“It’s vile,” said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach. “It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.” On Bill Clinton - 1998

St. Petersburg Times. Published September 12, 1998

Well, the quarter’s about over, so it’s time for my favorite new-to-me words of Q3 2006:

07.07.2006: vetitive: 1. Relating to a veto. 2. Having the power to forbid. 07.20.2006: nescience: Lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance 08.10.2006: ensorcell: To bewitch; to enchant. 08.17.2006: haruspicy: Divination by inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals. 08.24.2006: phatic: Relating to a communication meant to generate an atmosphere of social relationship rather than to convey some information. 09.04.2006: palinode: A poem in which the author retracts something said in an earlier poem.

What are yours?

The Poor Man Institute » How can I put this?

Call it a triple-layer cake of dead-on brilliance. Poor Man serves up a humorous intro to Olbermann’s lucid celebration of Clinton’s righteous, pointed fury.

PS: You should all be reading “The Poor Man Institute.” And watching Keith Olbermann. And working to get Bill Clinton back in the White House. Constitution Shmonstitution. The dude abides.

Maybe the Asia edition just printed too early to pick up the Annie Liebovitz retrospective scoop. Original site here. Via TittyD

Those of you who know me know that I Hate Tom Friedman. My disgust with him and his approach to reality is so thorough that when asked why I Hate Tom Friedman, I usually make something of a game out of it - let me pick a random op-ed and see how many sentences get my blood pressure up.

But I can’t imagine playing that game any more, because if I ever read this article again, my head is going to explode. Seriously - I Fucking Hate Tom Friedman:

The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. … The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don’t believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

You should, too.

The comment reproduced below was posted to Marginal Revolution (the blog of a pair of economics professors who dance mainly on opposite sides of the libertarian divide), in response to some thoughts on ‘fixing’ the trade imbalance with China.

The poster, a US Naval officer, makes a very rational, non-conspiracy-laden case for the sturdiness of the seemingly ludicrous current fiscal situation, where the USA depends on poor nations such as China to finance our deficit spending. Essentially, he frames the current account deficit and the associated dollar hegemony as a mild tax on global trade, paid to ensure security of transporting manufactured goods against the very real threat of service disruption, a service that no military besides ours is currently capable of providing (and in fact as the relative capabilities of non-state actors increases, this service will become increasingly costly to provide and difficult to match). The very first US standing military presence was created explicitly to halt piracy (after bribing them didn’t work out so well), and that role has continued more or less uninterrupted to this present day. I disagree with the commenter about how sudden the move between security regimes would have to be, but after reading I don’t disagree that it’s unlikely to change for a significant period of time. Europe doesn’t have the desire to be a military superpower on our scale, and China might have the will but would need to increase it’s military spending by at least a factor of twenty in order to rival ours… even accounting for lower labor costs (ahem), there’s much to be said for experience in these matters…

So, take this an example of why the rampant China fear (something I’ve succumbed to myself from time to time) is at least partly hype, inflated because it is a convenient tool for protectionists and xenophobes and other vested interests…

The original comment, after the jump Read the rest of this entry »