• How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories, June 26, 2009 – with WiFi Classroom
• Preparing and Delivering Congressional Testimony, July 30, 2009
• Money And Politics: Why spending millions on personal campaigns might help you lose – “Having to ask people for money forces a candidate to take their feedback, thus learning about their concerns directly rather than filtered through pollsters and consultants.”
• Editorial: General Motors Zombie Watch 5: Cross-Eyed and Painless – “If President Obama wanted to save GM, he should have let it fail. There’s only one way to change deeply-ingrained habits: pain. GM’s management will not change its slavish devotion to the fundamentally inefficient status quo unless it’s more painful for them to keep doing what they’re doing than to do something else. By making bankruptcy painless for GM’s upper echelons, by adding complexity rather than removing it, politicians have effectively sealed its fate.”
• Eugene Debs v. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. – “Holmes and his progressive fans advocated granting the state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life while at the same time weakening traditional checks on government power. … Mencken accurately denounced Holmes as ‘no more than an advocate of the rights of law-makers’:”
• A Socratic Dialogue: Fearing the Collapse of U.S. Treasury Bond Prices
• Fitch Expects Home Prices to Fall through 2nd Half of 2010 – “Fitch expects ‘home prices will fall an additional 12.5% nationally and 36% in California’ from Q1 2009.”
• Study: Home Equity Borrowers in Danger – “There will be many foreclosures of homes bought before the bubble (or in the early stages of the bubble), because the homeowners extracted too much equity from the home. This is not surprising, but probably means more foreclosures than policymakers expect. ”
• The Debt Conundrum, Part I – ” Only stooges would expect the same borrow and spend policies that ruined our economic system in the 1st place to fix the problem. The housing and debt crisis needs the attention of reality based, blunt, straight shooting doers. Not a 3 Stooges solution.”
• “If They Can Find Time for Feminist Theory, They Can Find Time for Edmund Burke” – “The politicization of everyday life by the socio-economic-professional-New Class I hang out with – the tendency, for example, to twitter one’s fleeting political thoughts twenty times a day, or to Make Political Statements with status updates on Facebook a couple of times a day – strikes me as somewhere between bizarre and pathological. Or, worse, trivial – merely the identification of professional sports. I understand it if it’s sports; I don’t understand it at all if it’s politics.”
• Weekly wrap: California faces July 1 deadline – “If lawmakers fail to act before the July 1 start of a new budget year, Schwarzenegger says he will not go along with a short-term loan to keep the state afloat. ”
• “Brutal” budget cuts loom in Colorado: State lawmaker: Lagging tax receipts paint a picture far grittier than area economy suggests – “Just when it seemed Colorado’s economy was improving, tax collections are backsliding and there are new worries the state budget will be $150 million to $300 million deeper in the hole than expected, a top lawmaker warned”
• To Discourage Water Bottles, a Little “Tap” Dancing – “U.S. cities could take a cue from Venice — ‘rebranding’ tap water is a great idea! Now, if only they could figure out a way to charge for it, citizens would flock to it in droves.”
• Property Rights Take a Hit – “’Crony capitalism’ is a term often applied to foreign nations where government interference circumvents market forces. The practice is widely associated with tin-pot dictators and second-rate economies. In such a system, support for the ruling regime is the best and only path to economic success. Who you know supersedes what you know, and favoritism trumps the rule of law. Unfortunately, this week’s events demonstrate that the phrase now more aptly describes our own country.”
• Moscow’s Commuting Dogs – “In Moscow, it seems there is an outbreak of commuting dogs. According to England’s Sun (the U.K.’s most eminently respected trashy tabloid): ‘STRAY dogs are commuting to and from a city centre on underground trains in search of food scraps. The clever canines board the Tube each morning.'”
• “Drugs Have Won” – “The NYT’s Nicholas Kristof joins the ranks of those urging an end to the drug war. The War on drugs, Kristof notes, has had three consequences: 1) ‘we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons’; 2) ‘we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad’; and 3) ‘we have squandered resources.'”
• They also serve who only sit in class – “Maryland mandated student service in 1992. It’s taught cynicism, Greene concludes.”
• Oops dept. – “The lead plaintiff in Alli v. Decker, an ACLU-led class action lawsuit aimed at preventing the deportation of various aliens who commit crimes, turns out to be a conman who played a role in a huge Nigerian-led identity theft scam.”
• Why is there a dire shortage of hippies in the country and what should the government do to address it?
• Archbishop Chaput gives ‘Stoning of Soraya’ two thumbs up
• 8 Ways Reading Makes You Better at Life
• Fried Food Is Tasteless: Let’s Thank The Guy From CSPI
• Jogging does NOT cause heart disease – “Having seen coronary plaque detected with heart scans in many runners, virtually all of whom demonstrated increased Lp(a), I believe that Lp(a) is causal.”
• Good Science: Dr. Leibel Explains Metabolic Slowdown with Weight Loss – “most people eating carb controlled diets or using strategies that keep their blood sugars normal do report that they are able to maintain their 15-20% weight loss long term”
• Why ants survive in a microwave
• Cherettes — Postered, Painted and Pasteled – the “guy who really invented the modern poster was Jules Chéret (1836-1932).”
• Dream discoveries