Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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The Economist has a good article up about reforming the UN Human Rights Commission. The HRC is considered by many to be illegitimate because some of the worst human rights offenders are regularly on the Commission.
So, my self-imposed moratorium on political posts has come to an end.
I’m looking at the whole Bolton nomination thing and wondering why we’re even having this discussion. I can’t find anyone that actually wants this guy in government, let alone as our principal voice at the U.N. Yet today, we have an endorsement for Bolton by Greg Djerejian, a knowledgeable voice in the foreign policy blogosphere. For the life of me, I can’t understand why he’s endorsing Bolton. It seems to come down to three things:
Those are, all told, not really a rousing endorsement of the guy. In fact, it’s not really much of any endorsement. It amounts to, the guy got lucky enough to be nominated so he should get the job. Which is fine enough, I guess, but let’s not get carried away thinking this guy is going to be able to do a damn bit of anything at the U.N. because of his personality.
The thing that bothers me the most about this logic, though, is that the “punishment” ends up becoming an Ambassadorship at the United Nations. If he’s being punished, why is he getting anything at all??? I can’t imagine that the Republican party and even the Administration doesn’t have more qualified candidates languishing at some third tier post in State or the White House or the Pentagon. It’s especially surprising to me because the professional offenses have been pretty severe to me. He’s been a loose cannon in the past and has a pattern of manipulating or purposely misreading intelligence to push his agenda. This is unacceptable and goes beyond simply being a jerk or a tough guy to work with. If you can’t read intelligence and realize that you’re wrong once, if you can’t be trusted to call a spade a spade because it hurts your greater plans, then I don’t want you in a position of responsibility. Period. I don’t want the President listening to you and Congress shouldn’t be comfortable with this either.
