when a candidate’s withdrawal hurts the Iowa caucus rather than the candidate. Calpundit says the Iowa-first setup distorts the candidates’ […]
Just when I proclaimed that Slate’s getting its act together on its music reviews, along comes a middling R.E.M. review by Chris Suellentrop (who’s usually on the political beat). Besides some outrageously broad claims (R.E.M. is the best band of the last two decades?! How and according to whom?) it’s not a bad piece of […]
For those still following the Enron scandal (there don’t seem to be many these days), David Warsh has a good overview of the coverage of Enron by the business press. It’s clear that he doesn’t like the New York Times (I think he’s being unfair - I thought their post-9/11 coverage was excellent), but he […]
More on Health Care: Today’s article by Steve Bailey captures the silliness of the Drugs-from-Canada solutions to rising medicine costs:
Politicians — Democrat and Republican, local and national — have latched on to the idea of buying Made-in-America drugs, via Canada, at half the price. But if this is good politics, it is not a healthcare […]
Calpundit says what’s been on my mind and probably the mind of lots of others:
Still, it’s a fact that healthcare costs do continue to spiral in the United States, and it makes life miserable for businesses that have to deal with it. These guys don’t want to be in the healthcare business, don’t want to […]
Throughout the recent California election, Indian casino “gaming interests” has become one of the right’s bugbears, much as Big Tobacco and Big Pharma has become the left’s. What better example to see another occasion of the Democrats’ morally suspect fundraising, peddling influence and furthering a social vice. But, as Jacob Levy argues in the New […]
Joseph Stiglitz today takes on the blame-China crowd and puts what’s at stake forcefully and simply:
To understand what is at stake, a few basic economic points need to be spelled out. First, international trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage: countries export goods in which they have a relative advantage and import goods […]