WilliamCody

The Tebow option will go the way of the Wildcat unless he becomes a more effective passer. It can last if he becomes a more consistent dual threat, but teams will adjust. He looked successful last night because the Jets safeties are not that good and it takes good safety and linebacker play to neutralize the option. Just look at Tebow's touchdown run. It was completely botched by Leonhard.

We should throw some wrinkles at them, they get 10 days to prepare for us, so we need to mix it up a bit

yeah, we was shown up by Tebow....not good

No, actually, I'm asking for other instances of this administration being non-transparent because the OP, it turns outs, missed the fact that they were posting the meeting minutes online. Then, I asked the question about other administrations so we could talk about whether or not this administration is more or less transparent than other administrations. Finally, I said it was perhaps not surprising that the campaign promise for more transparency was broken for, as another posting above notes, it is a pie-in-the-sky promise for a candidate to make, and another thing altogether for an actual president to realize. I'm not sure why you think you got me.

I think we have a pretty good idea already. The bedrock of democracy is an open government so the citizens can vote according the actual needs. No transparency just means there is a permanent bureaucracy running around out there with no responsibility to the people they ostensibly exist for. IMO if we have transparency, there would be less waste, corruption, illegal foreign operations, etc because the morality of the left and the fiscal responsibility of the right would have none of it. If you read the update at the bottom, they note the meeting minutes will be posted online. Completely open? No. Completely closed off? No, as well. This seems like a non-issue. Are there better examples of non-transparency on a grander scale than previous administrations, or are we witness business as usual and a not-surprisingly broken campaign promise?

They prefer a simple link out with no text? In my experience, that means everybody just reacts to the thread title instead of actually taking the time to read the piece. When I post an article, I usually post the link, full text, magazine/newspaper/website title, author, and date. Still no good? What is SOP here in this regard?

Right, but couldn't you just as easily blame this trend on a specious media only out for the latest ratings-gathering scandal as a left-wing conspiracy aimed at bringing down the right?

I wasn't sure if you misread and thought the reporter should have said loser instead of looser...

So you are faulting them for not creating havoc?

Not sure if serious...

Here is a really cool article that uses twitter feed visualizations to discuss the difference in composition between the TEA Party and the OWS Movements: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/11/occupy-vs-tea-party-what-their.html It confirms in a really interesting way what we already know: OWS is a diverse movement with a lot of different ideological bases and the TEA Party is an insider network that is more coherent but less diverse in its social connections and perhaps in its ideological composition.

It depends on who you ask. There is no doubt that many feel that Obama has mismanaged this administration so much that anyone would be better than him. I haven't made up my mind yet and it really depends on who the eventual Republican candidate is. But I really can't see myself being entirely happy about whoever I vote for in 2012. but that's the nature of democracy, isn't it? Everyone feels either somewhat shortchanged or completely slighted.

There is a good correspondent's piece on last night's Daily Show that emphasized the growing divisions within the Occupy Movement at Zuccotti Park just before it was cleared out. Pretty interesting...and funny.

Or maybe they're just terrible candidates. Whats more believable, a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy the right, or a few people not being fit for president? It's a small sample size, but there really isn't a viable presidential candidate in the group for a variety of reasons.

I think it is more difficult to see the long-term and short-term benefits of the stimulus bill than it is to see the costs. I don't pretend to have enough of an expertise in macro-economics to definitively declare that this type of Keynesian strategy is always good or always bad. As a historian, I am willing to wait a few more years before I declare definitively the success or failure of the stimulus bills. At the time, I thought that doing something was better than doing nothing (even if the only effect was to slightly raise consumer confidence and to ensure the current historic low levels of interest rates) just as with the XL Pipeline I currently favor doing nothing over doing something. But this belief comes as much from my belief that the US will gain a long-term comparative advantage in the global economy (and thus a growth in the domestic economy) not by clinging and growing its oil infrastructure, but in innovating new strategies for energy use. I happen to think for a variety of reasons that the current oil-based economy is on its way out (over the next 2 or 3 generations) and the country that realizes this first will be the leader of the 21st century global economy. For the sake of my kids and my grandkids, I hope that is the US. If this means you think I lean left, so be it - but I characterize my political beliefs of the response to particular issues, not by an adherence to some universal political ideology.

That's not explaining more fully, that's restating what he has already said. I would like to know the actual avenues through which this took place. I would also like to know how and why these projects would be necessarily opposed to a strengthening of the private sector. I'm just not seeing how the stimulus bills was meant primarily for unions, and I'm then not getting why many of the unions were still hostile to Obama's policies. If you have an article that spells this all out, I would love to see it. I don't know the exact definition of temporary, I haven't seen the reports. And I think the real issue is outlay versus benefit. It's not clear to many why this project is of long-term interest to the US economy considering it will be controlled by one Canadian company and most if not all the oil will be exported. This seems like a great proposition for TransCanada and Canada in general, I'm just not seeing such a great benefit for the US economy.

Explain more fully.

This is true, but only because the movement was conceived of from day one as confrontational. Again, I don't see this as an indictment of their agenda, but rather of their tactics - which is what most Americans have a problem with.

I think that the point of the article was that, despite our many differences, the US has a tradition of conceiving of one national community, a history of coming together as a nation when things get really bad (although this history is mixed). What the article was saying was that Europe does not have this long tradition and could very easily break up as a result of major fiscal shocks.

Yes, exactly. With one exception...infrastructure is designed to increase commerce for multiple parties while the pipeline will only directly profit one company in the long-term. See above. The stimulus was aimed at the economy at large. The pipeline is aimed at one (albeit important) sector, or perhaps even one company (that isn't even based in the US) Care to elaborate? What did I say that is incorrect? I did some quick research before I posted and I would like to know which portions are not factual.

No, but it would all happen around a tree that has been converted to a candle-filled fire hazard. Plus, you wouldn't drink the same old tired beer, nothing but egg nog and spiced rum.

This is a mischaracterization of the movement. The problem isn't that they have no opinions or that they aren't informed, is that the movement from its beginning allowed every opinion to be voiced at its meetings. There is undoubtedly an ideological core that seeks to call attention to and change the corporate/government nexus, but the problem is they have no agreement on what that actually is. But that doesn't mean the individuals themselves are mis- or ill- informed. It means that they are not doing a good job of finding a relatable message that can cut across demographic divides.

Yes, there are a lot of if's. The movement itself attempts to build on a pluralistic diversity that is at once the source of its greatest potential and its biggest handicap. We may see in the OWS Movement how a commitment to ideological diversity actually works against meaningful political action. Sometimes you just have to decide on a platform and run with it. Hopefully OWS can do this based around the government/corporate nexus, but I won't hold my breath.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/11/currency-unions?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/sellyourbourbonyoukentuckians Nov 14th 2011, 17:05 by R.A. | WASHINGTON IS KENTUCKY America's Greece? Matt Yglesias writes: Kentucky (population 4.3 million) and the San Francisco / Oakland / Fremont Metropolitan Statistical Area (population 4.3 million) do share a currency. They do this despite the fact that Kentucky has a longstanding lack of competitiveness relative to San Francisco. Eighty-seven percent of San Franciscans have high school degrees compared to just 80 percent in Kentucky. Forty-three percent of San Franciscans have bachelor’s degrees to just 20 percent of Kentuckians. Not surprisingly, San Francisco’s workers are much more productive, earning a median household income of $74,000 to Kentucky’s $40,000.The way this is made to work is by long-term, sustained, open-ended financial transfers to Kentucky. I'd put this differently. You don't have a competitiveness problem if your wages are sufficiently low. Wages are much higher in coastal California than they are in Kentucky, because productivity is higher in coastal California than in Kentucky. If productivity adequately explains wage differences, there's no competitiveness issue; so long as Kentucky employers get enough output from their workers to cover wage costs, everything works out. Imagine, though, that a new administration is elected to Washington which makes rapid growth in places like Kentucky a priority and which hints that it will prevent businesses that make big investments in Kentucky from suffering big losses if those investments go bad. Suppose, then, that the cost of borrowing in Kentucky drops as capital floods in from elsewhere. Kentucky experiences a boom and wages rise rapidly. After this boom runs for a while, bad news somewhere else in the world might lead some coastal banks to curtail their lending. When that happens, some of Kentucky's enterprises get into trouble, and investors quickly look to the government. As it turns out, the administration in the White House sees a bail-out of the region as being really unpopular and declines to do much to help. With the implicit guarantee gone borrowing costs soar and capital high-tails it out of Kentucky. Then what happens? Well, some but not all of that previous investment may have been productivity enhancing, and so wages as a whole are above their market-clearing level. Now, Kentucky has a competitiveness problem. No one wants to hire Kentuckians at prevailing wages, and unemployment will rise until wages fall to market-clearing levels. So does big trouble loom? Things won't be pretty for Kentucky for a little while, but neither will America face disaster (indeed, something very like this is infolding in Nevada at the moment, and yet the American union seems safe). Here we get to the key differences between Europe and America. First, adjustment is likely to be faster within America because labour markets are more flexible. The euro zone has come a long way in freeing its internal labour market, but cultural, linguistic, and other differences still mean that it may be easier to move from Kentucky to Texas than from Spain to Germany. Second, Kentucky can fall back on some federally-funded automatic stabilisers, which means that the feedback loop between economic weakness and fiscal tightening isn't as intense. As Mr Yglesias points out, payments for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and federal unemployment benefits will continue to be paid. And finally, the American economy has a national financial structure that halts contagion. That doesn't mean that there won't be bank failures or even, potentially, state defaults. It does mean that contagion isn't likely to develop. Say Kentucky banks are suddenly thrown into great difficulty. What happens? Well, the FDIC comes in and handles the problem. America's economy is massive relative to the size of the banking problem in Kentucky, and so there is no transmission of problem in Kentucky's banks to America's sovereign debt. But what if the problem was spread across half of the American economy, such that very large banks got into trouble? As America discovered in 2008, things can get tricky when banking troubles outstrip the capacity of the FDIC. As we saw then, however, the question was not whether America had the capacity to handle the situation but whether it could organise an effective rescue that would stick politically. When the federal government stood behind the banking system in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, the crisis ended relatively quickly. America's economy is very large and it is backed by the full power of the Fed. As Nobelist Chris Sims has noted, that's an extraordinarily powerful shock absorber. At some point, America's institutions will be tested again; perhaps a crisis in state pensions will threaten to spark a crisis. The country's federal and democratic government means that nothing is certain, but the structure of the national economy is such that its financial system is far less brittle and far more likely to survive such a crisis than Europe's. But a sense of identity surely matters. Mr Yglesias closes by writing: Americans, whether in San Francisco or in Kentucky, generally conceive of ourselves as all living in one country. We act either on behalf of narrow personally selfish claims or else broad idealistic concerns about what’s right and proper for the country as a whole. But if that spirit broke down, the whole national economy would have a very different feel. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, it took improvisation on the part of the Fed, the White House, and the Congress to prevent a major disaster. There were intense debates about how various costs would be borne, which continue to resonate today. Those debates lacked a clear geographic component, but it's unlikely that the presence of one would have been decisive. That is due, in part, to the fact that America's federal government has grown progressively stronger over the past two centuries; the Fed and the Treasury are now sufficiently powerful that they needn't worry about what California's governor thinks of their actions. And it is also due to the related fact that Americans think of themselves as Americans in a way that Europeans don't think of themselves as Europeans. That consciousness enabled the development of stronger national institutions. But the growth of national institutions, in crises especially, helped to forge that consciousness. It took an executive willing to substantially overreach amidst a civil war to knit states that still saw themselves as sovereign into something like a coherent union. In times of crisis, identity can't help but shape the resolve to fight or flee. If "core" Europe sees too little of itself in "peripheral" Europe to keep itself together, then the fact that Europe could save itself through the creation of sufficiently powerful federal institutions won't much matter.

I'd really love it if Christmas reverted back to the way it was in the 1700s and 1800s - twelve days of rowdy drinking, with some big meals and a few small presents mixed in for the children.