Politics

FUNNY CONSERVATIVES….To give him his due, John Derbyshire can be funny at times: I get lost in this TV talk because I hardly watch TV. How do you guys find the time? I have a book review due for Roger Kimball tomorrow, and I haven’t even read the friggin book yet. I did, though, accidentally […]

NORTH KOREAN TIMELINE….I’ve been struggling to figure out the basic timeline for the whole North Korean mess. No conclusions or policy recommendations, just the basic facts, and I think I have it: 1994: North Korea is about to start production of plutonium. The result is a treaty that shuts down their plutonium reactor in exchange […]

SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM….The Danish Research Agency released a report on Tuesday denouncing Danish author Bjorn Lomborg for the presentation of facts in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Australian economist John Quiggin, who is quite knowledgable on the subject, summarizes the situation like this: There’s a sense in which Bjorn Lomborg is entitled to feel aggrieved about […]

RACIAL PROFILING….Lots of blogospheric coverage of the Boston Globe study of racial profiling in Massachussetts. The results are shocking: Hispanics and blacks who were stopped by police were 50% more likely to be searched than whites. Who would have guessed? But I think there’s some kind of east coast bias at work here, because we […]

HUH?….Mindles Dreck explains the George Bush Tax Complification Act of 2003. Or tries to anyway, but I’m not even sure he understands what this is all about, and he does it for a living. I sure don’t, but whatever it is, it seems like an extraordinarily stupid idea. And go here (or just scroll up) […]

HISTORY THEN AND NOW….Chris Bertram writes about the history books of his childhood today. They just don’t write ’em like that anymore.

STATE AND LOCAL TAXES….Reader Bill Nazzaro pointed me to this report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. As the chart below shows, state and local taxes, when taken as a whole, are highly regressive. Among the non-elderly, the poorest pay about 11% of their income in total state and local taxes while the […]

RACE AND RACISM….I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions that I have very little use for John Derbyshire ? even if he does write about mathematics sometimes ? but in a soul-wrenching, bend-over-backwards effort to be fair, I want to excerpt the full quote of his that’s been making the rounds of the blogosphere lately: […]

SOUNDBITE MARKETING….Jay Caruso thinks it’s the Democrats who are better at phrasemaking, not the Republicans. Ah, if only it were so, Jay….

THE DEATH PENALTY….USA Today reports on a loose group of law professors and likeminded academics who are pro death penalty. As near as I can tell, their argument is that it’s not true that 100 innocent people have been put on death row and later released. In fact, they say, most of them were released […]