At Least It’s An Ethos

Dan Riehl:
Some of the alarmists out there might want to take a moment to consider all the ramifications here. It may sound harsh, but the Great Depression produced many things — one of them was called the Greatest Generation.
Which on the heels of the Brooks column calls to mind the best quote from The Big [...]

Brooks: “Nihilists”

An extraordinary columns today from the NYT’s David Brooks, pronouncing that the GOp has moved well beyond intellectual bankruptcy:
This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation [to the 1933 economic crisis], and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to [...]

Bail Out

Ross Douthat, in the wake of Monday’s House vote:
The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm without 1930s-style suffering; the Republican Party is not so [...]

Sunrise on Mars

 

Well, kinda, given that the Phoenix lander is near one of the poles:

Unions Seek Piracy Crackdown

The USN’s indifference to the piracy situation off Somalia isn’t winning this country any friends:
If civil aircraft were being hijacked on a daily basis, the response of governments would be very different.  Yet ships, which are the lifeblood of the global economy, are seemingly out of sight and out of mind.  This apparent indifference to [...]

SpaceX Makes It

NASA Watch has the on-board video. The first-stage separation still looked rough to me but they got away with it.

Ahoy, Mateys

The piracy situation off Somalia has gotten rather out of hand. Visit EagleSpeak for all the gory details. The USN is in do-nothing mode when frankly a few well-aimed shots from a 5-inch gun would go a long way toward cleaning things up. Galrahn is unhappy:
When piracy, a problem that directly effects free trade, is [...]

Community Reinvestment

Stephen Bainbridge rubbishes the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the Wall Street meltdown:
Put simply, the freezing up of the credit markets doesn’t have anything to do with either affirmative action or illegal immigration, and people who believe it does are on a par with the conspiracy theorists who think fluoridation is a Chicom [...]

Seattle Transit

Matt Yglesias points out, or more accurately has it pointed out to him, that California isn’t the only major player with a big rail bond/program on the ballot this fall.

The One Post to Read on Wall Street

Megan McArdle:
Banks have tens of billions of debt maturities to refinance in the coming months.  The overwhelming majority of it will be good even under distressed circumstances — unless they can’t roll any of it over.  At that point, they experience the same problems you would if your credit card company pulled your credit line [...]