Politics

A BLAST FROM THE PAST….I was looking through some old files a couple of days ago and found this, written in those halcyon pre-Monica days of 1997: Can somebody please explain to me why, after several weeks, there’s still such a fuss about Bill Clinton letting big campaign contributors spend the night at the White […]

DOUBLE TAXATION….Just a quick question: who came up with this lame nonsense about how the tax on dividends is unfair because dividends are taxed twice? I pay income tax on my entire income (being the honest Joe I am) and then when I go out to buy stuff I pay sales tax from the income […]

WHO’S YOUR FAVORITE PHILOSOPHER?….This is getting silly. Are we now going to ask all of our presidential candidates who their favorite philosopher is? You gotta give George Bush credit, though, for answering “Jesus Christ” during the 2000 debates. After he dropped that tactical nuke on his fellow Republicans, you either had to mumble something along […]

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY….Via Roger Ailes, I learn that Attorney General John Ashcroft is a Simpsons fan. Damn. Does that mean I can’t watch any more?

WEEKEND THOUGHTS ABOUT NORTH KOREA….I’ve had a hard time getting my arms around the North Korea situation, probably for the same reason as a lot of other people: there’s precious little hard evidence about what’s really happening on the ground. So I’m just going to talk out loud here as a way of trying to […]

REST IN PEACE….Jeanne d’Arc just won the Koufax Award for best lefty blog writing, but four days into the new year she’s already got strong competition for the 2003 award. Barry Deutsch talks about his dog Chelsea today, and by the time I was finished my eyes were misting over. It’s a great tribute and […]

SMALLPOX AND PROSPECT THEORY….One of my favorite economic playthings is Prospect Theory, which won a Nobel Prize for its inventor, Daniel Kahneman, last year. (Its co-inventor, Amos Tversky, died in 1996, and therefore wasn’t eligible.) One of the key elements of prospect theory is something called framing effects: the way we react to risky decisions […]

JURY DUTY….Dwight Meredith, riffing on my post about jury duty yesterday, asks a good question: why are so many people convinced that when their friends and neighbors serve on juries they suddenly go nuts and start handing out huge bundles of cash in frivolous cases? As Dwight points out, we are all convinced that we […]

YET MORE HISTORY….Kieran Healy has posted the answers to yesterday’s quiz about 1800 vs. 2000. Since today is apparently history day at CalPundit, go check it out. Both the questions and answers are genuinely interesting.

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY….By coincidence, right after I finished my history lesson below, I got an email from Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons pointing me to this Washington Post article: “The earliest vivid memory in my life,” said Kazuo Matsubayashi, “is the day my father was arrested on January 7th, 1943.” ….The internment of Japanese […]