A pet peeve of mine: Politicians who insist on talking about what “the American people” want, and what “the American people” think. Every politician who says that believes that—in a striking coincidence—what the American people want happens to be precisely what said politician wants. Never noticed this? You will now. You can hear an example …
Tag Archives: budget
Links for July 6th
The Register: Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its resultsGood. .co.cc sites are almost uniformly worthless—a hive of malware sites and search engine spam. Andrew Sullivan: Boehner’s Economic Terrorism"For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only …
Links for June 27th
WordPress Publisher Blog: A complete publishing system on WordPressThe Bangor Daily News managed to turn WordPress and Google Docs into an entire newspaper publishing system, by using a bunch of plugins to create an editorial workflow. Having written a lot of code to perform this very task, I'm really impressed by this. Better still, it …
Links for May 25th
Gratiot County Herald Letters To The EditorIthaca, Michigan school superintendent Nathan Bootz wrote an open letter to the governor to ask that his school system be converted to a prison, noting that Michigan spends $30,000–$40,000/year on each prisoner, but only $7,000/year on each student. WVEC: Taxpayers foot the bill when the governor flies on state …
Links for May 8th
NPR: Florida Bill Could Muzzle Doctors On Gun SafetyAn NRA-written bill has passed the Florida legislature, and is likely to be signed by the governor, that will make it illegal for doctors to advise patients on gun safety. (Pediatricians frequently advise new parents on how to store firearms safely, and doctors concerned about teenagers' mental …
Links for May 2nd
New York Times: A Tipping Point for Gay Marriage?With the government unable to muster a legally defensible argument against gay marriage, it's amazing that the House of Representatives went ahead and hired their own private law firm to carry on the right. But it's more amazing still that the law firm dropped the case, finding …
State Government Finances in the U.S.
That’s from Google’s Public Data Explorer.
Links for March 1st
Krulwich Wonders…: Cactus Walking On 20 Legs Found In ChinaHalf a billion years ago, lifeforms suddenly took on crazy, elaborate new shapes. It's really not clear why it happened, but they sure were impressive. Washington Post: GOP spending plan would cost 700,000 jobs, new report saysMoody's has released an analysis of the Republican spending plan, …
Links for February 21st
New York Times: As Republicans See a Mandate on Budget Cuts, Others See Risk"Public surveys suggest that most voters do not share the Republicans’ fervor for the deep cuts adopted by the House, or for drastically slashing the power of public-sector unions." I imagine that the electoral see-saw is going to continue in 2012, with …
Links for February 16th
New York Times: 30 Steps To Better GovernmentAmidst all of the flowery rhetoric about making government more efficient, this op-ed by Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro seems wonderfully concrete. He describes some of the GAO's successes thus far, and where they see improvement is necessary. Auditing oil and gas leases seems promising. Right now, we …