Josh Barro explains, again!, why Romney’s tax plan—cutting tax rates and eliminating tax deductions (or “preferences”) without hurting regular folks like you and me—won’t work. Because it’s us regular folks who get all the tax breaks! Tax returns reporting less than $200,000 of adjusted gross income (AGI) [that’s us folks] accounted for a total AGI…
How many stupid foreign policy advisors does President Obama have? One less than he used to
Foreign Policy is a pretty serious magazine, right? No Best Bikini Bods need apply. And a job title like “Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy” sounds pretty intense. So why does a recent article in Foreign Policy by Rosa Brooks, former Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy at the…
Artie Zaitz Quintet, “I Mean You”
Artie Zaitz: guitar, Laura Jurd: trumpet, Duncan Eagles: tenor sax, Peter Randall: bass, Andy Chapman: drums. Live from the Hot Dog Jazz stage at Peter Parker’s in London. Posted by JazzHotDog
George and Jeane, not my favorite Democrats
The recent death of George McGovern occurred when I happened to be reading the biography of someone who detested George—Jeane Kirkpatrick. George is very well remembered by his admirers, as is Jeane—and for very good reasons—but I’m afraid that I will always remember George as a “loser” and Jeane as a traitor. McGovern first helped…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “No, we ain’t lookin’ for the Port Authority. Ha, ha, ha. We just want to sell a little wool. Is that such a crime?” “Move it, folks. My gals are tired of your big city lights.” “Damn it, I’m guessing this ain’t the Weehawken Ferry. Please tell me I’m wrong.” “Where’s the…
Barack Obama: The Smell of Failure
There are a couple of interesting write-ups on the web interviewing a couple of well-known, undecided, unrelated voters—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, and 24-year-old pre-k teacher and “wage gap” questioner Katherine Fenton. What’s particularly interesting is that both these intelligent, well-informed people 1) don’t really know very much about politics and 2) though…
Eric Hobsbawm, hero of socialism
Morgan Meis has actually a touching memoir of Eric Hobsbawm, the late communist historian, up at The Smart Set. In particular, he quotes from Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, telling me something about Hobsbawm that I didn’t know, that he loved jazz: Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better…
Martha Nussbaum, not quite mastering the cause and effect thing
Martha Nussbaum, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, on the subject “How to write about poverty,” informs us that “During the Depression, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath had a comparable impact [to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle], educating the American public about the plight of migrant workers and producing support for New Deal legislation.” The…
George and Charles, high on pot
What else can explain it? Both George Will and Charles Krauthammer gave last night’s debate to Mr. Stupid, Barack Obama. George, who may have gone a round or two with Snow White earlier in the evening, said it was the best presidential debate he’d ever seen. Charles, who may have borrowed Marion Barry’s crack pipe,…
Bruce Bartlett, refuting vapor
Bruce Bartlett, everyone’s favorite truth-telling Reaganite, does the unnecessary, and does it well, here, explaining why, even if everything went “right” in Mitt Romney’s tax “plan”—which is to say, if one could divide by zero and count up to infinity in a couple of hours—it would have no more than a minimal impact on the…