Utopia, you are standing in it!

The 2016 Democratic primary is a mirror image of the 2008 primary. In 2008, Hillary Clinton fell behind in delegates on Super Tuesday and required blow out victories to regain the lead. Even though it was extraordinarily unlikely that she could do that, Clinton continued to run until the very, very end. Now Hillary has done the same to Sanders in 2016. He got a big win in New Hampshire and a tie in Iowa, but did very poorly in South Carolina and never recovered. He can only climb back into the lead if he gets big wins in big states to offset Clinton’s lead, which didn’t happen this week and is unlikely to happen over the next month. Yet, Sanders is still running strong. Why?

A few reasons:

• By basing his campaign on small donors, it is possible to continually raise money. He can bypass the party establishment who would…

A new book came in the post the other day.  It is a scholarly look at the long-term relative economic performance of New Zealand and Uruguay, something I wrote about quite recently and a subject I may come back to when I’ve read the book.

But there is an old line, especially applied to newspaper and magazine articles, that when the coverage of something you know about doesn’t ring true, be wary of the rest of the article.  And flicking through this new book my eye lit on a strange reference to the Reserve Bank.

In a paragraph on the reform period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s (“which showed characteristics of a coup”), the author writes

Douglas as well as further members of the Cabinet, the Business Roundtable, and other strategically located institutions represented the exclusive inner circle of the new right. Until at least 1988, they used their large human…

It goes without saying that the whole 60 Minutes saga has some serious knobs on it.

However, I don’t just mean the ’60 Minutes are a bunch of idiots with a serious corporate culture problem'(*) kind of knobs. I also mean the ‘this all got resolved very quickly and a little too easily with a lot of money changing hands’ knobs.

By Brent Bozell and Tim Graham ~

HBO should stand for History Bungling Office. Over and over again, they have abused their disclaimer that “This film is a fact-based dramatization.” They re-litigated Al Gore’s 2000  “victory” in Recount. They viciously cartooned Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy in Game Change. Now they’re smearing Clarence Thomas as a pervert and painting Anita Hill as a saint of sexual harassment in Confirmation.

The makers of this “fact-based” movie claim it’s balanced. Baloney. The advertisements give away the game. Over the face of actress (and executive producer) Kerry Washington (pictured) playing St. Anita are the words “It only takes one voice to change history.”

This ignores the obvious: liberals lost the Thomas fight more dramatically than they lost the 2000 election. It wasn’t just that he won his confirmation. The American people didn’t believe Hill’s lurid and unsubstantiated tales of “Long Dong Silver” chatter. Even…

Climate science is the latest manifestation of solution aversion: denying a problem because it has a costly solution. The Right does this on climate science, the Left does it on gun control, GMOs, and plenty more. Cass Sunstein explains:

It is often said that people who don’t want to solve the problem of climate change reject the underlying science, and hence don’t think there’s any problem to solve.

But consider a different possibility: Because they reject the proposed solution, they dismiss the science. If this is right, our whole picture of the politics of climate change is off.

Some psychologists wasted grant money on lab experiments to show that people that think the solution to a problem is costly tend to rubbish every aspect of the argument. Any politician will tell you you do not concede anything. Sunstein again:

Campbell and Kay asked the participants whether they agreed with…

As the choices for president become clearer, people ask me if there are any circumstances under which I could support Donald Trump. The answer is a clear and unequivocal no.

It’s not that I disagree with him on nearly every major issue, though I do. His specific refusal to reform entitlements, combined with his proposals to increase spending, threatens to bankrupt the nation. His anti-trade position would take us back to the days of Smoot-Hawley. He supports eminent domain abuse and corporate welfare. He backed TARP and the bank bailout. And I could go on and on. But as a libertarian, I don’t ever expect to find a candidate I agree with on everything. Hell, I didn’t agree with Rand Paul on everything. I certainly don’t agree with Hillary Clinton on, well, anything. For me, voting is almost always choosing the lesser of evils.

And it’s not his fundamental dishonesty…