That would be DFH’s like Assistant Secretary of Defense Sharon Burke. Just to take a break from Wisconsin perfidy, consider Burke, whose brief is “operational energy plans and programs,” making the connection between death and dinosaur wine in a speech at Harvard last week: Though the official price of a gallon of fuel within the …
Return of the Welfare Queen — Let Retired Teachers Eat Catfood Edition
Paul Krugman reports that Dean Baker’s got the scam nailed in a very sharply argued analysis of state pension shortfalls. (pdf) Those rapacious public employee union contracts that starve the taxpayer to support caviare-and-champagne retirements for state and local civil servants? Not exactly the problem. __ Krugman reprints Baker’s chart showing that the largest share …
Return of the Welfare Queen — Let Retired Teachers Eat Catfood EditionPost + Comments (73)
You Say “I Love You,” I Say Pass The Lithium Open Thread
Still too crazed to think a thought more complicated than “please pass the gravy,” but I thought I’d share a bit of kind of bit of way-we-live-now insight, gleaned from a presentation by the head of MIT’s Mental Health Services, Alan Siegel. Asked if there were particular moments of high demand for his kind of …
You Say “I Love You,” I Say Pass The Lithium Open ThreadPost + Comments (47)
Mike Huckabee and Colonel Mustard. Separated at Birth?
Just caught the TPM story on Mike Huckabee’s interview with the loathsome very serious Brian Fischer. It’s been too long and meeting-packed a day to offer anything terribly substantial, but I gotta say that Huckabee is a at least reliable source of comedy these days. It seems that the formerly cuddly weight loss advocate/presidential hopeful …
Mike Huckabee and Colonel Mustard. Separated at Birth?Post + Comments (112)
A Joyful Voice Stilled: RIP Peter Gomes
I got an email this morning telling me that the most purely wonderful voice in Cambridge is now silent. Peter Gomes died yesterday, of complications from a stroke. He was sixty eight — younger than I would have guessed, for he seemed somehow outside of time — and much too young to be gone.
Factoid Moment on the Death of the American Middle Class.
Update: I don’t feel a particularly upset stomach, but I regret that my calculator at least must have gastritis. As commenter TheF79 points out, I’ve double counted here: the inflation numbers reflected in the CPI are contained in the constant dollar calculation below, and so real incomes measured in purchasing power have in fact risen …
Factoid Moment on the Death of the American Middle Class.Post + Comments (103)
Quote of the Day: Adam Smith Profiles Barack Obama
Reading Nicholas Phillipson’s admirable new(ish) biography of Adam Smith walking to my office this morning, I came across a passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments that seems to me to capture Obama’s style and theory of governance remarkably well: When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion …(h)e …
Quote of the Day: Adam Smith Profiles Barack ObamaPost + Comments (75)