CapitalistImperialistPig

Ron Paul and some more sensible people are exercised over the assassination of terrorist and American Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. “Al-Awlaki was born here, he’s an American citizen, he was never tried or charged for any crimes,” Paul said today after a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, CNN reports. “To start assassinating American citizens without charges - we should think very seriously about this.” I'm not too sympathetic to this argument, even though al-Awalaki was a homeboy from my home town. The fact is, you don't charge and try a bank robber when you catch him in the act and he resists arrest. Yes, it would be nice if there was a more formal process for charging these guys, but its not like he was about to show up at the embassy to defend himself in court.

Krugman identifies some : The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue. The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality. Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest...

Cosmic inflation is purported to solve many ills that beset big bang cosmology. C. Fred Bergsten, an assistant Treasury secretary from 1977 to 1981, and director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says its Earthly namesake can have similar benificent effects down here below . BY virtually ignoring trade, President Obama and Congressional Republicans are missing a major opportunity to create jobs. The United States runs an annual trade deficit of about $600 billion, or 4 percent of our entire economy. Eliminating that imbalance would create three million to four million jobs, according to Commerce Department estimates, at no cost to the budget. ... First, the United States must, in effect, weaken the dollar by 10 to 20 percent. This step alone would produce one million to three million jobs. It’s been done before: In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility in gold, and in 1985, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III reached an agreement ...

Big Republican money is getting scared, and they would like to play one more big card: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. So argues TPMs Benjy Sarlin. There’s a lot of buzz around a Chris Christie run this week, thanks mostly to an all-out effort by big money Republicans to recruit him for a run. Sarlin has names and addresses. For Republican elites skeptical of Mitt Romney or worried his Obamacare baggage is too much to overcome, Christie holds a natural appeal. He’s proudly anti-union and, in private with top donors at least, bluntly demands cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to fix the deficit.

I am pretty sure that Steven Landsburg has a very high IQ. This does not prevent him from expressing opinions that seem utterly lacking in ordinary judgement. I am sometimes reminded of the opinions of my favorite string theorist - no, not that one - my other favorite (fictional) string theorist, Sheldon Cooper. This disquisition on Keynesian economics is an utter classic. I keep thinking it's intended as satire, but it really doesn't seem to be. I have a very naive question for the Keynesian economists: Why aren’t you thrilled with the current state of the economy? Here’s why I ask: According to what I take to be an orthodox Keynesian view, we are now in a liquidity trap. (My question does not apply to Keynesians, new or old, who believe otherwise.) That means that people want to hold lots and lots of money instead of spending it. Cool! We can provide money at almost zero cost. So it should be easy to make people very happy. What’s the problem? Of course, people a...

Lubos has a long article outlining one approach to explaining neutrino speeds that doesn't quite collapse standard physics. I won't attempt to summarize, except to say that it involves slow photons, Sieberg, Witten, and non-commutative geometry, and that Lubos notes that it can't quite fit all the experimental data - I think he means the Supernova 1987A data. Clearly, Lubos is still a skeptic about the result, but he and other people are already thinking about the meaning of the experiment turning out to be solid.

After gutting and spitting him . I’ve noted that Tyler Cowen and others seem, mysteriously, to believe that any uptick in Irish GDP somehow refutes Keynesian analysis; I’ve been seeing a lot of similar stuff about the Baltic nations, whose experience is supposed to prove that austerity works. Some graphs of the Baltic "success" follow. The more crucial point is that those who seem to think that such limited successes somehow challenge Keynesian economics are utterly mistaken - such limited successes are exactly what Keynes predicted, and the justification for more direct action. Again, it’s a stunning indictment of the austerian, anti-Keynesian position that those who hold it have to claim Ireland and Latvia as success stories, and have to invent an imaginary version of Keynesian economics to claim that it has failed.