Current Affairs

Will the 2012 presidential election be a referendum on democracy?

So long and good riddance to Keynesian economic theory?

While the rest of hyperconnected, interweb-powered planet Earth has now seen Keynesian economic intervention tested in real time and discredited beyond any intelligent doubt, the Times, I quickly learned, is a walled garden where the ideas of John Maynard Keynes remain not only viable but so evidently true as to require no factual support.

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The food police are getting more and more tiresome, but once in a while they make a good point:

School districts across the country are revamping their menus to serve healthier fare, but most schools give students so little time to eat that they could be contributing unwittingly to the childhood obesity problem.

The green future is here:

For the first time ever, more of the corn crop may go into gas tanks than into the stomachs of cattle and poultry destined for kitchen tables.

Still haven't wiped out sexism in the workplace, I notice. Even mean women are losing out and falling behind:

My new hero:

Starbucks Corp. Chief Executive Howard Schultz is winning support for his call to withhold political contributions from U.S. lawmakers until they strike a "fair, bipartisan" deal on the country's debt, revenue and spending.

The Klan is a detestable organization, but surely this isn't the way to go after them:

The Ku Klux Klan sued the prosecutor and sheriff of Rush County, Indiana to fight a littering citation. The Klan claims it was not littering, but distributing leaflets door to door to promote itself "as a fraternal and law abiding organization that works to uphold Christian values."

Juxtaposition of the day. Saw this piece in The New York Times about why there are no Big Ideas anymore:

We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.

This is a big deal and good to hear on an otherwise bad-news Friday:

An appeals court ruled on Friday that President Barack Obama's healthcare law requiring Americans to buy healthcare insurance or face a penalty was unconstitutional, a blow to the White House.

Now this is depressing. I've written frequently about the Tax Foundation's calculation of Tax Freedom Day, which is arrived at by dividing total federal, state and local taxes by national income. This year we worked until April 12 to pay all taxes. But Grover Norquist's group has now calculated a Cost of Government Day by adding in the other costs of government overreach (think Obamacare and the EPA, for example):