There’s too much coverage of this to summarize, and the issue is compounded by the indecision that pundits have on whether Schwarzenegger’s victory represents a larger, national trend, or is simply a California one-off. Joan Venocchi has a good piece arguing that it is a larger trend, but not the trend some pundits have latched […]
Yesterday I wrote about the current anti-intellectual streak in the Republican party. Exhibit K in the case came to my attention via the Unofficial Paul Krugman page: The National Review’s Don Luskin has an inadvertantly-hilarious-meets-creepy post on his website. Let’s roll the tape:
And one other thing. The Nobel Prize in economics will be announced in […]
Tom Oliphant has an op-ed today outlining what’s at stake in the California recall. On one hand, it’s a battle over legitimacy that mirror’s what David Brooks has called “the presidency wars.”
To put the mess in more crassly political terms, continued Democratic rule (Davis or Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante) would follow a campaign in which […]
One of my ongoing laments about the current (post-Gingrich) incarnation of the Republican party has been its anti-intellectualism and its disdain of expert culture as a liberal elite leading it to construct its own extra-academic phalanx of “experts.” Take economic policy. On one hand, the Bush administration relies on supply-sider think thanks while drawing on […]
In the TPM interview with Wesley Clark that I mentioned yesterday, Clark criticized the Bush administration’s “underlying ideological drive that overrides pragmatism.” For Clark (and for many in the center-left), the lack of a pragmatic expert culture has been particularly lacking in both foreign policy and the economy. Which makes Jeff Madrick’s discussion of Iraq’s […]
For those who have been following the drama of the State Treasurer’s attempt to remake himself as a pension fund manager, the Globe has detailed coverage today. Apparently, the expected votes of the Pension Fund Board of Directors is split evenly, with four supporting Treasurer Cahill, and four demanding a general, open search for a […]
I’ve fallen a bit behind on keeping up with the developments in the Democratic primary race. Hope to get around getting a better sense of the candidates over the next few weeks. But for now I’ll call attention to Josh Marshall’s latest interview with Wesley Clark. Impressive. Clark comes across as smart, down-to-earth and impassioned. […]
The best a book review can hope for is not only to assess the book in hand, but also tap into some larger point. By that measure, the latest cookbook review in the NY Times is a great read. In its crosshairs is the “easy” cooking using processed ingredients, and in particular one Sandra Lee’s […]