It should come as no surprise that the “budget negotiations” have, rather quickly, shown us that the Republican House Majority quickly figured out that they had no chance of holding most of their seats unless they backed off on their plan to destroy Medicare, and so they did. The fact of the matter, of course, is that Medicare (unlike its companion program, Social Security) is unsustainable currently, because Medicare taxes plus Medicare premiums barely cover half the cost of the program, the rest coming from “other general revenues,” which these days means borrowing from China. Popular or not, Medicare is...

Taking a break from all OBL all the time, I bring you this good-sentiment-bad-idea proposal from the Obama Administration to tax automobiles based on miles traveled. It would be collected at gasoline filling stations based presumably on some kind of electronic tracking device. Er, no. Best just raise the current gasoline excise tax, based on actual fuel usage. Someone with an extremely efficient vehicle should not have to pay more than someone who may use more fuel to travel shorter distances. And speaking of taxes, I propose a small (say, 1%) income tax on virtually all earners at virtually all...

To give credit where due, and notwithstanding that he is going to make going to work in Lower Manhattan a living hell tomorrow, nonetheless, I really do commend the President on the sober and measured tone he has taken since announcing the successful hit execution mission to kill [or capture, of course] Osama bin Laden, resulting in the accused terrorist mastermind’s death. Alas, it had to come to something like that… public trials would have denied OBL, KSM and the other accused masterminds of the one thing they wanted more than anything else– martyrdom. They would also have demonstrated actual...

It’s being reported that Osama bin Laden is dead, and the body is in American custody, and that the President will make a public announcement to this effect. It might have been from one of them flying killer robots. Thing is… bin Laden has most likely been dead for years,,, so the question is… why the need to tell us now? So we can be told that… everything that has been done in the name of getting bin Laden, including the destruction of the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands (and the displacement of...

I hope that the smoldering wreck of a country around him will somehow tug at the conscience of my college classmate Pres. Barack Obama when, in two or six years… probably six… he gets his real dream job, with Goldman Sacks or J.P. Morgan or B of A or Citi…or perhaps some hedge fund… because, well… you know… things like good old errand-boy-to-the-man, now SecTreas Timmy “the Tax-Dodger” Geithner has intervened to prevent regulation of foreign exchange derivatives, a $30 trillion market, whose problems led to a multi-trillion dollar bailout by the federal government in the last financial crisis… on...

I defer to the Onion for its coverage of the coverage surrounding the Medieval pageantry of an atavistic feudal throwback institution royal wedding of Prince William and commoner (so much fun to use that word!) Kate Middleton.

Another day, another big Wikileaks document dump, in this case, as reported by the great Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy News Service (just about our last reliable domestic print source), everything we have been publicly told about Guantanamo detainees is wrong. As most of those familiar with matters GTMO will tell you, not too much of this is much of a surprise– so-called “intel” was mostly a load of crap, entirely unsupported, or the result of snitches at GTMO ratting on their friends (and many of the snitches have been released, despite being purportedly “high risk,” while others, presenting “no risk”…...

Familia TD took a brief sojourn to our local museum, where I was blown away by the conceit of this exhibit. The visual concept of Brooklyn artist Lorna Simpson is to juxtapose vintage images with poses intended to duplicate them, in order to deliberately create a false dichotomy, to make an artistic point. I juxtapose this with Dmitry Orlov’s piece on an interview involving Michael Betancourt, noting that our planet’s entire economy is based on semiosis, rather than anything, you know, real. (Think about it: electronic impulses stand in for pieces of paper that stand in for pieces of metal...

In these already depressing times, it saddens me (perhaps more than it otherwise might) to see one of my genuine heroes succumb, in this case, the great Grete Weitz, who passed away this week at 57, from cancer. Grete, of course, was an unprecedented nine time champion at the New York Marathon (including three in a row in world record time, a multiple Olympian (taking a silver medal in the 1984 marathon) for her native Norway, and had numerous other distance running accolades. Every October, the New York Road Runners Club stages their annual “Norway Festival” in Central Park, featuring...

The usually sober and sensible business writer,Joe Nocera, writing in the Grey Lady’s op ed pages, suggests that the destruction of remaining potable water supplies in the Northeast United States iddy biddy “alleged environmental problems” associated with gas-extraction-by-fracturing, or “fracking” (presumably referring to the term for “garbage” from Battlestar Galactica) is really quite minor and can be easily solved with proper first-rate drilling methods and robust local regulation. I simply wonder what Joe is smoking country Nocera is living in… surely, it is not the USA of 2011, where every corner will be cut and every regulator will be bought...