Happy Birthday to Alexander Siddig, 48.
What would we do without the good stuff?
1. Sarah Binder on the nuclear showdown.
2. Ezra Klein is good on Obamacare/Katrina.
3. Ed Whelan is correct: excepting Supreme Court nominations from a nuclear-induced ban on other judicial nominations is pretty much a joke. Which is one of the reasons that Democrats didn't act up to now.
4. I agree with Matt Yglesias about the doctors' cartel. I'd like to see a good post, however, comparing doctors and lawyers.
5. And Sarah Kliff loves the first chart in her post, which I agree is a big deal. But the last chart is the Wow! one to me.
Jonathan: Your second link (Sarah Binder on the nuclear showdown) also goes to Siddig's IMDB profile.
ReplyDeleteThanks, fixed.
DeleteWhile I know they didn't go that way, and Peter Capaldi seems promising, I think Seddig probably would have been a good Doctor in his own right. Well, maybe. It's always tricky to pull someone in who's strongly associated with a particular role in a similar genre.
ReplyDeleteThat Sarah Binder post was great and got at what I was trying to say yesterday more eloquently than I did. Norm based approaches to filibusters are, by definition, unenforceable, and so an agreement based on norms is destined to fail eventually.
ReplyDeleteAlso, on that Whelan post, as Scott Lemieux said yesterday, as a Democrat it's hard for me to be afraid of Republicans nominating extreme judges to the Supreme Court when, with the filibuster in tact, we got Alito and Scalia. "Watch out Democrats! If you destroy the filibuster, it might mean that judges will be appointed who are just like judges that have already been appointed!"
DeleteYou may not want the filibuster gone, but this is not a good reason to keep it around.
Reading Furman's post (linked in Kliff's piece) about the source of the slowdown in health care costs, it felt like 2001 again. In 2001 we got the Bush tax cuts because of the newly-"permanent" surplus, the Beltway apparently oblivious to the unprecedented spike in revenues correlated with ubiquitous news stories about hyper-flipping of the likes of redenvelope.com.
ReplyDeleteFurman gives us the newly-permanent control of health care inflation, recently experienced, which is apparently distinct from the robustly recovering general economy, which I guess *is* producing inflation. So...Bernanke/Yellen will soon be bumping up that Federal Funds rate, then? And that stimulus discussion - put to rest now? Oh...that's right. Separate conversations, I remember.
(BTW - the post comparing lawyers and doctors would be interesting, but more interesting than the mean salaries would be the variance. A doctor at the low end of the salary totem pole - working at the VA, perhaps - is still likely making low 6 figures.
There are many many many lawyers who can only dream of that type of compensation).
I've got to put in a click for the salacious history post currently over at Politico:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/sex-in-the-senate-bobby-baker-99530.html?hp=pm_2
Not a normal Politico reader, but this stuff is hilarious... especially with respect to the desire to return to the days of Senate comity.
College professors are highly paid professionals. They earn more money—a lot more money—than your average American. What's more, American college professors get paid more than college professors in almost any other country. Given how much of post-secondary education is financed either directly or indirectly by the federal government, it's natural to make restraining professors' income part of any program for making college more affordable.
ReplyDeleteSounds right.
I recommend that college professors have their salaries cut 25% across the board and that the USG criminalize any contracts that pay professors above that cap. I'm sure that JB will get behind this necessary and unthuggish cost-cutting measure. Given the number of industries that the USG is slowly nationalizing, we could save a lot of money with Yglesias' and JB's logic.