Grasping Reality by Brad DeLong
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Noted for February 16, 2013

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  • Roger Mahony must be an atheist--or, if not, be shitting himself 24/7/365: "Church Used Cemetery Money to Pay Sex Abuse Settlement 'Pressed to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to settle clergy sex abuse lawsuits, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony turned to one group of Catholics whose faith could not be shaken: the dead,' the Los Angeles Times reports. 'Under his leadership in 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles quietly appropriated $115 million from a cemetery maintenance fund and used it to help pay a landmark settlement with molestation victims. The church did not inform relatives of the deceased that it had taken the money, which amounted to 88% of the fund. Families of those buried in church-owned cemeteries and interred in its mausoleums have contributed to a dedicated account for the perpetual care of graves, crypts and grounds since the 1890s.'"

  • Emmanuel Saez: Striking it Richer: Evolution of Top Incomes in USA

  • Dr. Martin Luther: Disputatio pro Declaratione Virtutis Indulgentiarum

  • Pasta con le Sarde (Pasta with sardines, from Palermo, made with fennel, pine nuts and currants)

  • Jared Konczal: Growthology: The "Entrepreneur Subculture"

  • Scott Lemieux (2009) on Robert George: Give ‘Em Enough Rope: "You will probably not be surprised to learn that this would-be modern Aquinas has discovered that “natural law” and “practical reason” reveal…a near-perfect photocopy of the 2008 Republican platform."

  • David Fiderer: Mortgages, Ed Pinto, And A Vast Conspiracy Of Silence

  • Menzie Chinn: notes that the Heritage Foundation is still a clown show: "Recently, the Heritage Foundation has criticized me for caricaturizing their methodology, and insisting that they use modern, intertemporal approaches. This may very well be true, but thus far, I have not seen much evidence of this modern, intertemporal, approach in Heritage analyses. I will, however, applaud Dr. Foster for moving from (T-G) + S ≡ I to (T-G) + (S-I) ≡ TB."

  • Buce: Underbelly: Alan Blinder and the Treehouse Syndrome

  • Ben Kesling: Kansas City Fed’s George Warns About Current Policy

  • Jonathan Chait: Will Conservatives Learn to Love Obama?: "When Bill Clinton was president, conservatives described him as an unrepentant sixties-era leftist, a socialist class warrior whose tax hikes would doom the economy, and a rabid demagogue. Over time, it became impossible to reconcile this hysterical tone with Clinton’s political accomplishments and the success of the economy under his tenure…. [N]ow they have little but praise for him. He was practically a conservative! Certainly in contrast to the demagogic left-wing socialist class warrior Barack Obama. Now that Obama has won a second term… the same transformation [is] under way… in stages…. Yuval Levin… Jonah Goldberg… Michael Gerson… concedes… [Obama is] largely sensible. 'Many of Obama’s largest requests were downright reasonable', he writes. Obama’s gun control proposal? '[P]rudent, incremental'. Climate change? A view 'that many [Republicans] held only a few years ago'. AIDS? A stance 'which should (one would hope) find support on both sides of the aisle'. Immigration reform? '[C]entrist', 'designed to accommodate GOP concerns'. Sequestration? Obama is 'exactly right'. Deficit reform? He’s 'generally right'. Also, 'Obama is right in tackling the problem of economic mobility'…. Gerson decided to frame this near-total endorsement as a damning indictment. Obama’s agenda is so obvious and so meager it just shows he’s tired and exhausted. But you could just as easily frame all these assessments… as praise. He is a prudent moderate, seeking to expand government only when there is demonstrable need and the opportunity for a bipartisan solution…. But you know who really does have a scary socialist agenda threatening to destroy all we hold dear about America? Hillary Clinton."

  • Eric Alterman (2007): My Marty Peretz Problem -- And Ours: "For the past 34 years, the name of The New Republic's problem has been 'Martin H. Peretz'. My Marty Peretz problem -- and ours, if you happen to care about the respective fates of American liberalism, Judaism, or journalism.... America's most influential independent liberal weekly magazine... was no longer any of these things…. It is a sad but true fact of American political life that liberals rarely exercise so much influence as when they happen to be endorsing conservative causes, and this temptation has proven consistently irresistible to Peretz and his magazine… helpful to Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America and George Bush's war in Iraq… seminal service to Newt Gingrich's and William Kristol's efforts to kill the Clinton plan for universal health care… intellectual legitimacy to Charles Murray's efforts to portray black people as intellectually inferior to whites. As for liberal causes, however … well, not so much…. Michael Kelly, who brought to the job of editing what was still considered America's most influential liberal magazine an unequaled animus toward liberals of all stripes, and an obsessive hatred of Bill Clinton in particular…. Beinart would write an apology for his wrong-headedness about [Bush's Iraq] war. But as former American Prospect editor Mike Tomasky pointed out in a TAP piece, Beinart's words of regret read, 'as if he'd spent [the run-up to and the first years of the war] on a mountaintop in Tibet instead of editing an influential magazine and cheering on the administration virtually every step of the way -- and accusing war critics, not all of whom (news flash: not even a majority of whom) are anti-imperialist Chomskyites, of "intellectual incoherence" and "abject pacifism."' TNR was not simply wrong about Iraq, it was viciously, nastily wrong."

On February 15, 2013:

February 15, 2013 at 22:02 in #weblogging | | Comments (5)

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