Trees Cause Pollution. Sort of.
The press, as usual, is getting it wrong. But it is an important discovery anyway - that normal oxygen rich interactions have plants producing methane, rather than just as a bi-product of anoxic...
View ArticleJustice Strangelove
Alito is good news for progressives. He is nearly the end of the ability of the old conservative Democratic Party to command a river of funding "protecting" an every shrinking list of programs and...
View ArticleHelicopter Shot Down by Insurgents
The New York Times Reports: An American helicopter crashed north of Baghdad this morning, apparently after being shot down by insurgents. It was the third crash of an American helicopter this month. In...
View ArticleHandwriting, Meet Wall
The New York Times reports on the Tokyo stock exchange's early shut down. It is one of a string of trading scandals, many in Japan. It comes at a time when major market indexes are at or near...
View ArticleDavid Broder needs to get off his knees.
The Washington Post reports that Congress' own advisor body declares that the the Bush Administration (sic) violated the 1947 National Security Act, as amended. Let me repeat that: the Congress' own...
View ArticleStanding on the precipice
The recent spate of smears from Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough aren't to protect the Republican Party. Certainly they are directed at Democrats, but the real threat to Bush doesn't come from the...
View ArticleNo More Schmoementum
The old warhawkolic is hitting the battle again. There he was, telling Face the Nation that he wanted the President to spy on Americans, just so long as he promised to stop flagrantly violating the...
View ArticleLocked and Loaded: Dorgan to take on K Street Konservative Korruption
If he came from a bigger state, he would be mentioned as presidential timber, with his sharp wit and clean speaking style. If he came from a state with a Democratic Governor, he'd be mentioned as a vp...
View ArticleA World Half Free: Neo-Mercantilism And Trade
I've been asked by Hale Stewart to do a short trade presentation for the Yearly Kos economics panel. This is a broad backgrounder of the key problem - a freedom deficit. Trade, energy and decency are...
View ArticleExxon shows record profits, right wing blames the arabs.
One expects peer reviewed papers to meet a certain basic standard of logic and factuality. Roger Stern shows how far below that standard one can go, with a paper that is peppered with right wing...
View ArticleFed Raises, Markets Hold
Greenspan leaves where Volcker did in the middle of a rate raising campaign, hoping to land an economy rather than crash it. The odds against him are getting longer, according to the yield curve, this...
View ArticleBig 5 Refer Iran to Security Council, Crisis Escalates
While no action will be taken until March, referal by the "Big 5" has happened and Iran says that the referal would result in the "end of diplomacy""and "an illegal" breach of the UN charter, the...
View ArticleThe Way Forward [Updated: Obama announces opposition to a blank check.]
Let us speak of rights and reason. Of rights we have to begin from the final humiliation against a free people a proposal to grant dictatorial powers to an outgoing administration. In effect, the...
View ArticleThe Fate of the Union [Updated]
There are few days were everything hangs in the balance, and where it is ordinary people who hold the scales. There are few days in the history of the Republic which are as important as today. Either...
View ArticleLike a Bear in a China Shop
Last night Asian markets lead by Tokyo, crashed. The Nikkei, the benchmark for the Japanese stock exchange, fell by 9.38% an amount that can only be called a "crash." Rapidly the world's central banks...
View ArticleThe Panic of 2008
This isn't your father's recession, or as Krugman quipped about 2001 your grandfather's, it is a panic from the 19th century, where a house of cards comes completely unraveled with a bank failure. The...
View ArticlePost America - I A birth of fire and ice
Far in the distance, canons were heard, shots that rumbled and boomed. The low slung clutter of buildings that was Batavia, which was to become the city of Djakarta in what is now Indonesia, soldiers...
View ArticlePost-America II - The Post Post- Society
This is an age of post-. We talk of ourselves in terms of our weights from the past, and in terms that show we are not really after a cataclysmic change, but, instead, before one. People look back most...
View ArticleThe Coming of Age: Reactionary Revolution 1857-1876 - I
A spectre is haunting the world, the spectre of conservatism. It is everywhere free to put peoples in chains. It claims that it is all of propriety, and sanity, even as its adherents admit that it's...
View ArticleThe Coming of Age: Reactionary Revolution and the Raj
Ours is a neo- age, and the template is the Victorian, our neo-liberalism, was their liberal trade, our neo-conservatism was their conservatism, our neo-classicism, was their classicism, our...
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