In yesterday’s Clinton Herald, there was a story about the county unemployment rate surging from 6.6 percent in December, 2011 to 7.3 percent in January, 2012. That’s a big jump! Especially because the rest of the Iowa Workforce Department press release article states that the unemployment rate statewide fell two tenths from 5.6 to...
Read More »

via Andrew Sullivan, we have an link to an article by one of the UK’s leading conservative intellectuals and journalists — a species sadly extinct in the wild here in the USA, kept alive only in a few captive breeding programs — making the conservative case for… gay marriage. Matthew D’Ancona writes: The correction...
Read More »

One of the best technology reads last week was a New York Times’ big Sunday article on the outsourcing of high-technology manufacturing The iPhone Economy. The piece is a really thorough examination of how high-technology product manufacturing in East Asia has not only resulted in jobs going there that would otherwise be here, but...
Read More »

In a perfect world, this talk by noted author and electronic liberty activist, Cory Doctorow, would be a viral video that would reach millions of people instead of the just a bit over 110,000 it has so far. Because in it he explains in relatively plain English what is going on in the copyright...
Read More »

The irrepressible, outspoken Barry Ritholtz has a quick post today regarding whether or not Microsoft is even worth holding as a stock any more. The highlight from his take: During the past decade, MSFT returned exactly zero to investors, including dividends. They are a bloated, bureaucracy run by bloated, bureaucratic CEO. The paradigm has...
Read More »

I’ll expand on this later but in the meantime, there is a public forum today at the Eagle Point Lodge on the future of planning in the City of Clinton. There will be a number of breakout sessions and members of the public are encouraged to attend. Begins at 4:30. More in the Herald....
Read More »

He also makes what I think is a critical point about how 9/11 changed our perception of threats and our reaction to "security warnings." There are numerous academic studies that show that people react to repeated security warnings that come to nothing by basically tuning them out. And by warning people about...
Read More »

Taking the pulse of the GOP race this morning we find: Michelle Bachmann is now her party's frontrunner in the race to be the next President of the United States. And while you let that thought marinade in your brain juices for a moment, consider that barring her total implosion, she will remain the...
Read More »

One can be forgiven for snorting with a bit of derision at Standard & Poor’s decision to take a notch out of the USA’s credit rating by lowering it from AAA to AA+. These are, after all, the morons who rated the credit default swaps of the 2000′s as investment grade and look where...
Read More »

This post was written for the Des Moines Register Political Opinion Page. Yeah, so three months and no posts. I don’t have much to offer in the way of an excuse really. Work has certainly been a factor. But more than anything it has been a combination of a numb depression at the direction...
Read More »