Quotes of the day

Not true.--Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in hearing President Obama's remark on a recent decision

The president's statement is false. The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any "expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication." This is either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind.--Bradley A. Smith

I claim that it is immoral for government to make promises that it does not expect to keep.--Arnold Kling

Please, if you have a connection, ask the State Department why [Haiti relief] volunteers are being forced to foot the bill for empty flights to the States.--Jake Wood

In last night's State of the Union address President Obama proposed a three-year "spending freeze" on what amounts to one-sixth of the federal budget. Our biggest entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, would be excluded. These changes are optical rather than substantive. Given the spending agenda that is already in place, we can expect to see large increases in the proportion of GDP that is spent by our government for years to come.--Edward Lazear

Jon Stewart has been asking for the last year whether Obama was getting his ass handed to him, or whether he was a Jedi master, 5 steps ahead of his opponents. I guess now we know which it is...--aka Jesse Livermore

... both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives.--McNulty, James K.; Neff, Lisa A.; Karney, Benjamin R.

Offered a single man, 59 per cent [of heterosexual single women] were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.--Andy Coghlan

If you hang around you'll notice that there are no shortage of women in these discussions. Having read a particularly smart take on Brett Favre, or having received a good recommendations on a particular IPA, it would not be a compliment for me to say, "Wow, I forgot you were a woman." Indeed, it would be pretty offensive.

The problems is three-fold. First, it takes my necessarily limited, and necessarily blinkered, experience with the fairer sex and builds it into a shibboleth of invented truth. Then it takes that invented truth as a fair standard by which I can measure one's "woman-ness." So if football and beer don't fit into my standard, I stop seeing the person as a woman. Finally instead of admitting that my invented truth is the problem, I put the onus on the woman. Hence the claim "I forgot you were a woman," as opposed to "I just realized my invented truth was wrong."--Ta-Nehesi Coates

A German couple who fled to Tennessee so they could homeschool their children was granted political asylum Tuesday by a U.S. immigration judge ...--Travis Loller

Consistent with the culture of honor theory, pitchers from the southern United States were more likely to hit batters in these situations, but primarily if the batter was White.--Timmerman, Thomas A.

I was born in Michigan, grew up in Madison, and went to grad school in Chicago. These three areas encapsulate how I think about the recession. Chicago is a cross-section of America, with a highly diversified economy. Its unemployment rate is 10.3%, close to the national average. Madison is blessed with unusually acyclical industries, and I don’t recall it ever experiencing high unemployment. Because its economy is dominated by state government, college education, insurance, biotech, and dairy, it has only 5.5% unemployment. At the other extreme is Detroit, with 15.4% unemployment. Detroit has two problems. First, heavy industry is unusually cyclical, and thus steel, autos, machinery, etc, will suffer more job losses when AD falls, even if there is no recalculation. Of course the auto industry is the main problem in Detroit. It is not true that the US auto industry is in a long term state of decline, but the Big 3/UAW auto industry is in a long term state of decline. So Detroit’s unusually high unemployment rate is due to both cyclical factors and structural (recalculation) factors.--Scott Sumner