If I Ran the Zoo (Free subscription) | 11/29/2008
I usually think of Matt Yglesias as highly overrated but he simply nails this one : I’m fascinated by how common [Mark Steyn's whiny] depiction of American education is considering that it’s 100 percent false. No doubt there are bad history teachers and bad history classes in the United States, but anyone who’s vaguely in contact with reality can tell you that U.S. history is very much...
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones (Free subscription) | yesterday
DEMOCRATS AT THE PENTAGON.... With Republican Bob Gates staying on as Secretary of Defense, does that mean that all his Republican deputies will be staying on too? Matt Yglesias says no: To provide some background and context, you need to understand that a lot of these guys were never Gates' people anyway. Gates and Donald Rumsfeld had some pretty different ideas about a lot of stuff,...
Gerry Canavan (Free subscription) | yesterday
Random linkfest. * Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out . * You had me at Planet of the Apes . Just don't screw it up this time. More at CHUD . * Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0....
The Debatable Land (Free subscription) | yesterday
Matt Yglesias wrote a column last week in which he disputed what he termed the "counterintuitive" view that President Obama's relations with Europe will not necessarily improve as much or as swiftly as is commonly imagine. On the contray, he suggested, simpley a) not being George W Bush and b) not going out of his way to insult or alienate Europeans would indeed go a long way towards...
TalkLeft (Free subscription) | yesterday
In answer to counterfactual assertions in the Media and from some bloggers like Matt Yglesias , Plutonium Page and John Issacs demonstrate that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the President-Elect and the Secretary of State designee on foreign policy. Indeed, President-Elect Obama explained : I think if you look at the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made...
faith in honest doubt (Free subscription) | yesterday
Matt Yglesias observes one of the central perversities of American politics : [I]t’s worth noting how odd it is that the United States has the kind of highly ideological and deeply shortsighted business community. There’s no way a serious climate policy could be anything other than bad for oil companies and catastrophic for coal companies. But for most companies? Well, there shouldn’t...
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones (Free subscription) | yesterday
LEVERAGE.... Matt Yglesias approvingly notes something that Hank Paulson said today: We need to get to the place in this country where no institution is too big or too interconnected to fail. Hmmm. Is this even possible? Trying to regulate leverage is hard enough, but trying to directly regulate size and "interconnectedness"? Do we really want to do that? Take AIG, for example. Was the...
Brian Beutler (Free subscription) | 12/01/2008
Here's the text of Hank Paulson's big speech today. There's some good stuff in there--but, of course, words only matter so much. As Matt Yglesias notes , it's perfectly fine to talk about keeping banks from becoming too big to fail, but ultimately useless (and puzzling) if in practice the bailout is, at least in part, a scheme to keep banks in business long enough to be purchased at...
The Corner (Free subscription) | 12/01/2008
Megan McArdle approvingly references Matt Yglesias's post on limiting CO2 emissions. She cites these key paragraphs: It's worth going back to first principles on markets, property rights, and air pollution. To have a functioning market, you need to have property rights. And property rights need to be defined in some way or other. This includes taking some view of the relationship between...
Outside the Beltway (Free subscription) | 12/01/2008
We’re about to see a great shift in resources from the military to other actors, David Sanger argues. In a New Atlanticist piece called “Obama’s Foreign Policy Shift,” I join Matt Yglesias in proclaiming this “a really good idea.”
Environmental Capital (Free subscription) | yesterday
... Progress worries Jim Jones’ energy and climate ideas are well out of step with Obama’s , and Matt Yglesias wonders why business groups often act against their self-interest. Actually, the Jones pick won’t matter that much for energy policy , and people like us just went way overboard, at Grist. Talk of how to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is increasingly global, like in the big Polish...
Unqualified Offerings (Free subscription) | 12/01/2008
Matt Yglesias makes the essential point about Bill Kristol’s desire to send the Marines pirate-hunting: One might further note that the whole situation is a big unintended consequence of the Christmas 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Something that was done with full US support and loudly cheered by The Weekly Standard. But thought he consequence was [...]
Marginal Revolution (Free subscription) | 11/30/2008
Kevin Drum comments, here is Brad DeLong, and Matt Yglesias, and Arnold Kling; they make good points all around. There aren't nearly as many Cassandras as you think, once you require more of a person than "having called" the housing...
The RBC (Free subscription) | 12/01/2008
Megan McArdle puts it in a nutshell: There is no such thing as a free market approach to air quality or water rights. But, as Megan (quoting a Matt Yglesias post I can't find) point outs, some form of greenhouse gas tax or cap-and-trade system is as close as we're going to get. Since neither "no pollution" nor "unlimited pollution" is an optimum, some mechanism has to decide how much...
TalkLeft (Free subscription) | 11/30/2008
Credit to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias for pointing to the latest NYTimes article that demonstrates that NBC and its empty headed, blow dried anchor Brian Williams have not a shred of integrity. See their posts and the Times articles for the details. But this is the bottom line about NBC specifically and the Media in general, from Yglesias: it's worth contemplating the breathtaking...
