Month: January 2009

I couldn’t bring myself to watch Bush on Thursday night. But Ross did:

Watching Bush’s farewell address last night, what struck me above all was how long it’s been since he felt like the President. Bush never had the gift of persuasion, the ability to give a State of the Union address or a press conference that left his enemies disarmed, but there was a time when he at least seemed like a leader – like someone consequential, active, and important, whatever one thought of his actions and their consequences. But that air of authority and leadership dissipated somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 midterms, and for the last two years Bush has projected the air of a bystander to history, as though events, and his presidency, were largely out of his hands.

Nicholas Kristof argued that sweatshops are better than the alternative – namely, earning a living by sorting though trash. The video is hard to watch. He adds a few more thoughts on his blog:

My point is that bad as sweatshops are, the alternatives are worse. They are more dangerous, lower-paying and more degrading. And when I struggle to think how we can really make a big difference in the development of the poorest countries, the key always seems to be manufacturing. If Africa, for example, can only develop an apparel industry, it will boom.

Yglesias adds his own two cents.

Seriously? I guess if Goldfarb cannot help wage a new war, this is his second best option.

Tyler Cowen on Obama saying he will deal with medicare and social security:

The deeper reality is that Obama understands that this country was set up to be governed from the center and he’d rather start there than move there after two years of failed attempts to do something else.  Don’t be taken in by those funny maps they show about how the Democratic legislators are further left than before; the more power you have, the harder it is not to govern from the center.

But the more prosaic truth is that given that the possibility of a second great depression requires massive borrowing for a year or two, entitlement reform may be unavoidable. How do you persuade the global markets to lend the US more money in the short term if you do not show some small chance of getting back to fiscal sanity in the long term?

If Obama manages to leverage this crisis toward entitlement reform, he would become an historic president. It really would be Buchanan-Lincoln. I’ve spent too long in DC to believe it, but I can still hope can’t I? And the key thing this time around is whether we can build a grass-roots movement to support Obama in this, just as we did in the campaign. Raise the retirement age, means-test social security, raise Medicare premiums for the affluent. After what has amounted to a generational war on the under-40s under Bush, re-balancing is actually a moral cause.

You up for it? I am if you are.

A semi-conscious Kite looks out after an operation at the Forest Department’s Van Chetna Kendra rehabilitation centre in Ahmedabad, India, on 16 January, 2009. The center, with the help of volunteers of several non-governmental organisations, rescued some 200 birds after thousands of birds received injuries and hundreds died owing to being cut by sharp, glass-coated ‘manja’ – kite-strings -across the Gujarat state during the festival of Makar Sankranti. By Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty.

Blodget says the socialist leader has learned the primary insight of conservatism:

What’s interesting is that the idea of re-inviting Western firms was actually floated prior to the collapse in oil prices, upon the realization that local producers weren’t up to the task.

Expect this to play out around the world. State-run firms badly underperform their private peers, and governments desperate for revenue won’t have the luxury of squandering their resources when they’re this cheap.

Americans say goodbye to Dick Cheney. And they are being much too kind.

This pure:

[T]he massive spending splurge unveiled by House Democrats is just a joke, an expression of eight years of pent-up liberal frustrations at fiscal discipline –the teenagers given a fifth and the car keys, out on a destructive joyride.

Every time you think: nah, they can’t say this with a straight face, they can’t actually pretend – in January 2009 – that the Bush Republicans were adept at fiscal discipline for the past eight years, can they? … not after doubling the national debt, not after raising spending more swiftly than LBJ or FDR, not after a surplus became deficits of trillions of dollars as far as the eye can see, they can’t say that, can they? … you realize – yes they can!

Seth Godin asks what "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?" His answer: "investigative reporting." But Godin is optimistic:

…if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)

(Hat tip: Doctorow)

Eddie Izzard explains that they don’t: