Nudge-ocracy
Barack Obama's new theory of the state.

Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber,  The New Republic  Published: Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Barack Obama has the type of mind--orderly, analytical, well-read--that takes naturally to the study of ideas. But he's always been uncomfortable describing himself in ideological terms. Is he a liberal ( Read more... )

Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. Formerly, he was the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His work involves Constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, civil and human rights, as well as law and literature, and Japanese law and ( Read more... )

Obama may use 50-vote tactic on energy, healthcare By Jim Snyder- THE HILL Posted: 03/01/09 12:19 PM [ET] President Obama’s budget director said the White House would consider using a Senate procedural tactic so ( Read more... )

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Obama Introduces Win-Win-Win Budgeting

The Times reports today that Obama and budget director Peter Orszag are experimenting with something fairly new in preparing their budget: honesty.

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting ( Read more... )

Egalitarian Intellectualism
By: George Packer, The New Yorker

From Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”:
If anti-intellectualism has become, as I believe it has, a broadly diffused quality in our civilization, it has become so because it has often been linked to good, or at least defensible, causes…It made its way into ( Read more... )

• rmali

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So.....  Just when you think you might have it figured out, and you praise the President like crazy (see my blog from yesterday), his Secy. of the Treasury goes and blows his big speech today by doing everything Obama had been promising he wouldn't do!  In fact, he was as vague as Paulson!   The great pity seems to be that it's now a much, much ( Read more... )

For what it's worth, I agree with every word that is said in this following NYT piece by Herbert.  The cynics and doubters really are going to end up hating Obama, I suspect.  His boldness really is astonishing.  Krugman (& Co.) need to calm down a little.  An 800 Billion spending spree is unthinkable in "Center-Right" America.  Yet, here it comes ( Read more... )

Cost of shoring up U.S. banks may be in trillions

Thu Jan 29, 2009 4:56pm EST

By Emily Kaiser - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The cost of restoring confidence in U.S. financial firms may reach $4 trillion if President Barack Obama moves ahead with a "bad bank" that buys up souring assets.

The figure far exceeds even the ( Read more... )