H.D.S. Greenway has a long and distinguished journalistic career and his NYT op-ed on US-Pakistan relations is nuanced, balanced, sensitive — and misses the main point.Greenway attacks the Obama administration for cutting military aid to Pakistan and tries to explain US-Pakistani relations.  They are angry, he says, because we want a “transactional” relationship and they […]

Robert Reich has a smart WSJ piece this morning saying that without job growth, Obama is toast in 2012.  His suggestion: an extended payroll tax holiday for the first $20,000 of income and Depression style job creation programs like the WPA and the CCC.Coulda, woulda, shoulda.  Obama could have done that in 2009, and he […]

In my post on global weirding I wrote that as China’s economy and society become more complex, it gets steadily harder for policy makers to balance competing interests and manage the tradeoffs.  This is what I mean: as the WSJ tells us this morning, turning the renminbi into an international reserve currency is much harder […]

President Obama recently admitted he was surprised to discover that shovel ready didn’t mean shovel ready anymore.He shouldn’t have been: the essence of blue social policy is to make everything complicated and hard.In the Depression, shovel ready still meant something.  No OSHA inspectors, no EPA paperwork: if the government wanted to open a camp and […]

Shockingly, the Libyan rebels are not nearly as nice as Human Rights Watch.  Looting, burning, taking revenge — according to the New York Times, Libyan rebels in the western mountains are behaving much like their government opponents.  Maybe NATO should be bombing the rebels to protect pro-government civilians even as it bombs the government to […]

Shingles is a serious, often excruciatingly painful disease that people who’ve had chicken pox often (roughly 1 million cases a year) get later in life.  The good news: there’s an effective vaccine that would prevent the disease and save billions.  The bad news: there isn’t enough of it and only 10 percent of the at-risk […]

The spirit of Marie Antoinette is alive and well and supporting local produce in the Hamptons according to this story in the Wall Street Journal.  Dedicated social activists have set up a charmingly twee non-profit to promote the production and consumption of local, organic food in the Hamptons.  No word yet on whether I-banker trophy […]

Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation that mandates that California schools teach gay history.I know, I know.  California is plain out of money.  The entire educational system from preschool to the University of California is falling apart.  The Supreme Court may force the prisons to release thousands of inmates.  The state’s budget is a laughingstock […]

More than 220 years after the Bastille went down, we are still trying to figure out what happened and what it meant.  For most people around the world the French Revolution remains the revolution par excellence; the English speaking world talks about 1688 and 1776, but most of the world entered modernity through traumatic meltdowns […]

E. D. Kain at Forbes launched a missile strike at my post on the drug war, then took most of it back after a discerning reader hauled him over the coals.  Kain appears to believe that giving authority over drugs to the states is the way to sort out this mess.  So if cocaine is […]