This may be my favorite song about the beauty of this nation, but it’s hard to find on YouTube.
What’s going on chez vous?
by DougJ| 20 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Readership Capture
This may be my favorite song about the beauty of this nation, but it’s hard to find on YouTube.
What’s going on chez vous?
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, NANCY SMASH!, Assholes
Nancy broke out Thor’s hammer and once again gets it done:
The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to overturn the ban on openly gay and lesbian soldiers serving in the U.S. military, passing legislation repealing the controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
The bill — a so-called “standalone” measure not tied to any other legislative items — passed 250 to 175 in a virtual party-line vote. It now advances to the Senate.
The House previously passed a repeal of the ban as part of a larger defense spending authorization bill, but the measure stalled last week in the Senate.
“Now is the time for us to act,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California. “We should honor the service of all who want to contribute” to America’s security. “Repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ makes for good public policy.”
Now we get to sit around and wonder what kind of bullshit excuses Scott Brown, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Joe Manchin, and the other “moderates” come up with to block the bill.
Alright, Moderates, You’ve Got Your Stand-Alone BillPost + Comments (169)
by John Cole| 95 Comments
This post is in: Cooking
I’ve just been informed that my father has made his first batch of rum balls and other cookies. He said they are pretty good, but not quite as strong as late Grandma Cole’s “Eat two of these and get a DUI” rumballs. We think in her later years she was either forgetting the recipe or adding the rum twice. One batch, I swear, you would eat one and you could see a vapor trail when you exhaled.
None of us complained, though.
by DougJ| 59 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, We Are All Mayans Now
That “economist” that mistermix linked to earlier is back to say that he meant unemployment benefits in general, not specifically those in North Dakota and Nevada. Then he whines about people saying mean things in the comments.
I don’t know the literature on how unemployment benefits affect employment-related migration either, I’ll admit, but it seems to me that you have to be an idiot to think that North Dakota is not a special case given its low population, general remoteness, and the importance of the (the highly cyclical) energy sector in its economy. You can’t have it both ways, you can’t bring up an unusual example, then bitch about how:
Wasn’t it clear I was seeking some actual studies (by which I mean peer reviewed, data-driven, analysis) on the general issue? Regular readers know how this blog works. It’s not about anecdotes and one-off examples. It’s about solid evidence.
The game Frakt seems to be playing is this: he wants to eliminate unemployment insurance so he finds a tiny, remote state with a low unemployment rate, does next-to-no investigation of why its unemployment rate is low, then tries to segue that into a general attack on how unemployment benefits interfere with the Galtian perfection of the free market. I hate to go here, but no wonder this guy boasts of a PhD then won’t even say where he got it.
But good enough for Sullivan work, obviously.
by DougJ| 71 Comments
This post is in: Lindsey Graham's Fee Fees, Politics
I doubt this will go anywhere, but it’s worth a try:
Senate Democrats will make a dramatic effort to reform the rules of the chamber when the next Congress begins, one of the body’s primary filibuster-reform advocates said Wednesday morning.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who has championed a weakening of the procedural mechanism that allows the minority party to hold up legislation, predicted “fireworks” on Jan. 5, 2011 — the day on which the Senate can, he argued, revamp its rules by a simple majority vote.
“There could be some fireworks. There could be some fireworks on January fifth,” Harkin said at a pro-reform event sponsored by several like-minded organizations. “I’m going to be there. I’m armed. I’m armed with a lot of history, and I know the rules, and I know the procedures too, so we will see what happens on the fifth.”
Update. I see mistermix just posted on this. I think we started the same time but my internet went hinky halfway through and I had to come back to it.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 70 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
A friend sends this HuffPo story where Tom Harkin talks some smack about filibuster reform:
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who has championed a weakening of the procedural mechanism that allows the minority party to hold up legislation, predicted “fireworks” on Jan. 5, 2011 — the day on which the Senate can, he argued, revamp its rules by a simple majority vote.
The scenario is that Democrats propose a rule change, Republicans object, Biden overrules that objection, and 51 Democrats vote for filibuster reform.
I can’t see 51 of those cats doing anything, and I think that some are (probably reasonably) afraid that changing the Senate to a majority rule-institution will disadvantage Democrats when President Palin is in power with Republican majorities in the Senate and House. But failure to do this puts Jim DeMint in the driver’s seat for the next two years, and that’s going to be ugly.
by Tim F| 22 Comments
This post is in: Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You
To put a finer point on my post below, the people profiled by Michael Lewis in his book The Big Short are a perfect example of what I’m saying. A handful of guys like Steve Eisman and Michael Burry both figured out what was happening even while Wall Street was bursting its seams with mortgage money, and they secured enough support to bet real money on their hunch. Here was a case where a small number of relatively minor players took on the giants of their field and more than won. They utterly humiliated the traders who took the other side of their bets.
The difference? These guys took the time to understand the real housing market and the actual positions of major firms while overcompensated con artists packaging loans depended on math whiz ‘quants’ who worked with simulated markets, outdated assumptions (e.g., mortgage default rates from the Eisenhower administration) and best-case economic models. The knowledge gap between Eisman and Burry and the MBS salesmen they preyed on was about as great as the gap between the salesmen and their average client.