Andrew Sullivan thinks Republicans hate the cash-for-clunkers program, wherein the government gives people up to $4500 of taxpayer money to trade in their cars for newer ones that get slightly better gas mileage, out of “emotional reaction to the end of the far right’s dominance of American discourse.” [C]ash-for-clunkers is one example of the government [...]

Glenn Greenwald rebuts those who think his strident attacks on Presidents Bush and Obama for abusing their power make his blog “an ideological wind tunnel” and that he is “oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.” By the design of the Founders, most American political issues are driven by the vicissitudes of political realities, [...]

Continuing a long-running theme at his blog, Matt Yglesias laments that Senators from small states wield so much power.  The latest fuel is a NYT feature on six moderates who are supposedly the linchpins to putting together a bipartisan health care deal and who routinely hash out the details of same over snacks. [V]ast power [...]

In a speech to the Atlantic Council this morning, Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, argues that we need an “international FEMA” to coordinate complex contingency operations across the various agencies of the American government and institutionalize lessons learned. You can listen to the audio at the link. What struck me about [...]

Political blogging is, by its nature, slave to the zeitgeist. If it happened more than two hours ago, it’s old news. And if it happened more than 24 hours ago, you’d better have some sage reflections to make the waiting worth the while. Heedless of this, Brian Moore is getting around to fisking the speeches [...]

NYT urban planning professor Mitchell Moss has taken to the pixels of something called New Geography to point out what most of us already knew: Washington, DC thrives during bad times for the rest of the country.  His historical discussion of the District’s evolution from swampy backwater to major city is interesting. But this, I [...]

Matt Yglesias has an interesting suggestion for a preachy movie revival: [W]hat the new rebooted Trek really needs is a re-do of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home but dealing with a more contemporary environmental threat than the need to save humpback whales from extinction. For example, The Enterprise could travel back in time to [...]

Surprisingly few bloggers of the bloggers I read are writing about GM’s emergence from bankruptcy in a mere 40 days through a rather unorthodox process.  The background: AP: General Motors completed an unusually quick exit from bankruptcy protection on Friday with ambitions of making money and building cars people are eager to buy. Once the [...]

Kevin Drum argues, correctly I think, that British- and Canadian-style socialized medicine is not on the table in the United States and that we should therefore frame the debate in terms of a French- or Dutch-style mixed system.  He further cites Jonathan Cohn‘s argument that these systems are quite good. But in the course of [...]

Michael Tomasky is stoked that Wal-Mart has come out in support of government’s mandating business provide health insurance for all employees. His explanation, however, is curious: There’s got to be a fascinating story behind the “why.” Wal-Mart would never acknowledge this, but there seems to me little doubt that all the pressure campaigns over the [...]

The events in Honduras today have been some of the more dramatic in recent Latin American (and especially Central American) politics. The events are certainly of relevance to the democratic evolution of Honduras. Dave Schuler asked that I post a few comments given my academic focus on Latin America. If anyone is interested in the [...]

The Clear Card program whereby pre-screened passengers are expedited through airport security is no more.  I received this email overnight: Ensuring that this wasn’t some sort of odd email fraud scheme, I did a quick news search and, sure enough, it’s true: Clear began in 2005 with the potential to make airport security quicker and [...]

Jeff Jarvis notes that there has been some controversy over Google’s Streetview, which allows people to see videos of what’s going on in the streets, including residential neighborhoods, in an ever-expanding number of locations. In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even [...]

There’s been much back-and-forth since Wednesday’s tragic shooting of a guard at the Holocaust Musuem about the rise of right wing extremists and the need for the federal government to treat them as a threat.  Inevitably, we’re seeing the perennial “their extremists are worse than our extremists” debate.  Oddly, we’re even seeing some “No, he’s [...]

I begin my New Atlanticist roundup essay “European Parliament Moves Right” with, “The weekend’s European Parliament produced good news for the center-right parties, bad news for the center-left, and good news for radical parties of all stripes.” I plan other posts today on the implications for the major governments and smaller states in Europe.  This [...]

A court decision striking down Jefferson County, Alabama’s commuter tax — combined with an impasse in the state legislature — has led to the shutdown of significant government services, Bloomberg reports. Alabama’s most populous county is preparing to stop road maintenance, close courthouses and shutter services for the elderly after a court struck down taxes [...]

Hilzoy wonders why we take counterterrorism more seriously than food inspection. After all, food-borne illness kills about 2,000 more people every year than died on 9/11; why we should spend over half a trillion dollars a year defending ourselves against human invaders while leaving ourselves open to bacteria that are every bit as lethal is [...]

President Obama wants some major reforms in our unemployment system. President Barack Obama wants unemployment insurance to become a stepping stone for future work by making it easier to enroll in school or job training. Whether he succeeds will depend on the willingness of states and colleges to change the rules.People who have been laid [...]

I mentioned Newt Gingrich‘s article “Are You an Obama Winner? Or an Obama Loser?” at the tail end of Wednesday’s episode of OTB Radio (“Republican Party, RIP?“) but never got around to blogging it.  It is both a classic Frank Luntz-inspired use of obnoxious language to paint a dire picture of the Democrats — and [...]

One of Dave Schuler’s favorite statements in recent months is that “Anything too big to fail is too big to exist.”  If we’re not going to allow them to shoulder the negative consequences of failure because we deem it too dangerous to society, then their very existence is too dangerous for society.   Ezra Klein makes [...]

“What starts with f, ends with k, and means screw your workers? That’s right—401(k).” – James Ridgeway A great line, even though I disagree with his premise. He’s arguing that the rise of privatized retirement was the doom of the relatively short-lived social contract that arose in the postwar years in which employers and the [...]

King Banian persuasively argues that this statement by President Obama on Chrysler’s bankruptcy was “utterly contemptible.” While many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you some did not. In particular, a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout. They [...]

Amusing sign seen in Atlanta by a Tyler Cowen reader:

Kevin Drum observes, When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes.  We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong, and even if there’s a price to pay we can’t shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing. But when [...]

After several days of inflamed public debate following official confirmation that the United States government tortured suspected terrorists under specific authorization from the Bush administration, the inevitable pushback has begun.  Several reports now suggest that these extreme interrogation techniques had the desired effect, yielding valuable intelligence that saved lives. The most interesting of these, alas, [...]

The United States taxpayer will be giving Chrysler $50 million a day in hopes that it will be absorbed by an Italian firm and ten times that to GM for, well, no apparent reason. The Obama administration will make about $500 million available to Chrysler LLC through the end of this month as it seeks [...]

Andrew Sullivan is soliciting right-of-center comments on a report by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that has mostly attracted left-of-center commenters thus far. Here’s the lede: The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress [...]

“Has the Right surrendered in the culture war?” asks Washington Examiner political editor Chris Stirewalt.  The piece is illustrated with the photo and caption at right and begins: As some 240 million American Christians observe the most sacred week of their religious calendar, the nation reached a pivot point on faith and values. Demonstrating the [...]

Glenn Reynolds has been dutifully chronicling the efforts of those organizing “tea parties” around the land to protest government bailouts and other stuff.  Apparently, there are going to be a gaggle of them on April 15. Now, Jane Hamsher is promoting a counterweight: “On Saturday, April 11, there are going to be demonstrations all across [...]

Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Arnold Kling has managed to come away from an anti-capitalism screed in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi with this conclusion: For quite a while, but especially over the last nine months, the best way to predict developments in politics and finance has been to ask: what will do the [...]

Friday, under the slightly exaggerated headline “Obama to Run GM, Chrysler,” I passed on word that President Obama was going to demand “pretty drastic changes” in order to back further bailouts for the two struggling US auto companies.   Well, reductio creep happened before the weekend expired, as the top story at memeorandum shows. I’ll let [...]

President Obama says he’ll help GM and Chrysler but they’ll have to agree to some “pretty drastic changes.” “We will provide them some help,” Obama said. “I know that it is not popular to provide help to auto workers — or to auto companies. But my job is to measure the costs of allowing these [...]

In the midst of an argument about the dubiousness of some charitable tax deductions that I generally agree with, Conor Clarke makes an astounding leap: Decisions about what will make our community better should be made communally — by pooling revenue and making collective decisions about where and how it should be spent. Methinks someone [...]

Jack Balkin, the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, examines the Constitutionality of the Houseand Senate versions of the bills taxing bonuses of AIG and other companies that received government bailouts and pronounces them Constitutional.  He quickly dismisses arguments under the Due Process, Takings, Ex Post Facto, and [...]

Tim Geithner takes to the pages of WSJ to flesh out his Plan for Bad Bank Assets. Our new Public-Private Investment Program will set up funds to provide a market for the legacy loans and securities that currently burden the financial system. The Public-Private Investment Program will purchase real-estate related loans from banks and securities [...]

Matt Yglesias, responding to my statement yesterday that “We’ll always have a strong ‘conservative’ movement. It’s just that Ronald Reagan and Alex P. Keaton wouldn’t quite recognize it,” one-ups me and posits that “American politics in the future will mostly be dominated by a center-right political coalition just as it always has.” While he’s riding [...]

Paul Waldman fleshes out a theme that many observers have made in passing: The young voters who helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency could create a “permanent” realignment in American politics. In 1984, 59 percent of the nation’s Alex P. Keatons voted for Reagan, an extraordinary percentage for a Republican (and just over his [...]

Congress is threatening to confiscate AIG bonuses by abusing its power to tax: Senate Democrats vowed Tuesday to all but strip AIG executives of their $165 million in bonuses, as expressions of outrage swelled in Congress over eye-catching extra income for employees of a firm that has received billions in taxpayer bailout funds. “Recipients of [...]

Responding to understandable public outrage, President Obama is vowing to figure out a way to get back the money AIG paid to the people who ran the company into the ground. President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of “recklessness and greed” and said he intends [...]

Amity Shlaes tells NPR’s Kai Ryssdal that the current tax system reverses the problem that the founders faced. Taxation without representation. That’s what our nation’s founders rebelled against. Subjects in the colonies were sending money home to the crown without getting say in their own government. The course of U.S. history can be seen as [...]

Inspired by an OTB comment thread, Steven Taylor has written two essays questioning the use of the phrase “A Republic, Not a Democracy.”   In Part I: Looking at Terms, he cites the political science literature to show that the terms are interchangable.  Part II: Madison, Republican Government and Federalism, he argues that even the founders [...]

H. Rodgin Cohen, “the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration,” George Stephanoupoulous reports.  He adds, “Cohen had risen to the top after the withdrawal last week of expected deputy treasury secretary pick Annette Nazareth.” Something’s wrong with this picture. To be sure, Cohen wasn’t technically an appointee.   Still, as Glenn Reynolds [...]

TigerHawk wants to know why, if it’s a good idea to cap the salaries of CEOs of companies getting federal bailouts at $500,000 why we shouldn’t do that with universities that get federal funding? Megan McArdle isn’t persuaded by the obvious answer: one is asking to be rescued by the taxpayer and the other is [...]

Ross Douthat has discovered Barack Obama’s evil genius: What Obama does have, though, is an atmosphere of crisis and a massively-unpopular opposition party, which grants him an unparalleled political opportunity to pass whatever spending the Democratic Party likes, and damn the short-term cost. And what you see in his budgeting proposals, I think, is the [...]

Earlier today, I took Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Buckley to task for their seeming surprise that Obama is a big spender. Some, including Steven Taylor, responded that they, like other center-right types who supported Obama, were aware that he would often make policy choices they would disagree with but were simply choosing between bad alternatives. [...]

Eric Posner has a Slate piece offering a novel plan for “renegotiat[ing] all those bad loans at no cost to the taxpayer.” The solution to this problem is for the government to force renegotiations to occur. A simple plan could do this. The plan would give all homeowners who live in a ZIP code where [...]

Despite my being local and getting the Sunday Washington Post delivered to my driveway, I just encountered this story about an Alexandria shop owner’s renting his space to a sex shop to spit city planners on memeorandum. To many in Old Town Alexandria, the sex shop that opened recently on King Street is nothing short [...]

Tyler Cowen passes along a “study” by Daniel Klein and Jason Briggeman which “finds” that conservative magazines are anti-liberty: Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty [...]

I’ve followed the discussion about the Bill Moyers “scandal” (see, for example, today’s (WSJ piece “Bill Moyers’s Name Is Linked to J. Edgar Hoover’s Abuse of Office”) out of the corner of my eye for the last couple of days  and am having trouble seeing what the big deal is. Basically, as I understand it: [...]

Michael Kinsley has a rather rambling column about the “upside-down economics” of the stimulus plan that’s subtitled (or, whatever one calls the SEO-driven title tag that appears at the top of the browser and in search results) “Recession Economics – How Do We Repay the Stimulus Spree?” But even if the stimulus is a magnificent [...]