Month: August 2010

Cowen weighs the pros and cons of Wyclef Jean running for president of Haiti.

If you need cheering up, this story about a gay couple, a homophobic neighbor and a house-fire will do the trick.

Mark Thompson answers this Dish reader:

Where this average person may believe humans who live in high crime neighborhoods are capable or uniquely capable of evil or, at the very least, that cops are justifiably anxious and untrusting of such humans, this average person also likely knows that pets – and especially dogs –  are always innocents, and that no decent human being could ever be so afraid of a dog as to try to kill it (well, unless it’s a “pit bull” of course, which is why cops have a bad habit of describing every dog as a pit bull when one of these incidents happen).  The intentional killing of an indisputable innocent who could never be a threat to anyone like a poor, defenseless animal is so incomprehensible that it can, in this worldview, only be performed by a complete psychopath. When it is done coolly and professionally, or when the police chief tries to defend it as being merely a matter of procedure, even the most insulated suburbanite should be able to quickly understand that this is not the act of a lone bad seed, but instead the symptom of something much, much larger.  Maybe this leads such a person to begin to think seriously about violent crime, police abuse, and the like.

Joyner agrees. On reflection, I do too, although my reader's critique of Dish coverage holds.

Yael Borofsky and Jesse Jenkins respond to Avent’s suggestion that we put a $5 tax on every barrel of oil:

Instead of raising energy prices, the point of the gas tax should be to raise revenues. In fact, a $5 gas tax could raise about $40 billion annually, as Avent notes, without consumers feeling much financial pain at all. These revenues could then be dedicated to the kind of public-private partnership that has successfully catalyzed private sector entrepreneurialism and innovation and delivered transformational technology investments throughout America’s history.

There is little historic evidence that marginal price signal changes can spur significant innovation — after all $5 gas taxes throughout the EU haven’t given Europeans affordable electric cars or bio-fuel alternatives.

I think the fiscal necessity is increasingly argument enough. And Europe is far further ahead on non-carbon energy than the US at this point, so perhaps those hints at industrial policy are not dispositive.

Naturalist Jack Rudloe has started a Noah's Ark for animals affected by the Gulf oil spill. It includes over 350 species:

We have to get as many animals in there as we can and then if the conditions permit, be able to put some of them back and get some things started. I don't believe that the oil is gone. It's still out there in cold water, little tiny droplets that could come spilling up here in the wrong conditions of one or two hurricanes.

Dan Drezner gave Obama a failing grade on trade policy. Ryan Avent and Kevin Drum counter. Kevin:

Second, this isn't a classroom, where you get an F for not showing up. In politics, you get an F for actively damaging things. Obama hasn't done that. He's simply ignored trade as an issue. But he hasn't done any harm, and under the circumstances that's quite possibly about as much as a trade enthusiast could have hoped for.

Drezner defends his judgment:

The U.S. political system is arranged to make it very difficult for anyone to change the status quo.  Even if Barack Obama wanted to pull the United States out of the World Trade Organization, for example, he likely couldn't have gotten the necessary votes in Congress.   The Obama administration has mildly resisted more hawkish member of Congress to "get tough" with China.  That's about it in terms of preventing protectionism.  When I said Obama had done almost nothing on trade, I wasn't kidding.  

Bainbridge jumps in. What about the House?

That should be interesting. Kudos to Fox for acknowledging that many principled conservatives support full civil equality for gay citizens. That may come as a shock to some of their viewers.