This morning, as I was walking to the gym, I passed a small apartment building, nestled amongst the townhouses of West 10th street.  From somewhere on the upper floors of the building I heard a woman shouting and finally screaming.  First it was "Leave me alone!"  Then it was "Get off of me!  Get off of me!"  This was punctuated by screams, but they sounding like shrieks of anger rather than terror or pain, though it takes a lot of assumptions to get to that judgment. [Read more]

Eduardo Saverin, something of a villain in the Facebook tale, is about the become a billionaire, assuming the social network's initial public offering, scheduled for this week, is successful.  From the $15,000 he invested to help Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg pay for servers, Saverin will get an estimated $4 billion payday. [Read more]

We all did stupid things when we were young and the private preparatory academies of the type that Romney attended in the fifties and sixties were settings for all sorts of bullying and boorish behaviors and boys forced unnaturally together in search of A Separate Peace.

Adult Romney wants tales from his high schools years to be filed away under "youthful indiscretions" and left there.  I don't blame him.  I don't even like seeing pictures of myself in high school.  I had a mullet.  Some things are best left in the recesses of our memories. [Read more]

No, I'm not defending Naomi Schafer Riley as any art form, including the writing of an 800-900 word newspaper article can be practiced badly.  To not even read what you're criticizing is pretty low.  But Dr. Cleveland, Professor of Dagblog, sets a very high standard for columnists.  Paul Krugman, who sticks (usually) to his discipline, is praised while David Brooks and Ross Douthat are singled out for writing on a broader array of topics which they cannot, by definition, claim expertise. [Read more]

"Is Our Adults Learning?" asks David Brooks in The New York Times today (the paper where columnists don't appear to be edited much.)  In this column, Brooks talks about the fight between stimulus supporters and austerity supporters.  He concludes that both sides relied on grand theories but that three years and $800 billion later, we are none the wiser as to which policy choice was better: [Read more]

I'm certainly not the first to make this observation.  Logicians going back to Aristotle and probably prior, have warned us about the potential tyranny of experts that can arise in any society.  Even people with credentials can be wrong.  Einstein made mistakes.  When William F. Buckley joked, a long time ago, that he would rather be ruled by a random sampling from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard, he did have something of a point. [Read more]

I was actually a little embarassed for Talkingpointsmemo when I read its kind of breathless coverage of Obama stating the obvious fact that he "wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth."  TPM's editors seemed to think this was some sort of Oscar Wildean bon mot or Mencken-style broadside worth repeating.

It's a fine thing for Obama to say, though I wish he'd avoid cliche when he does it.  Everybody knows that Obama is self-made and that Romney's dad was a business executive and the former Governor of Michigan.  [Read more]

I have a lot of sympathy for the position the president is in with our intransigent opposition party in control of part of Congress.  Yes, the stimulus was too small and yes, his advisors urged him to concede that fight too early, but given that the other side was bent on "doing nothing," I understand the reasons for the outcome.  With healthcare, traitors within his own party's caucus sealed the fate of the public option.  No speech will make Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman come around to a more liberal solution. [Read more]

When it comes to Social Security and Medicare, there's no shortage of pundits willing to tell me that the promises the government made to us in the past can no longer be kept because people are living longer, healthier lives than they used to. These arguments tend to be bogus because they ignore the fact that lifespans have increased, in part, because infant mortality is down.

But there's one group of people who are certainly living longer, healthier lives than they were back when the nation was founded -- the influential, rich and powerful justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, who have unfettered access to the best health care in the world along with jobs that ain't exactly coal mining when it comes to the toll taken on the body.  This is why in my Daily column today, I argue for term limits on Supreme Court justices. [Read more]

In my column this week at The Daily I argue that it's time to give up on a strict second amendment interpretation and allow for states and municipalities to decide on their own gun control laws.  Since I grew up with guns, I'm actually sympathetic to states that want to have concealed carry laws or or that want to allow unregistered gun ownership (like former home state, New Mexico).

But, it makes no practical sense to me that in a country where you can have countries where alcohol can't be sold and towns where strip clubs can't be built, but that you cannot have a town or state where gun ownership is banned, even if that's what the residents want.  All this because of an amendment to the Constitution that seems to me was explicitly included because, at the time, the Framers were worried that they might have to call on every able bodied man to lock, load and get ready for the next British or French invasion (or, more likely, to repel a perfectly justified attack from a Native American tribe). [Read more]

Sorry for writing about Trayvon Martin again, but it's a topic I can't let go.  Once the President decided to comment on the issue, his political enemies have gathered in a predictable attempt to turn his from the heart honesty into a political liability.

But they can only do that by proving that the President was foolish to comment on the issue and they can only do that by establishing that the President didn't know the facts and that he rushed to take sides based on race.  Obama's critics have, of course, found an enthusiastic audience for this argument. [Read more]

"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," says the President.

There are moments when President Obama says just the right thing.  He cuts through the chatter and babble. 

Now think back to when Obama remarked that the police had "acted stupidly" when they arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates outside of his own home.  What sturm and drang erupted.  The President is criticizing a hard working police officer!  The President is taking sides!  He's taking sides with... with... an African American! [Read more]

The news here is only preliminary and, of course, much might be redacted, but a Freedom of Information Act request from Gawker shows that the civil rights and liberties leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, seems to have taken its job seriously with regards to Occupy Wall Street.

Count me as stunned that any DHS employees were actually pulling back on the reigns and reminding people, both within DHS and within interested government agencies that: [Read more]

Today, The New York Times printed an op-ed called "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs."  I don't know how into investment banking you all are.  It's pretty dry stuff, I think, but I also feel a bit forced to take an interest, what with investment banks nearly destroying the world and all.  If we all lived in a comic book we'd have to take an interest in Lex Luthor too, even if he can drone on at times. [Read more]

...wherein the Ghost of Andrew Breitbart will capture the conscience of the President!"

Yes, the big Andrew Breitbart scoop is out and it's that in 1998, Barack Obama attended a play about the life of Saul Alinsky called "The Love Song of Saul Alinksy."  After the play, Obama participated in... wait for it... a panel discussion on the topic.  This is, by the way, in the tradition of the Chicago Little Theatre of the 20s and 30s, where they used to stage socially relevant (and Modernist experimental) plays and then invite the audience to stay and chat with the cast and directors afterwards.  Obama's night out 14 years ago sounds like fun to me!

Breitbart's Ghost posits that Obama has expunged his record of radicalism from the 1990s and reinvented himself as a moderate Democrat.  My word, Obama was so radical that he appeared on that panel with... Studs Terkel! I may faint. [Read more]

We don't need an Andrew Breitbart eulogy here, and I wouldn't be qualified to write one.  I've been reading them all day though.  Elizabeth Spiers, the young editor trying her best to save The New York Observer from extinction, writes one here that, I think, captures the tone.  Josh Marshall has a short and interesting piece as well.  The two dovetail nicely. [Read more]

Olympia Snowe is calling it quits as a Senator.  Apparently, she wants to rededicate her life to "help give voice to my fellow citizens who believe, as I do, that we must return to an era of civility in government driven by a common purpose to fulfill the promise that is unique to America." [Read more]

Pssst.  I'd like to be president of the United States but before you vote for me, there's something you need to know.  I believe, literally, that Star Wars is a true story.  I believe in both the Old Testament story of Luke and Vader (parts IV-VI) and the New Testament origin of Vader (Parts 1-3 and The Clone Wars cartoon series).

Does this make me an unfit leader? [Read more]

According to GM's last proxy, the U.S. government still owns 32% of the company.  So it's pretty sad to see that one the eve of reporting it largest ever annual profit ($8 billion) the company is freezing pay, cutting bonuses and ending pension benefits for salaried workers. Meanwhile, CEO Daniel Akerson's has been targeted to receive cash and stock worth $9 million a year. [Read more]

Two big stories in the foreclosure mess today, both of them depressing.  The first, via Atrios, was broken by Bloomberg and reveals that Fannie Mae, which owns billions worth of underwater mortgages, canceled a program where the agency, as the holder of the debt, would write down the principal due on underwater mortgages to bring them more in line with present home values because executives were, "philosophically opposed to writing down principal balances." [Read more]