Political Bloviation

The US needs an aggressive national broadband policy. This is step in the right direction, if it cab survive the can survive the Washington sausage grinder:
The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.
The plan, [...]

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner : The New Yorker.
Tim Geithner did manage to hold the financial system together for the most part through the worst financial crisis in modern times. Yet he seems reviled on both the left and the right. The media ignores the successes and plays up the failure, as the media so loves [...]

Windows 7 Activation Technologies Update coming down the pike, will tell you things you (should) already know — Engadget.
If you don’t want MS snooping around your PC have a look ay how to avoid the update that adds their nasty little “Windows Activation Technologies” update.

Private equity : The New Yorker.
Maybe not. Hedge fund managers get a massive tax break worth billions because of a tax loophole that allows them to pay only 15% on the great majority of their income. I know I pay a helluva lot higher rate, but then again I’m not a downtrodden hedge fund manager. [...]

The title might be an oxymoron. My wife loves to sing and loves her some American Idol. Therefore I watch American Idol and make fun of it. I think the show is moribund and should die a gruesome death. I hear Simon is leaving. A snarkless  Idol just isn’t worth watching. So here’s my suggestion.
Next [...]

Any resemblance to the iPad is tooootaly intentional.

Glenn Beck and his sponsors deserve mocking:

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I thought I was pretty well informed about trade and economics, but I did not know this:
The Americas’ economies are tightly intertwined, to the benefit of all sides. Most U.S. citizens, for example, probably don’t realize that their country exports as much to Latin America as to the entire European Union.
via Adios, Amigos | Foreign [...]

Ezra Klein – Reid to McConnell: Reconcile this.
Read it yourself, Reid puts the GOP on notice that they will in fact use reconciliation to complete health care reform. Let the screaming from the right begin, now!
I suppose this means that Harry Reid does in fact have balls.

In case you missed it a few weeks ago:
YouTube – Epic beard man.

67 year old white dude (Beard Man) insults a younger black man (Corn Rows) by asking him how much he would charge to shine his shoes. Admittedly, that could be construed as a racist remark by anyone. Jesus might have tried to pimp [...]

Here’s a post on a development in an ongoing case brought by a couple of private military contractors who allege imprisonment in a US military facility and torture for blowing the whistle on illegal arms trading inside Iraq by their employer Shield Group Security. It appeared that SGS was selling arms to insurgent groups at [...]

Magazine Preview – Building a Better Teacher – NYTimes.com.
A long but worthwhile piece on improving education by improving teachers, rather than worrying about standardized test scores or charter schools or class size:
When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: [...]

2010 Walk Now for Autism Speaks: Tampa Bay – General Donation.
I have a very personal connection to this effort. It’s is for my granddaughter Elisabeth and other families living with autism. She’s  and is a very sweet 5 year old little girl who’s still struggling to learn to speak. Please follow the link above and [...]

I have seen the future and it’s SSD.

The more I see an hear about SSD devices, the more I like it. I know I’m going to upgrade to SSD for the OS and swap file partitions, perhaps with a few programs that would benefit from the extra speed. That would require a another drive for [...]

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead.
Bondad at 538 takes on the notion that US manufacturing job are gone (and aren’t’ coming back) because free trade agreements like NAFTA allowed US markets to be flooded with cheap foreign goods. He literally graphs the issues to death.
The main point appears to be that that [...]

The New Yorker points out that despite bitching and moaning to the contrary the Senate Health Care bill is bipartisan:
…the Democrats’ bill more closely resembles Richard Nixon’s health-care proposal—the one that Ted Kennedy went to his grave regretting he hadn’t embraced—than it does Bill Clinton’s, to say nothing of Harry Truman’s. Nor are all its [...]

This was a gem from Krugman, I don’t usually copy an entire post, but this was worth it:
Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about.
It goes like this: Person A says [...]

Are there no limits of civilized behavior that’s not subject to be waived away by legal sophistry?
At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed [...]

Krugman, on the shear incoherence and cowardice of the GOP’s so-called  small government activists:
…ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the [...]

Anyone with an interest in what’s wrong with the Senate should read the whole thing. Here’s what’s wrong in one paragraph.
most strident partisans must learn to occasionally sacrifice short-term tactical political advantage for the sake of the nation. Otherwise, Congress will remain stuck in an endless cycle of recrimination and revenge. The minority seeks to [...]