"By law, Congress is also obligated to write a budget representing its plan to carry out these transactions in the forthcoming fiscal years." I wonder if that's a subtle dig at someone?

This was the same series of events at which Weiner, while staunchly defending the health care law, announced his intention to seek a waiver for all of New York City. We now have over a thousand private groups with waivers and the entire state of Maine, with other states in line with their applications.  You might ask sarcastically: why not waivers for everyone? Weiner actually praises this aspect of the law, which he refers to as "flexibility." More amusing is to see Media Matters spin the negative reaction to his comments, as if "jamming the law down our throats" is in perfect opposition to the highly uncertain process of having to petition HHS for a waiver. (Richard Epstein had an excellent piece on the inefficiency of this political rule-making process.)

Paul Krugman: "Perhaps we're spending a bit too much."

If I had been there, I wouldn't have been so calm. I'd have liquefaction in my pants.

Just an FYI, here in America the phrase "hooking up" can no longer be used.

That opening piece of music made me think I had accidentally chosen the Cato podcast.

BTW, it's implicit in my last comment that there should be no need for a "recently active" item to learn about revived threads that you've already commented on. There may be a legitimate use to learn about threads for which you haven't already demonstrated interest.
Re the "not well publicized" RSS feed, add this line to the template header to at least make it autodiscoverable within Safari:
<link href="/rss/feed/conversations" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS">
Details here

This highlights a persistent UX problem. The act of following or commenting within a thread doesn't really do anything. It just results in an alternate "Conversations I'm Following" UI. But by demonstrating such interest in a thread, notifications of subsequent comments should be pushed out to you, like in Facebook. At the very least, supply an RSS feed for each thread's comments to give users a mechanism to pull notifications to keep from drifting out of the conversation.
To demonstrate the problem, if anyone happens to comment on this suggestion, I won't know about it until tonight after I return from work, if I happen to remember it. Keeping track of that stuff is what computers are for. 

This pretty much sums up the liberal precedence table, doesn't it? What happens under ordinary circumstances when a lack of regulation leads to numerous deaths among poor minority members?

Laugh Like Peter Robinson Day?

Jawboning industry leaders on their levels of employment is straight out of the Herbert Hoover playbook.

Not reading anything past McCloskey's few few responses, the only thing I could come up with was a willingness to casually drop Latin terms in spoken conversation, which strikes me as a bit priestly.

Well, certainly nice to see them once again holding summits in places where there's little danger of embarrassing cold weather.

I'm surprised nobody has focused on Sowell's ideas on race, for which he is so well known.  I was impressed years back with his response to The Bell Curve's focus on the role of innate IQ, with a possible racial component, in determining outcomes. Basically, he related how the same things were said by all the highly educated mid-19th century elites about the Irish: that they were comparatively unintelligent, were inherently a violent drunken lot, and that there would forever be an entrenched underclass, etc. This wasn't mere prejudice; there seemed to be reason to believe this based on their far worse outcomes -- consider the word "paddywagons." Sowell concluded that cultural attitudes were far more powerful in determining outcomes, and that Irish success followed after they went to work repairing their cultural attitudes through assimilation. If there's a question in there, it's: just how flexible are cultures in evolving past their dysfunction, and to what extent can the larger culture encourage this process? (Has he ever read the book, "Sick Societies"?)

Concord MA, outside Boston of course, originally from NYC & upstate NY, and a college stint in Iowa.  Fled city in terror before Giuliani paved streets with gold. Don't think I could manage California with its lack of seasons and chronic irony shortage.

Another hypocricy: As I ask my friends, "did you not long ago vote for a guy who insisted that diplomacy must be allowed to work?"