You’d think Kevin would have warned Comer not to screw the pooch like he did James Comer, who is leading the GOP’s probe as chair of the House oversight and accountability committee, appeared to say the quiet part out loud during a “Fox & Friends First” interview. “We have talked to you about this on the show, about how the media can just not ignore this any longer. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, it says, ‘Millions Flowed to Biden Family Members. Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Matter,’” said the show’s host, Ashley Strohmier, referring to a piece last week by conservative columnist Jim Geraghty. “So do you think that because of your investigation, that is what’s moved this needle with the media?” “Absolutely. There’s no question,” Comer replied. “You look at the polling, and right now Donald Trump is 7 points ahead of Joe Biden and trending upward, Joe Biden’s trending downward.
Reading
“Don’t do it, Ariel!” Florida’s governor was heard bellowing in the back row.
Good ad. You can donate to his campaign here. Here’s the best review of Hawley’s “Manhood” For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis. Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence. As far back as the 1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little boys. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in Esquire that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” A dispatch from the journalist Susan Faludi confirmed that manliness remained “under siege” in 1999. No wonder there is such a chorus of complaints about the dearth of male role models.
One question for José Arroyo-Barrigüete, an economist at Comillas Pontifical University in Spain.
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Including in the Washington Post It’s obvious that right wingers did not read the report. They have been relying on each other’s interpretations and it’s all wrong. Here’s the very trustworthy NY Times’ Charlie Savage: Marc Thiessen wrote a shoddy Washington Post column using as a foil the headline of my piece yesterday assessing how the Durham inquiry fell flat after years of political hype. (He didn’t engage with its substance, of course.) A dissection follows. As an initial matter, Thiessen got his start at a lobbying firm that included two named partners – Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – who were convicted of felonies in the Russia investigation & pardoned by Trump. He does not disclose that conflict to the WP’s readers. Thiessen opens by insinuating that I am downplaying Durham bc I’m implicated in (his tendentious portrayal of) the media’s Trump-Russia coverage. Aside from whether he is accurately describing Mueller’s complex findings, I wasn’t part of the NYT’s Trump-Russia coverage team. He links a screenshot, not the piece nyti.ms/3pSTil6, then moves goalposts.
My new book Class War is a literary history, but it is committed to literature as something more than a record of past events. With a textual archive comprising letters, slogans, songs, manifestoes, memoirs, and field manuals in addition to novels, poems, and other more obviously literary modes of expression, literature is to be understood here as an active participant in the revolutionary process.
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Back in January, I wrote this: Democrats are supremely confident that the Republicans will be blamed for the standoff and that this will benefit them in the 2024 election. In fact, many of them didn’t even try to convince Sinemanchin to raise it in the lame duck because they are so sure that everything will turn out all right and the GOP will be blamed for any fallout from the hostage taking. Wherever did I get that idea? Democratic leaders have signaled that they don’t intend to address the borrowing limit in the current lame-duck session of Congress, when their majorities in the House and the Senate would theoretically give them a shot at raising or even eliminating the cap entirely without the help of Republican votes.
There is a sharp contradiction at the heart of the Albanese government’s attempt to stabilise trade with China, whilst at the same time preparing for war with China in support of the United States. Trade Minister Don Farrell has just returned from a visit to China. He described his visit as ‘a step in the process of stabilising Continue reading »
I participated in the drafting and negotiation of the document of recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and was personally responsible for some of the practical aspects of dismantling the diplomatic representation of Republic of China (ROC – Taiwan) in Canberra. It might be helpful, therefore, if I offered some clarification regarding the Continue reading »
Every Australian who has sweated over a grant for a modest sum, or who pays taxes and thinks they should get value for money, must be asking questions about a huge swindle that has been growing over the past two decades under our noses. One thing is certain: our parliament needs to act. All over Continue reading »
The government has a Bill before parliament which, if passed, would exempt the nuclear power plants on nuclear-propelled submarines from the requirement of two other Acts: the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998 and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. The Bill is called the Defence Legislation Amendment (Naval Nuclear Propulsion) Continue reading »
The crisis in which PricewaterhouseCoopers finds itself is a useful illustration that the problem of politicians and bureaucrats becoming lobbyists, and of the revolving door syndrome are far from the only ones besetting integrity in public administration. The widespread use of supposedly independent consultants, many with deep and intractable conflicts of interest, is undermining good Continue reading »
Back in 2008, I had a book contract to describe the obvious failings in Australian health care. It was planned to challenge the national myth that our system was ‘exceptional’, literally ‘best in the world’. I didn’t persist as Prime Minister Rudd was promising sweeping national reforms and there was genuine community enthusiasm for a Continue reading »
Just months before the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, an old Hongkonger was interviewed. He was squatting next to a bundle of goods that he was hawking in the street. When asked about how he felt about the Chinese taking control again, he paused, drew on his cigarette and said, ‘maybe they Continue reading »
It’d be fair to say that there are two competing entities on the world stage right now. One composed of the G7, and the other a less structured group of countries that were once exploited by the G7. I left Wuhan on Wednesday morning this week, on a train which terminated at Xi’an but was Continue reading »
Just thought I’d share this because it’s very cool:
Someday, Sarah, our ship will come in, and I’ll buy you a diamond as big as your eye and a mink coat to rival any movie star. And then, Sarah, I’ll move us back to the neighborhood we used to live in before we got priced out.
Just imagine, Sarah, our own row house, the very same one we rented for five years for seven hundred dollars per month before the owner evicted us to sell to a developer. Only this time, Sarah, the shag carpets will have been replaced with the finest and most homogenous gray composite flooring. It will be so easy to clean, Sarah. And so neutral it will offend no one.
Just think, Sarah, soon we’ll be sitting on our old back stoop, and instead of hearing a domestic dispute, we’ll be deafened by the roar of the newly-yet-shoddily-installed central air unit. Just imagine it, Sarah: You. Me. And the neighborhood we lived in for years but can no longer afford.
If they win the presidency get ready for a revolution Picture if you will, it’s January 21st 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2016 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader’s Retribution Agenda and it won’t be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country. Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous: There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
After ten years of publishing, The Nib is going to close down this summer.
The invisible hand is the idea that people operating based on their own self interest in a market economy will optimize “value” and by doing so will increase human welfare. If a person runs a company which makes something that people are willing to buy, they must want or need that thing, and the person will want to make more of that thing so that they can become richer. They do it out of greed, but the richer they get the more they improve the common weal, as it were.
So even though they aren’t doing what they do because they care about the welfare of others (Adam Smith is very clear about that) operating from greed leads to increase human welfare.
Works, except when it doesn’t.
Descriptive statements describe how the world objectively is. Prescriptive statements describe how the world ought to be.