The state of the Union is bad, continued

I am a self-identified progressive.  My favorite economists in the public arena are Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.  But I am also a deficit hawk.  Today, I received an email from Nouriel Roubini’s consulting business that addresses America’s likely long-term fiscal deficit.  The picture is bleak.  This is the main reason that I think America’s […]

The State of the Union is…

bad. I had intended to post this before reading today’s Paul Krugman column. I agree with Krugman that America is facing a crisis of governance. It has serious long-term budgetary problems with which Congress seems either unable or unwilling to cope. For me, the fabled US Constitution lies at the heart of the crisis, because […]

Frank Rich deserves Pulitzer, gets Ledocsian

This piece by Frank Rich in today’s NYT is one of the best political columns I have ever read. It’s about, surprise, surprise, the need to reregulate the financial industry. This is the big story that is being neglected by almost everyone. www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10rich.html I would never have guessed that this former NY drama critic would […]

David Brooks again, what a guy

David Brooks in today’s NYT: “The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so […]

David Brooks not a moderate in defense of liberty

Where to begin, where to end, in one’s condemnation of David Brooks’s idiotic column concerning the tragedy of the Fort Hood massacre? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opinion/10brooks.html Brooks seems to have received a memo that was also received by Tony Blankley, whom I heard deliver Brooks’s column on the radio show “Left, Right, and Center.”  What I do not […]

In Today’s New York Times

There are interesting dueling columns by Bob Herbert and David Brooks in today’s NYT.  Herbert decries the racism that is coming to the fore in anti-Obama and anti-health care reform demonstrations.  Brooks says the demonstrations are about class, not race, and traces the ferment back to Jefferson-Jackson v. Hamilton.  Working-class whites, per Brooks, are proponents […]

Welcome to Ledocs World

I would like to have heard Judge Sotomayor address the charge that her speech that averted to a “wise Latina woman” was an example of “relativism run amok.”  There was a form of relativism implied, but was it running amok?  I think not.  The alternative of the originalists cannot be sustained, it must crumble under […]