Gross Evidence of Rent-Seeking

It’s not often that you get enough evidence of rent-seeking you can actually find it entered into a public record. Leave it to Stupakistan to show the incredible power of insurance and other nondepository financial institutions to leave their fingerprints without shame on the public policy debate over the healthcare payments system. It [...]

Congress Critterz Gone Bad

I should be used to reading about ethics lapses in politicians since I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life watching every one from a governor, my state senator, my US congressman, two City Council members, to the School Board president (and that’s just a short list) do the perp walk.  Most of these [...]

What’s wrong with young people everybody now

I’ve been thinking about the failures of government recently (1, 2), and it turns out (h/t dakinikat) I’m in good company. Sachs points out that “Not only are Americans deeply divided on what to do about [everything], but government is also failing to execute settled policies effectively. Management systems linking government, business and civil [...]

Our Dysfunctional Government

I used to tell my students down here in New Orleans how smoothly things ran in Minneapolis compared to here until that Interstate Bridge fell into the river. Then I realized we were just the canary in the coal mine.
Still, it’s really hard to describe the degree of dysfunction surrounding all levels of government down [...]

Perspective

One of the first things to go when people get morally outraged is their perspective.  Not only do they frequently lose perspective, they also lose sight of bigger issues.  A sense of outrage simply overwhelms one’s sense of perspective.  The enraged heart overtakes the circumspect mind.
I’ve talked about The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) before [...]

Common Sense and the sensus communis: anatomy of an American pressure cooker

Gay-Lussac
The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.
This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of [...]

Uncle Sam Contracts Frater Magnus to Safeguard his Healthcare Liberty

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. – Abraham Lincoln
There’s a sucker born every minute. – P.T. Barnum
We, the People, are born every minute. The last ten [...]

And you wonder why we can’t have a Public Option

H/T David Sirota and Open Left
I just got this link via David on Facebook.  I’m speechless but not surprised.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the first time yesterday suggested she may be backing off her support of the public option. According to CNN, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “said they would support any provision [...]

Friday Morning News

Good morning Conflucians! Today is September 11, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of focus on that grim anniversary in the major newspapers. The New York Times has a couple of articles. The first is about fears that never materialized:
Remembering a future that many feared
So much has been said and [...]

Borrowing a turn of Phrase …

Paul Krugman’s Saturday blog post takes a defensive tone with Marc Ambinder who once called Krugman and a group of other liberal thinkers “reflexively anti-Bush”.  Krugman expected a better apology from Ambinder after it was confirmed by former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that the White House did, in fact, play politics with the [...]