Kevin Drum

YOO-BYBEE II….Yesterday the ACLU finally got hold of the infamous August 2002 “Yoo-Bybee II” memo, which outlines acceptable interrogation techniques for CIA prisoners held outside the U.S. I figure you probably want to know what’s kosher and what’s not, so here it is: Sorry about that. It’s all still a secret, I guess, even though […]

VIRAL SMEARS….The world obviously moves too fast for me: today, Gregory Stroud emails to tell me that the “TF Wasatch” rumor has been debunked. The what? Who/what is TF Wasatch? Turns out some officer from Task Force Wasatch in Afghanistan started up a viral email claiming that Barack Obama blew off the troops to hobnob […]

JOURNALISTIC CLICHE WATCH….My crystal ball at work: July 18, here: “I will offer this free prediction: Either National Review or the Weekly Standard — or both! — will headline their recap of [Obama’s] trip, ‘The Innocent Abroad.’” July 25, headline of David Brooks’s column in the New York Times: “Playing Innocent Abroad.” OK, I didn’t […]

GAY DIVORCE….A few days ago I was joking to a friend that now that gay marriage was becoming more widely accepted, the next frontier was gay divorce. Turns out that’s no joke if you get married in one state but live in another. Today the LA Times tells the story of Cassandra Ormiston and her […]

MORE ON WATER….The mysterious Froude Reynolds, who “carried pipe in tomato fields, walked along canals, and studied water in California universities in preparation for current employment that makes a pseudonym a reasonable precaution,” responds to David Zetland’s suggestion that the price of water be determined by market forces here. Bottom line: many blog commenters, even […]

YET MORE McCAIN….As the sun was setting in Berlin on Barack Obama’s big speech, John McCain stepped out from Schmidt’s Sausage Haus in Ohio to rebuke his opponent: I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States. But that’s […]

OBAMA AND TERRORISM….The Cornerites are in such an apoplectic frenzy over Barack Obama’s Berlin speech that I’m almost afraid of being hit by a barrage of spittle flecked pixels if I head over there again before they’ve calmed down. In the meantime, though, how about this from Byron York? It’s a small passage from Obama’s […]

TOO AWESOME….Candy Crowley on CNN: Barack Obama was, indeed, awesome in his Berlin speech tonight, but watch out! Americans might decide he was a little too awesome. Yeesh. They just can’t help themselves, can they?

IMMIGRATION….Via Tyler Cowen, here’s a new paper about the effect of immigration on wages of native workers. Nickel version: among workers with no high school degree, wages go down 0.7% in the short run and up 0.3% in the long run. Among all workers, wages go down 0.4% in the short run and up 0.6% […]

IMPROVING OUR SCHOOLS….Bob Somerby reminds me today to comment on Emily Bazelon’s article about school integration in this week’s New York Times Magazine. It’s basically a review of many decades of research showing that the most important way to improve school performance is to eliminate high concentrations of poverty: other things equal, it turns out […]