By Dave Anderson:
1) Get your knees up
2) Relax
3) Think of England
That is good advice in two situations. The first is in the fraction of a second before one is hit by an oncoming car as becoming a reed flexing in the wind (or through the windshield) is far safer than [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I am at best a believer in the weakest form of the mostly, sort of, kind-of eventually efficient market hypothesis --- namely that Stein's law is in effect and that sooner or later, valuations will roughly reflect reality but day to day price fluctuations are mainly noise. Strong' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I have been puzzled as to why the Mexican cartels have not begun to attack the Mexican government's cash flow. The Mexican economy has five main sources of foreign currency; hydrocarbon exports, light manufacturing in the border zone, tourism, remittances and smuggling into the United States. The cartels' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Ian Welsh summarizes politics 101:
Bad policy = bad outcomes for ordinary people. Bad outcomes for ordinary people when you control the House, Senate and White House make them figure they should try the other party. (See, 2006, 2008).
Dem politicos need to get this tattooed on their butt, [...]
By Dave Anderson:
That is where Tony Blair should be going anyways for a trial on the crime of waging aggressive war. He indicts himself this morning as the LA Times reports:
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I have long thought that the primary cartel goal in Mexico is not a collapsed state, as we see that Somalia is too dysfunctional for large scale, complex criminality in the anarchic south, but a hollow state that maintains the pretenses and appearance of sovereignty but not [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I've been tough on Altmire and I still think that he faces an uphill battle for re-election as I have a very hard time seeing where he will get his doorknockers to rouse an apathetic Democratic base in a Tea Party friendly district. He has voted against' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Security Crank points out claims that a significant portion of the entire Chechan population is supposedly in Warizistan:
At some point, this kind of thing moves beyond parody.
According to the reports Haji Akbar Ali Mehsud, a 55-year-old resident of Zinda village in District Sararogha received, there [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Carbon taxes and cap and trade are both attempts to create price incentives to reduce carbon emissions. The goal is to raise the dispersed and mostly externalized cost of pollution into a concentrated and internalized cost for the polluter. From here, most polluters will seek to reduce emissions [...]
By Dave Anderson:
How much has piracy impacted Egypt? The main impact on Egypt is the loss of trade from ships that would otherwise have landed at an Egyptian Red Sea port but no longer or not as frequently and the loss of revenue from the Suez Canal. The first group [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Voice of America reports on a large series of attacks in Baghdad:
Iraqi police say a series of car bombings across the capital, Baghdad, has killed at least 112 people and wounded nearly 200 others....
Tuesday's attacks were the worst in the Iraqi capital since late October when twin car bomb [...]
By Dave Anderson:
One of the great structural problems that faces the United States is that our elites are insulated from their stupidity. There is sufficient wealth and social amnesia that being wrong is at most a minor inconvenience instead of a career killer unless the "wrongness" involves stating the unpleasantly [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Just a few things that I have seen about Somalia during the past week.
The Wall Street Journal reports on a partial decapitation strike on the Somali "government" that is completely dependent on foreign guns that are insufficient to secure the capital city:
A suicide blast at a [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Budgets are moral documents as they are the practical implementation and prioritization of plans and values.
Ezra Klein notes where the priorities of the American elite lie:
As Annie Lowrey points out, Obey isn't trying to make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars deficit-neutral. He's not even trying to [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Typepad iteration of the Newshoggers has just put up its 5,000th post. We opened the doors here in April 2007 and have been writing up a storm since then. We are averaging a touch more than eight posts per day. Going back through the blogger 'Hog, the' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
From Jonathan Schwartz:This is from the recent HBO documentary about Barack Obama's campaign. Watching it now made me angry all over again on behalf on people who believed in him, worked on his campaign and spent a big chunk of their lives getting him elected. You can say they were' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Somali piracy season is in full swing. Two tankers have been targeted this week, including the one that was captured at the start of the week.
Somali pirates have captured a tanker carrying oil to the US, officials say.
The
Greek-owned Maran Centaurus was about 1,300km (800 miles) off [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Training the trainers is a high value activity for consultants and specialists. Being able to impart knowledge and the structure to students to effectively redeliver and expand the knowledge sphere is a tough skill set. It looks like the US policy of training paramilitary forces for counter-drug efforts [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is trying to put on a happy face to the region's gambling revenue declines. There are gains, month over month, as long as one neglects to mention the G-20's effective closure of the Pittsburgh casino, or admit that some months have more days than [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Brad DeLong asks why good long-term macro policy is not politically popular. I think the answer is one of the distribution of visible and discrete benefits versus the visible and discrete costs. He asserts the following:By Dave Anderson:
The Carnegie Endowment's Gilles Dorronsoro has an interesting take on the emerging conventional wisdom of COIN and its futility in Afghanistan:
The so-called ink spot strategy—subduing a large hostile region with a relatively small military force by establishing a number of small safe areas and then pushing out from' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Matt Yglesias makes a simple point about Russia's incentives concerning Iran --- mild instability and uncertainty is great for the Russian budget:
wouldn’t Russia be the primary beneficiary of the strategic and economic instability on Israeli attack on Iran would bring...
The fact of the matter is that Russia, a [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I'm a little late for this but pumpkin pie and good Kentucky bourbon has occupied my weekend, but the New York Times piece on Dubai's debt going bad is worthwhile because it highlights what I think should have been the proper course of action for basically any' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I want to follow up on the whack I took at Kevin Drum on his support for a bipartisan commission to take a whack at Social Security in the next couple of years. Social Security is fundamentally a rounding error over the seventy five year intermediate case [...]
By Dave Anderson:
In a non-cooperative, multi-iteration game, the best strategy to ensure cooperation or at least non-douchebag behavior is tit for tat. This means make a choice that punishes the opposition for being a douchebag when they previously made a choice to be douchebags, and make a choice that rewards [...]
The Obama Administration pinched several excellent bloggers for mid-level staff positions earlier this year. I approved of those decisions as I had read Phil Carter and the Balkinization crew for years and I trusted both their judgment and their integrity, especially on the matter of realigning our policies [...]
By Dave Anderson
Counter-cyclical spending by the government for needed infrastructure does two things. The first is that it fills the gap in demand that the recession caused. This is the basic argument for most stimulus spending --- it puts people to work who otherwise would not be working.
The [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Militias in the modern context are a state-weakening and decentralizing force as they are armed formations that are not completely controlled or recruited by the state. Militias can be allies of the state; a prominent example is the the Colombian right wing militias that have been battling FARC [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Democrats don't want to be in the majority. They don't want Republicans in the majority either, but the Democratic elected elite has minimal interest in being part of an effective governing majority. The healthcare bill is the best example. They have managed to shed their left flank, Ron [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Another edition of what Ian Welsh said:If you’ve been right down the line, then you are precisely the sort of person who isn’t “serious” and shouldn’t be listened to when it comes to what it takes to fix the problem.
Why? Because everyone knows that fixing the problem will end [...]Schradenfreude may strike Texas, as a plain reading of their anti-gay marriage laws and amendments that passed in 2005 implies the possibility of all marriages not being legal in Texas. [h/t James Joyner]
From McClatchey:By Dave Anderson:
Accidental systems disruption happened in New York earlier this week. Fox has the local story:By Dave Anderson:
Just a few quick hits on institutional and governmental capture and failure. I would write more, but I have to change diapers and get to a play-date in a few minutes (I have my priorities.)
Brad Delong on institutional failure and a Depression:In my [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Chris Briem has an accurate and scary paragraph at Null Space for anyone interested in municipal finance in the State of Pennsylvania:
And connected to everything are the finances at the casino. Revenues down there have clearly settled into a range. No joke how everything comes back [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Listen, transcribe, submit is the Stephan Colbert indictment of the press corps during the Bush era.
There were minimal "serious people" who actually had the gall to look at what they wrote three months ago from the same source, or three years ago, and comparing it to the [...]
By Dave Anderson:
What happens when the money that that Iraqi government has been spreading around runs out? The New York Times Op-ed page raises this question:
As much as 51 percent of the Iraqi labor force is either unemployed or underemployed; the number is even higher for young workers...
Iraq’s private [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I wrote in August 2008 that defensive legalization of at least marijuana would become part of the national political debate because it is the most direct attack on cartel cash flow that is fueling the hollowing out of Mexico amidst massive political violence:
Quite a few people are willing [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Pakistan supports the Quetta Shura Taliban and other anti-government insurgent groups/networks in Afghanistan because Pakistan wants strategic depth against India. The warlords of the Northern Alliance and the Karzai government have a long history of having good working ties with India. Crushing Pashtun nationalism and strength in the [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Pennsylvania has a tradition of electing governors from the same party for two terms and then giving the other party two terms. That has gone back since 1968 when the governorship was term limited to two terms. So just based on a historical pattern, it would not be [...]
By Dave Anderson:
What was the Dean campaign critique of the Democratic pro-Iraq invasion position --- If you offer people Republican and Republican lite, they'll take the Republicans as they know they believe their crazy instead of mealy mouthing it.
Ian Welsh notes the Democratic Party elite has not' [...]
By Dave Anderson
By Dave Anderson:
Allegheny County's politics have been thrown into a tizzy this afternoon. Judge Wettick has ordered a four year rolling reassessment for the entire county as the base year system produces highly inequitable results. Re-assessments are the local political career killer and everyone in the regional political system' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
This is a casino post, while the next post will be a broader political-economy and municipal finance post. The Post-Gazette reports that Allegheny County will assess the Rivers Casino in the near future instead of putting the problem off by hiring consultants to conduct the assessment. [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Something that I wrote in December 2007 that I saw while looking for another post, but is very relevant today: (I did not get all of this right, I forgot about the agenda setting power of not scheduling floor votes on horrendous bills, but Stupak-Pitts is the [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Liberals and Democrats have argued that the two governors' races that the Democrats lost this week turned on a combination of local issues and weak Democratic candidates who would not do anything to excite the Democratic base.
Conservatives and Republicans have argued that these two races are' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Pennsylvania politicians are scared to raise broad based taxes even when everyone acknowledges that the state needs more long term and recurring revenue. Gambling and other sin taxes provides for politically "cheap" money as those activities are voluntary activities that can be taxed at a very high rate [...]
By Dave Anderson:
This is a follow-up on the Altmire wants to lose post from yesterday. His basic argument is that last night would be an indicator that Democrats should further trim their policy sails so as to attract more Republican votes because the Republican base is more energized than [...]
By Dave Anderson:
There were six races that I was paying attention to last night. I thought Democrats or liberals would win the Maine gay marriage referendum, win on civil unions in Washington State and hold onto CA-10 by a decent margin. I expected losses in NY-23, and a blow-out in [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Here are a few things that were notable to me this Election morning as my ten month old daughter is slowly waking up from her nap:
1) My daughter loves the voting machines as it has a bright blinking button to press at the top. She helped me vote. [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Move-On is pushing its e-mail list to donate and phone bank for Democrat Bill Owens for the NY-23 special election next week.
The SEIU and its local members are dumping serious money in support of Bill Owens.
I do not understand the rationale behind these two progressive institutions [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on the grand and glorious Iraqi Army that is the model of national unity and non-sectarian allegiance. Whoops, I'm drinking at lunch time again:
Both the military and the police remain heavily politicized. The police and border officials, for example, are' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I'm a soccer referee. Part of my standard pre-game conference when I am the center referee is the following instruction to my assistant referees: "Give me first crack in the box. If you see a felony, flag it. You all know what a penalty kick should look like."
The' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I'm a young voter and worker, still under 30 (for a few more months), as is my wife. Since high school, I and the rest of my peers in this generational cohort have been told and have seen that the old social-economic contract of shared risk bearing' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The LA Times has a very good article on the Kunduz region in Afghanistan. I first want to highlight the confirmation and reiteration of a long-lasting and disturbing indicator from a COIN perspective, and then hit on the major point of political legitimacy and coalition building.
A Taliban-run [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Senate Guru has an interesting take on the Delaware Senate race as he looks at Mike Castle (R-Del) 3rd Quarter fundraising:
For the entire three months of Q3, Republican Mike Castle only raised $57,593, $55,250 of which came from PACs. In other words, over the three months [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Chris Briem and I have been collaborating on tracking the revenue at the Pittsburgh Rivers Casino. This week saw a take of $173 per machine per day.
This is a slight improvement from last week, but it is further confirmation that there seems to be a firm floor [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Telegraph reports that Juarez has shattered last year's murder count with a touch more than two months to go in the year. The cartels, the Mexican Army and local police are all contributing to the increasing level of violence as the Mexican government is devolving into [...]By Dave Anderson:
If two organizations are deeply intertwined so that operationally they are indistinct from each other, it would follow that the merged organization would not be partially rolling in the dough and partially flat broke.
Bernard Finel makes this point in regards to the question of whether or [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Defense in the National Interest is pointing out the obvious; the critical interest for the United States in Afghanistan is the prevention of "far enemy" terrorist strikes. Everything after that is a secondary or tertiary goal. And those goals have minimal real importance to American security or [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Last night, I grabbed a couple of beers with a buddy of mine who is also a political blogger. By about the third beer, we had talked about counter-gravity coconuts, Hines Ward leveling a rookie safety and how that relates to single neural net activation, and then NY-23. [...]
By Dave Anderson:
George W. Bush is exactly the person you want to speak to your staff on the topics of setting tough goals and then accomplishing them. After all, he had such great success as President invading two countries. seeing a US city drown, almost wrecking Social Security so it [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Alan Greenspan thinks it is possible that the 3rd Quarter GDP will be a positive 3% or better.
James Hamilton thinks unemployment claims have peaked for the cycle and are in a steady downtrend.
Paul Krugman thinks the 3rd Quarter annualized GDP could post 4% growth [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Here is the BBC on the suicide bombing in Iran that killed some of the Revolutionary Guard's top leadership:
Iranian state television said 31 people died in the attack, in the Pishin region of Sistan-Baluchistan, and more than 25 were injured.
Shia and Sunni tribal leaders were also killed. [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The basic story of market competition is that the market should create strong incentives to not get things massively wrong because being massively wrong means losing money. That is the basic argument advanced to privatize everything and to minimize regulation. There should be no free and easy opportunities [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The US Army knows how to manipulate numbers, especially embarrassing numbers so they don't look so bad, or they look even worse then needed in order to "justify" a favored policy or to flip a vote or two. Nothing too wrong with any of that, this is just' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
As Steve noted earlier today, this was a "quiet" week in Iraq:
Meanwhile, in Iraq, a week of "reduced" violence that doesn't even merit much Western press coverage any more, plus a high-profile attack on a Sunni mosque at Tal Afar today, has cost 81 lives.' [...]
By David Anderson:
All else being equal and held constant, time is on the side of the insurgent or non-state force that is seeking to delegitimate the state based actors. This is because the existence of an active non-state force is in and of itself an expression of the state's loss [...]
By Dave Anderson:
The Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh has had another bad week. Their average take per machine per day was $168. That is an improvement over last week, but it is slightly more than half the level projected by the state and bondholders, and less than half that was projected [...]
By Dave Anderson:
In the conflict and war blogging and theorist circles that I dip my toes in to, there is the concept of generational warfare paradigms. The first generation is epitomized by the American Civil War, the second was World War 1, the third was demonstrated in World War II [...]
