In the Times today, Joe Nocera (who I am loving as a left of center columnist who knows business) really whiffs it when he claims that Robert Bork deserves to have be on the Supreme Court today.  He doesn't say it that way.  What he says is that the Democratic opposition to Bork's nomination, back in 1987, was the start of all the partisan division we're experiencing today.  In short, he claims the Democrats were unfair to Bork, and that Republicans decided to retaliat

To me, one of the more troubling aspects of the War on Terror is how often our law enforcement agencies have broken potential terrorism cases by, in essence, finding disaffected losers and egging them on.  In these cases, the police or FBI get wind of somebody mouthing off on the Internet about how they want to blow something up in an act of anti-American jihad and then they make contact, pretend to be al-Qaeda, and set the perp up with a phony bomb or plan of what have you, and then arrest him when he finally tries to pull the trigger on a plan that he would never have been able to pull of

Last week, I sat in a room and listened to a billionaire tell me, and a couple of hundred other people, that the thing he fears most is the government.  He justified his fear by saying that the government is often arbitrary in its rulemaking and in the way it uses its power.  Also, he hates Obama and accused the president of encouraging the Wall Street protesters when "he should be doing the exact opposite."

Today's horrible story about a man's suicide after being fired from his job makes me think of Willy Loman, and the anxieties of power and employment that have always been part of American society.  In "Death of a Salesman," Arthur Miller broke with tradition and wrote a classical tragedy about an ordinary man.  This is something we take for granted now, but when Miller was writing, people in the theatre were  seriously debating whether or not it was even possible to write a tragedy with a prosaic

If you're in a really generous mood, you can kind of forgive a few people for shouting "let him die!" in response to a question about a person without health insurance who is suddenly stricken ill.  That shrieking answer might well be directed at the hypothetical itself and not any one individual.  Hypotheticals like that can be frustrating, particularly when you lack a non-sociopathic answer.

I never even know even the most scant details about most death penalty cases and that I only  take notice when one makes the national news -- that's sad.  In a lot of ways, that's understandable, but it's also, given the magnitude of the punishment that society is about to deliver, unforgivable.

It's also, at least by my watching of CNN over the last hour, very disturbing to me as an observer of human evolution.  This "death watch" coverage is very bread and circuses. 

If I can be Stone Column Punk about it:

So, when I posted this, it looked as if my column, "The U.S. Will Never Pay Off Its Debt" would not be published.  I had hoped that by posting it here, you guys would ferret out its flaws for me.  But, instead, it was well received, which made me think, "darn it, this should be published."  The Daily now seems to agree.

But, they'd also like me not to scoop my own column, in the event that we run it next week.  So, I'm taking the draft down, but leaving the very good thread intact.  Thank you all for the help on this.  I thought I was losing my mind.

It's rare that I praise Nicholas Kristof because, most of the time, he typifies the kind of "conventional wisdom of the TED Conference" type that I just can't stand.  You know, the pro-globalization, let's let a blue ribbon panel of tech billionaires and former maverick politicos solve all of our problems, bunch.  The Bloombergians.  Oh wait, but I'm not here to bury Kristof but to praise his column, "We're Rich (In Nature)."

Investor Jeremy Grantham, well known for years and around the world (he manages more than $100 billion) has recently come around to the idea that some mortgage debt forgiveness might be necessary.  Given that Grantham invests in bonds from time to time, this is amazing stuff.  Bond investors hate the idea of debt forgiveness.  They usually prefer "debt repayment at all costs, or I get to take your stuff."  I recommend reading Grantham's latest letter to clients, which you can find here, or perhaps my

He has the hair.  He doesn't know anything about science or history.  He likely misuses the phrase, "when in Rome."  My column for The Daily this week is about Rick Perry, the conservative superstar and great Republican hope of the moment who reminds me entirely of Ron Burgundy.

The media is so allergic to common sense these days that nobody has reported on the obvious implications of the Republican complaint that nearly half of Americans had no income tax liability in 2010.  Republicans want to raise taxes on the poor.  This is the subject of my column in The Daily this week.

Playing Diogenes, good ol' jollyroger asked us to name some respectable conservatives.  It's a tough game because they all have sins.  I used to cite William Buckley as a personal favorite for his general tone and writing style, but would always be confronted with the crass and ignorant things the guy said about homosexuals in response.  From our lens, none of them are perfect.

My column for The Daily today is about the S&P downgrade and its effects but, beyond that, it's about an undercurrent of belief in the U.S. that we should be collectively punished for the sins of borrowing and profligate spending.

There's actually a whole school of "hard money" economics adherents, known as the "Austrian School," that believes this very explicitly.  They see stimulus packages, quantitative easing, Keynesian money printing and other Federal Reserve tactics as ways of avoiding necessary economic pain.  Ron and Rand Paul are in this camp.  They believe that you deal with high unemployment or stagnant wages or even inflation by... living with it.  These are the necessary results of speculative bubbles that you never should have let happen in the first place and if you'd just let the supply of gold be the disciplining factor in economic life, you wouldn't have had these problems in the first place.  I tend to believe that if we did that we'd still be living in 15th century conditions, but that's another story.

I see over at Swampland today that likely casualties of the budget deal include the long-term unemployed (who are unlikely to get another extension of unemployment benefits) and, of all things during a time when we're encouraging people to get more education to be better at their jobs, graduate students, who will lose the ability to take out federally subsidized loans.  One can only hope that pulling subsidies for those loans will eventually bring the costs of graduate schools dow

My latest column for The Daily was a reaction Thomas Friedman's recent New York Times column calling for a third party presidential candidate to be selected by some Internet Web site that he says is backed by flashy hedge fund money.

This morning, Paul Krugman praised a New York Review Of Books article by Elizabeth Drew called "What Were They Thinking?" that I recommend you all read.  It's depressing stuff but it at least offers an explanation as to why Obama never called the Republicans on their debt ceiling bluff and why he's made so darned many compromises that it's almost inconceivable that this whole debate ends as anything other than a Republican victory.

I used to think that the most lasting effects that a President can have on the country are his appointments to the federal courts.  But George W. Bush has changed my mind about that.  If you really want to have a lasting voice in the national conversation, just put your name on a big, fundamental piece of legislation and make it sunset after you're out of office.  The "Bush Tax Cuts," designed from the start to expire after Bush's two terms were, were a devious trap, set to explode in the face of the next president, preferably a Democrat.

The largest single economic problem the U.S.

Over at TPM, the early response to Obama's presser seems to be that this was a political homerun for President Obama.  I get the logic here.  He used his bully pulpit to very clearly articulate that all of the debt ceiling obstruction is coming from the right.  He tortured House speaker John Boehner by praising his honesty and intentions, thus making the rest of the Republican party look a tad insane.  This could, as David Kurtz argues, cost the Republican some stature with the press, if not with vote

I have criminal trials on the brain this week with Dominique Strauss-Kahn and now Casey Anthony dominating the non-political news.  But, as I said in a previous post, I'm not a crime news junky.  I am, however, very interested in procedure and civil liberties.  When something like the DSK case happens I almost immediately wonder, "what happens to the accused when they are not fabulously wealthy?" Which is the topic of my column for The Daily this week.