Michael O'Hare

At the circus, the elephant [sic] is always followed by a dedicated crew equipped with large shovels and stiff brooms. Sometimes the guy with the follower spot slips up and a shovel guy comes into view doing his job. Why did this memory pop into my head? Romney is in serious trouble on grounds of […]

My past keeps recycling, and everything old is new again. Last year I was asked to write papers about NIMBY issues affecting nuclear waste recycling and high speed rail development, something I last worked on three decades ago. Now the Massachusetts “bottle bill” is in the news again, with a proposal to extend it to […]

Many years ago, Mark Moore observed wryly that a good way out of the gun control morass would be for the congress to (i) require an individual license to possess any firearm, hand grenade, etc., and (ii) to charter (and fund, of course) the National Rifle Association as the sole agency empowered to issue such […]

Holmes’ little arsenal is worth attending to. Especially the 100-round magazine and the ammunition dump that would keep a Syrian rebel unit in business for days. It was all legally purchased by a guy whose lifetime police record seems to have comprised one (1) speeding ticket. We don’t even know what kind of stuff he […]

The California Senate voted another tranche of financing recently , keeping the state’s high speed rail project alive. There’s a cartoon to be drawn in which the program is a maiden tied up in the middle of a freeway with the highway/automobile industry approaching, or maybe it’s a train being switched off a track leading […]

Ann-Marie Slaughter is on the cover of the Atlantic with an important essay about work and family. along with a stupid picture of a baby in a briefcase (which some art director stuck her with) and a stupid title/headline (which she did not write). She starts out with a personal anecdote, which I regret as […]

The Obama campaign is going after Romney’s qualification as a businessman, portraying his career at Bain as heartless looting, extracting wealth like pensions and health care from blue-collar workers rather than creating value and sharing. The new video is posted here (at the end of the story text), and it’s pretty heartrending. It also suggests […]

Of course government should support the arts. Unfortunately, as soon as we try to reduce this prescription to specific practices, it gets extremely messy. What level of government should give what to whom, under what conditions? What government programs, other than writing checks, matter? The New York Times offers a Room for Debate forum that […]

Last fall the Economist had a short feature on traffic circles that I only noticed today. I was about to riff on how wonderful they are, and how underused in most of the US, but I’m already walking back the post I had in mind. For drivers, and people who breathe air, they are pretty […]