When You Hit Bottom, Stop Digging…or McArdle’s Kitchen Chronicles redux.

Fair warning:  This is way too long and fundamentally way too trivial to bother with.  Given all the urgent stuff going on in the world, Megan McArdle hardly deserves anyone’s attention.  I’m just posting this to clear my hard drive and brain of a bit of unfinished business. Plus I think I promised several times [...]

Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias, Wisconsin Edition

I know that probably everything below is obvious to this audience and/or already presented better by someone else here, but anyay:  following up John’s post on the deliberate deception behind “contribute more” demand of public service workers in Wisconsin, here’s some inconvenient data. The shorter:  public service workers are not overpaid.  Not even a little [...]

The GOP War on Women (And Families) Continues

Deep thinker Mike Pence’s amendment banning federal funding for Planned Parenthood has passed the House, 245-180. This cuts $363 million that would otherwise pay for the full range of family planning services Planned Parenthood provides. That would be this operation: Our skilled health care professionals are dedicated to offering men, women, and teens high-quality, affordable [...]

Yup, I Do Need A 12 Step Program: McArdle’s Calculator Is Acting Up Again, Social Security edition.

Oh boy.  Speaking of faux hawks, Megan McArdle yesterday decided to start getting serious about the deficit.* In McArdle’s playpen, that means we’ve got to eliminate Social Security for the middle class (and the rich), shifting instead to covering only low-lifetime earners.**  There’s more:  She offers a Medicare budget “plan” designed to replace the lower [...]

Megan McArdle is Always Wrong: Reading Papers Is Hard edition.

(BTW: Apologies in advance for the length of this screed.  You can always think Playboy and/or wherever it was my junior senator offered his cheesecake and “read” it for the pix. I know that Megan McArdle is a bagatelle in the supermarket of awful opened by the current (and hopefully temporary) right wing ascendancy.  But [...]

Guest Post: Friends vs. Reason, or the Cost of Being Wrong

Please welcome my MIT colleague Jim Bales, who is the only teacher I know who has to weigh the pros and cons of handing his T. A. the rifle.  He writes here on a post over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen that I meant to excoriate myself…only he got there faster and better. _________ [...]

I mentioned earlier this week Bernard Avishai’s piece on the almost-nearly-but-not-quite peace deal Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas all but consummated in 2008. Read the whole thing. Weigh it in light of what Avishai (and others, including your current absolutely non-expert correspondent) think is a last-best-hope raised by the Egyptian political earthquake. Pay particular attention [...]

Please, Please, Please, Oh Please Let This Happen

Via TPM we learn that a legislator in the Palmetto State seeks to create a new South Carolina currency, just in case the US dollar blows up. It seems that, as the proposed legislation puts it, “many widely recognized experts predict the inevitable destruction of the Federal Reserve System’s currency through hyperinflation in the foreseeable [...]

Don’t Read This One, Boston Haters: Bill Russell Testifies, Exemplifies.

Bill Russell never flapped his gums idly.  Instead, if you listened to both the words and those moments in which he chose not to speak, you’d learn something. So we can today. Russell is often asked about his reaction to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he will receive from President Obama on Tuesday, … [...]

The Triumph of Hope Over Experience — Or….

…Can the Egyptian protesters of Tahrir Square save not only their own country but Israel, now seemingly committed to a slow murder-suicide pact with the Palestinians? I’ve resisted commenting on the Egypt uprising because I have no real knowledge or historical depth to offer, and I lack both time and resources to do the reporting [...]