Dispatches

Is Soros Too Anti-Bush for Baseball?
06.29.2005 14:15 | MICHAEL MANVILLE
The folks over at the Marginal Revolution point us to a story that is both frightening and insane: a political litmus test to buy a baseball team. Quoting the Washington Post: Major League Baseball hasn't narrowed the list of the eight bidders seek...

The Anatomy of Pork
06.28.2005 09:44 | MICHAEL MANVILLE
LA Times reporter Ken Silverstein has a nice, albeit depressing, article on pork barrel politics in the new issue of Harper's (not yet available online). In small doses, what we call pork isn't automatically a bad thing, and in any event it's pretty...

Krugman the Isolationist?
06.28.2005 09:34 | MICHAEL MANVILLE
Alex Tabarrok, my second-favorite libertarian economist (the first being Tyler Cowen) unloads on Paul Krugman for his most recent column on China, saying he has abandoned both liberalism and economics. Has he? Here's Alex's take: Marginal revolutio...

Angels? Give me a houri any day.
06.28.2005 08:42 | RUSS WELLEN
To expand on "Nationalism Trumps Theology," I've long believed men on the hard right are fueled by resentment over all the sex other elements of the population were having starting in the sixties. In disdaining the secular life, though, and settling for t...

Armored Vehicles in Iraq
06.27.2005 11:52 | MICHAEL MANVILLE
Nothing is too good for the troops -- except, apparently, the vehicles we use to ferry VIPs around Iraq. The New York Times has the story, and I plucked it off Brad Delong's web site: Safer Vehicles for Soldiers: A Tale of Delays and Glitches - N...

The French Workweek
06.24.2005 16:22 | MICHAEL MANVILLE
A new study argues that lowering the French work week to 35 hours created 350,000 jobs. Here's a link to a story. I haven't read the study itself yet, but since the government commissioned it I'm not sure how many of its conclusions we should take at...

The Hillary Smear
06.24.2005 15:04 | MICHAEL MANVILLE
I've always been a little puzzled by the right wing hatred of Hillary Clinton. Forests have been felled to describe this woman's malign intent, and for the most part what we have gotten out of the effort is 1) a whole lot of dreck, often involving asserti...

Major Threat
06.24.2005 14:55 | MATTHEW CALLAN
Phil Knight, founder of Nike, has made reservations for his own special spot in hell, where his entrails will be turned into strings for demonic tennis rackets, his legs ripped off and used as bats in an interleague softball game between Nazis and pedophi...