Unions and survival

“We’re willing to take an extra step here.  ‘Concesssions,’ I used to cringe at that word.  But now, why hide from it? That’s what we did.” 
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger
That’s momentous, and to me ultimately a good thing.  Understand, I’m generally pro-union, almost reflexively.  The idea that a mass of workers should be able to [...]

Trade-offs

The question is whether increased economic viability in, say, Mali, is worth the increased pollution it would bring.  The thinking is that the development would bring up health care far faster than the pollution would drag down people’s health. 
All kinds of other practical matters — such as to whom the real [...]

OK. I’m convinced. (Larry Summers edition)

Brad DeLong on why Summers is right for “high federal office,” perhaps even the Treasury Department, which he previously helmed at the tail end of the Clinton Administration.
Summers and other intellectually robust people like him filling the ranks of government?  And then given rein to do their jobs?  That would be “change.” Barack Obama knows better than to [...]

The stories are the same

 
This week a Midwestern black man in his mid 40s pulled off a big move.  I’m talking about Joe Dumars, of course, trading Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson.  It might not be a good move for this year but almost certainly it helps the Pistons over time.  And Dumars has a lengthy track record by [...]

President Barack Hussein Obama

Even if you didn’t know his face, his name would stand out.
Here’s how the electoral map looked the moment it was called on MSNBC: 

Poetic that Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” has become a theme song of sorts… precocious Stevie’s first major hit, “Fingertips (Pt. 2)” was in 1963, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his ”I Have [...]

Anticipation

Via Yes We Can Hold Babies.

Ground game

This is the best summation of why Barack Obama will win the Presidency and John McCain will not.  From Sean Quinn at the currently indispensable FiveThirtyEight:
The busiest McCain office we saw was in Arlington, at the national HQ, but tight security prevented us from getting any pictures. Ironically, that was our first full office, in [...]

The Ron Clark Academy shows well

Never heard of it before a few minutes ago.  But the publicity machine is going full-tilt.

Brandon McClelland and hate crime

 

Takes five weeks or so for the national news media to pick up the story of a man whose body was discovered torn apart by the side of a road.   The man was Brandon McClelland, 24, of Paris, Texas. 
That’s the same Paris where Shaquanda Cotton received a seven-year sentence for pushing a hall monitor in high [...]

Where real Americans live

This is the first mainstream story I’ve seen about Barack Obama as a true product of the big city, a rarity among Presidential contenders, as I noted a while back.
The United States long ago became an urban-suburban nation, with two-thirds of the population now residing in its 100 largest metropolitan areas. Yet recent presidents have [...]