The Poinsettia Bowl kicks off tonight, starting a pre-New Year’s gauntlet of lesser bowl games with ridiculous names (*), and also initiating the annual ritual of bellyaching from ESPN about how the BCS sucks (true), about how we need a playoff (not true), and about how the Big Ten and the Pac 10 are to […]
For the first time in 24 years, an Illinois football season is going to end the way we all hope, back in September, that it will end: with a trip to the Rose Bowl.
Forget the BCS. Forget all the different proposals for a playoff system. If I were the king of the world, we’d play […]
“But I never knew why it had to have a trash compactor — that’s about the dumbest thing in the universe, when you think about it.”
Ross Douthat offers an interesting theory on the future of small government conservatism, but it misses the mark here:
As rich countries get richer, the demand for state services - and particularly middle-class entitlements - may naturally rise, because people increasingly feel like they can afford the pinch of taxation that comes with, say, lavishing more […]
Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I was on vacation, but now I’m back. Of course, there are pictures of Victoria, and Olympic National Park.
Also, long-distance Amtrak travel is vastly under-rated and under-appreciated.
An iPod Nano.
An iPod Nano.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have an essay in the New Republic arguing for a “New Environmentalism” that doesn’t get trapped by old-fashioned arguments about pollution and regulatory structures.
They phrase the idea as “clean-energy investment that is unburdened by the pollution paradigm” (*), which parses out as something pretty close to nonsense, but what […]
Michael Hunt’s column in the Journal Sentinel:
If the schedule is the only measure, then, yeah, go ahead and give the National League Central to Chicago. The divisional dregs plus Florida are something like a combined 50 games below .500, the martial equivalent of facing the French army reserves when it matters…
Yet in a Brewers-Cubs sprint […]
This photograph is Exhibit A for the argument that Florida is for spring training, not for real baseball.
That’s an actual photo from a (not delayed by rain) game yesterday against Washington, where “there were no more than about 400 fans in attendance at the game’s peak.” The crowd was quiet enough that the umpire threw […]
Census Shows a Modest Rise in U.S. Income, also known as missing the lede:
The nation’s median household income grew modestly in 2006, the Census Bureau reported yesterday, even as the percentage of people without health insurance hit a high.
Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of […]
Bradford Plummer over at The New Republic points out the latest entry in the Bush Administration’s long history of behind-the-scenes misanthropy.
The Interior Department is preparing to offer a handful of agribusinesses long-term rights to 15 percent of the federally owned water in California — more water than all the households in Los Angeles and San […]
Jon Chait, via Ezra Klein:
You can look at the federal tax code as a kind of layer cake. At the bottom is the federal payroll tax, used to finance Social Security and Medicare. This tax is a flat rate and covers wage income only to around $100,000 a year, with all income above […]
Daniel Larison on Karl Rove’s picture of himself as a latter-day Mark Hanna:
Rove’s errors were not merely political, but stemmed from a misreading of the very McKinley years he claims to admire and that he wishes to imitate.
A more compelling comparison between the GOP under Bush and an early twentieth century center-right party’s fate might […]