Shorters

Why scrap WIC instead of reforming it?

It's been thoroughly captured by the farm lobby.

You see, there's very, very little soy produced in the US.

Policy: getting there from here:

all the liberals I hear talking about national health care seem to imagine it being implemented in a magic fairyland where the AMA and the AHA have not developed gigantic lobbying arms in order to more effectively siphon cash from Medicare. This enables them to design a perfect system based on cherry picking their favorite features from each European country, rather than working on the assumption that whatever we get in the future is probably going to look very much like what we already have.

You see, even if we overcome those barriers to reform of our health care system.... they'll be barriers to reforming our health care system. It's the Moebius strip version of logic.

Markets are hard:

After a little thought, I'm not sure that I made what I was thinking quite clear on my earlier post on McCain's healthcare plan: markets are hard. We used to think that, like Topsy, they "just growed". The experience of Russian shock therapy belies this. Once bad government regulation has screwed things up, fixing them is not always just a matter of removing the original bad law. Nor of simply willing, via legislative fiat, that a better one shall grow in its place.

That is one dense turd. The opening is funny, like a fart, the middle is all full of crap, and the end... I dunno, I think it's time to end this.

A few things it is wise not to do: Another thing it is wise not to do: publish shit like this under the once proud banner of The Atlantic.

Home, sweet home:

This morning, a bracing dose of reality: Home Depot's earnings have cratered. There is no field associated with housing that is going to be a good place to be for the next couple of years--unless it is nailing foreclosure notices to front doors.

So does this mean the recession is back on now, or just that predatory subprime lenders remain blameless?

Knowledge is power: They're fat because it's their fault, not the system's.

A longer look at the gay marriage =/ polygamy post to follow soon.