I’m obsessively watching this and this, hoping that Hurricane Ike doesn’t flood southeast Texas as badly as it looks like it might.
Steve Yegge talks about touch typing in today’s rant. I’m linking to it only because it reminds me that I love to tell people that typing is the most valuable class I took at any level of education. I took one semester of typing in high school, and it was the best thing I ever did.
What role have speculators played in the rapid rise and then decline in crude oil prices? Andrew Leonard cites a book that argues that commodity index speculators were a driving force behind the price fluctuations.
And from elsewhere in finance, Tyler Cowen explains why the government must bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Looks like Foreign Policy decided to play along with my little game from yesterday. Here are their 20 questions, focused on foreign policy. They seem to be designed more as a test of knowledge (and even trivia) than a test of judgement or philosophy, and they feel a little like gotcha questions to me.
Update: Politico has solicited questions for Palin from a number of big names from both sides.
Update: Jack Shafer offers 10 questions of his own. I think we can be fairly certain that Sarah Palin won’t be sitting down to an interview with Shafer anytime soon.
Update: Palin’s local paper has prepared a list as well.
James Fallows writes about uptake of Hot Spot Shield in China. It’s a tool that tunnels your Web traffic through a VPN so that people can’t snoop on your Internet traffic, and is supported by ads that it inserts when you load Web pages. Among other things, it enables users in China to circumvent the Great Firewall and view Web pages that are otherwise blocked. (I wonder how long it will be before the Chinese government blocks access to anchorfree.com from inside the firewall so that people can’t download Hot Spot Shield?)
David Simon explains The Wire and American cities to overseas viewers:
That is the context of The Wire and that is the only context in which Baltimore – and by reasonable extension, urban America – can be fairly regarded. There are two Americas – separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed. Both things are true, and one gets a sense, reading the distant reaction to The Wire, that Europeans are far more ready to be convinced by one vision than the other.
And wow, I’m just quoting these two paragraphs because they should be quoted:
In places like West Baltimore, the drug war destroyed every last thing that the drugs themselves left standing – including the credibility of the police deterrent. To elect one man to higher office, an entire city alienated its citizenry and destroyed its juror pool.
Mayor O’Malley is now Governor O’Malley. The police commanders have all been promoted. A daily newspaper that had no stomach for addressing the why a decade ago when it had 400 editors and reporters, a newspaper more consumed with prize submissions and gotcha stories than with complex analysis of its city’s problems, now has 220 bodies in its newsroom and is even less capable of the task. And nothing, of course, changes.
Andrew Leonard posts about the politics of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:
The critical difference between right and left points of view on this issue is that the right thinks the government shouldn’t be involved at all in the housing market, while the left believes that Fannie Mae — which was originally created during the Great Depression as a fully public agency entrusted with propping up the housing market — never should have been transformed into a semi-public, semi-private entity in the first place. This gets to the heart of a distinction made by Paul Krugman in his blog today between “nationalization” and “deprivatization.” Headlines declaring that Fannie and Freddie are being “nationalized” are running rampant through the blogosphere, summoning up visions of banana republics kicking out Yankee oil companies in the name of the revolution! But what’s really happening is that the bastard halfway privatization of Fannie Mae has now been revoked.
And here’s why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t really the problem in the first place:
We shouldn’t be shocked at all that Wall Street went completely overboard in its love affair with housing market manipulation. That’s what happens when a market is left to its own devices, and government eschews its oversight responsibility. That’s what always happens. And when the mess gets big enough, government has to step in and clean everything up, which means that even if the feds had kept their hands totally clean — if there had been no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac muddying the waters — some kind of public entity would have had to be created as the government vehicle for correcting market failure.
ABC’s Charlie Gibson has won the honor to be the first journalist to interview Sarah Palin since she was nominated to the Vice Presidency. It’s a great opportunity for him, and I imagine he’ll be working overtime getting ready, since everyone suspects that he was chosen because he can be counted on not to put any pressure on Palin. (Indeed, Josh Marshall reports that the terms of the interview guarantee that he won’t.)
Fortunately, those of us on the Internet are only hypothetically interviewing Sarah Palin, so we can ask whatever we like. When it comes to a candidate like Palin, who we don’t really know much about, it feels to me like an interview with her should be like a job interview. I think it’s a waste of time to ask “gotcha” questions, and that we won’t learn very much at all if she’s asked about her family or even about her scandals. I’m sure she has an answer all tucked away when it comes to why she supported the “Bridge to Nowhere” and then claimed she didn’t, or how she decided to fire the head of the Alaska state police.
What I’m interested in is her philosophy of government and the sensibilities she brings to the kinds of decisions a President has to make. With that, here are some questions I’d ask if I got to interview her.
There are ten from me. Anyone else have any questions?
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James Fallows on Sarah Palin
Back on August 29, James Fallows made an observation about Sarah Palin and about running for President (or Vice President). Here’s how he described the stakes:
And here’s how he described the inevitable outcome:
This is the spectacle that began today.
Update: Here’s Fallows on her interview with Charlie Gibson.