I’m convinced that Megan McArdle, on her old blog, once wrote about her idea to write a book on personal finance for young people like herself, who grew up affluent but chose to go into careers that don’t pay all that well. The entirety of one early chapter, as I recall, was an instruction to “Stand in front of the mirror, and practice saying, ‘I can’t afford it.’ ”

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At Unqualified Offerings, Neel Krishnaswami makes sense. Given how easy it is to learn anything about anyone these days, and further given that the govt has computers, too, we should: “Take things like FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and put it on steroids — the presumption should be that documents are not revealed on request, but that they are made publicly electronically available and searchable by default.”

Strangely, the Ross Perot people look at the chart below and see

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I got a lot out of the comment thread to Alex Tabarrok’s post about Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution from earlier this month. It seems pretty inarguable to me that Borlaug’s work saved many lives in its day. It seems debatable whether what the present moment calls for now is more of the same. During the era of cheap oil, there was real economic - if not ecological - sense in pumping plants up with massive inputs of fossil fuel. Now? I’m honestly unsure what a post-hydrocarbon agriculture that can feed billions of people will (can) look like.

David Brooks has the admirable and rare quality for someone in his position of not being the least bit stingy in helping young writers he feels are talented get ahead in their careers, nor does he expect any sort of quid pro quo. Unfortunately, Brooks’ nose for talent has a very spotty track record, and the result is sometimes that the world would have been better off if he were more self-involved. For example, several years ago, after Brooks spent a semester guesting at Yale, he gave a plug in his Times column to the then unfinished biography one of his students was writing about Charles Hill, most recently late of the Giuliani campaign, a warmongering non-scholar and non-intelligent man who seems to have secured some sort of legacy lectureship ‘neath the elms. Anyway, because of Brooks’ plug, the book garnered attention from publishers that would have been unimaginable otherwise, and the author eventually cashed out for something in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. The ultimate product of Brooks’ generosity, however, was perhaps the worst “Yale book” ever written, and bear in mind that’s a class that includes God and Man at Yale.

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So. Let’s say you’re a center-right pundit with a reputation you feel you deserve for non-partisan evenhandedness and ideological heterodoxy. Even for being a bit of a contrarian. So when Barack Obama torpedoed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regime, that might strike you as a teachable moment for liberals. After all, the McCain-Feingold regime is simply the latest iteration of a post-Watergate regulatory framework ostensibly designed to curb unseemly financial influences on the political system, but has achieved, with every new iteration, more expansive criminalization of political speech. What it has not achieved is any halt in the growth of the influence of allegedly malign special interests. On the contrary, some iterations of campaign finance regulation have actually augmented special interest influence.

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Thanks to George Will, I think I have a better idea of the thrust of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s much-discussed new book on “libertarian paternalism,” Nudge. It’s not about distorting the tax code with a million new Pigovian prods. It is also, it should be noted, not remotely libertarianism pure. It’s a regulatory regime. It would impose some burdens on businesses and probably individuals. It does sound like an incremental improvement over existing nanny-state impulses, though. And the plain truth is, generalized libertarianism is unproven as a plan for human betterment. (There’s a rights-based case that side-steps the practicalities of whether every single possible reduction of governmental sway over our lives will make people happier and materially better off. A dedicated anarcho-capitalist is pretty sure life would be “better” without government, but thinks that what matters is that life without government would be more moral.) Meanwhile, past - managerial - approaches of liberalism to societal problems have often misfired spectacularly.

I completely agree with my awesome UO co-blogger, Thoreau: It’s time for Barack Obama to put his authority to use where it counts, stopping this corrupt telecom immunity bill making its way through the Congress this week. Otherwise, we’ll have a right to find his nods in the direction of civil liberties to be empty gestures; indeed, we’d be fools to regard them any other way.

As I wrote yesterday over at Unqualified Offerings:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is working eagerly with a Democratic-controlled Congress to grant George Bush all the power Bush wants to intercept Americans’ telephone calls and emails without warrants, and to retroactively grant immunity from civil or criminal sanction to the telecoms that have been assisting with Bush’s illegal eavesdropping for years — telecoms that heavily contribute to congresspeople of both parties, and which are in the middle of lawsuits they’d dearly love to see rendered moot by Hoyer’s efforts.

[...]

To fully understand how sickening and outrageous this all is (and tell me, why did I vote a straight Dem ticket in ‘06 again?), read Greenwald. (Brief ad click-through.) I can’t do better than he does, as he has been working on this issue feverishly and my re-explaining it could only be a paraphrase of his posts. Then, contribute to this fund to put heat on Hoyer and the other Democrats who are acting like good little authoritarian GOP-bots.

Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal (6/18/2008)

Contact: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It’s moving that fast. If we don’t stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lymon, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, “The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration’s assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They’re American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them.”

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This, my friends, is corporatism and the military-industrial complex at work; companies so in bed with the federal govt that they do the state’s (dubious) bidding, at the expense of their customers’ trust and for fine pay (links omitted): (more…)

It seems a little odd to be offering political analysis in a moment of so much human suffering, but it must be noted that the Chinese government’s response to the massive recent earthquake in Sichuan province is a damned sight more open and competent than I expected. On the negative side, China is still blocking international aid workers. On the positives side, the state media is broadcasting in what appears to be an accurate and timely manner and foreign correspondents are allowed to do their jobs. It seems that the regime is learning from the past. From the NY Times: (more…)