The New Republic

There was a time when I might have started this blog post with, "Granted, Eliot Spitzer is brilliant ..." But even if he hadn't--well, you know--his post-Albany scribblings at Slate would have put that qualification to rest anyway. His latest article, "Robots, not Roads," is a call for Obama to eschew traditional infrastructure spending and put the stimulus toward "transformative" efforts like smart grids and alternative fuels: "These projects by and large are building or patching the same economy with the same flaws that got us where we are. READ MORE >>

Bill Frist is officially out of the 2010 Tennessee governor's race (to be precise, he has confirmed, after months of speculation, that he won't enter it). READ MORE >>

According to the Washington Post, the Bush Administration is set to make a technical rule change to allow a logging-cum-real-estate firm to pave dirt roads through Forest Service land. Doing so would give access to some of Plum Creek Timber's eight million acres of western forest holdings, with the intention of then converting parts of that land into housing subdivisions. READ MORE >>

It’s the euro’s tenth birthday, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page wishes it well. But the paper’s enthusiasm for the increasingly linked European economies drives it to an unpredictable ecstasy: While considering, then rejecting as implausible the idea of a global currency, it calls for the world’s leading economies to pursue much tighter exchange rate coordination, a la the eurozone: READ MORE >>

A horrible trend that is sadly, brutally evident in my own D.C. neighborhood of Adams Morgan: According to a new study co-written by Northeastern University criminologist extraordinaire James Alan Fox, between 2000 and 2007 homicides among young African-American men skyrocketed--a 31 percent increase as victims and 43 percent as perpetrators--even as most communities saw a drop in murder rates. READ MORE >>

Count me among the folks eager for a Palin '12 campaign. And not just because of the wisdom and gravity she'll bring to the debate. It would tear the GOP--what's left of it--apart. In Washington, at least, most Republicans I know are smart enough to see the danger of a Palin encore, and so the reality of her deep public support doesn't enter the conversation (that said, the John O'Sullivan has a huge piece in the Wall Street Journal drawing parallels between Palin and Margaret Thatcher. You go, John). READ MORE >>

I really like Winter’s Tale. But it’s hard to take Mark Helprin seriously--as a thinker, at least--when in late 2008 he still writes things like this, in today’s Wall Street Journal: READ MORE >>

What to make of Obama’s pick for SEC chair, Mary Shapiro? She wasn't exactly a dark horse, but the good money was on former SEC Commissioner Harvey Goldschmid and former Treasury Undersecretary Gary Gensler. But Shapiro has some particular qualifications. First, her selection is good evidence that the administration is serious about combining the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Shapiro has served on both--including as CFTC chair--and thus brings both broad experience and a lack of territorial READ MORE >>

A few weeks ago I blogged about a county-by-county national map in the New York Times showing that large sections of the South, particularly the Deep South, had voted further to the left this election than the last (though the Times took it to show the opposite, and to be fair the Mid-South--Tennessee and Arkansas, mostly--tilted further READ MORE >>

How much blame should the Securities and Exchange Commission shoulder for the Bernard Madoff case? On the one hand, Madoff was good--he appears to have hidden his $50 billion Ponzi scheme from even his own sons, who worked with him at Bernard L. Madoff Securities. On the other hand, well, a $50 billion Ponzi scheme should create some sort of wake, somewhere. In fact, it did: The New York Post this morning cites a 1999 letter from investor Harry Markopolos READ MORE >>