One aspect of climate change that's already affecting people in various parts of the world is the slow but steady rise in sea level (via YaleE360):
Yesterday’s release of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index has economists—and probably the Obama administration—on edge. The reason: an apparent softening of demand in October, which translated into weak home price growth across the 20 markets that the index tracks. That followed stronger, more widespread price growth in the summer months. The news has stoked fears of a “double dip” in house prices and the resulting havoc it might wreak in the mortgage market.
Like the economy itself, though, what you make of U.S. home prices depends on where you look. The latest Case-Shiller data portray an eclectic collection of metropolitan housing markets, experiencing divergent trends in recent months. The 20 metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller seem to break down into five types:
Consistent recovery. The three big coastal California metro areas—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, along with Phoenix and Detroit, posted price gains in October, following at least three consecutive months of price growth. Prices in San Francisco were up a considerable 12 percent from their trough in April 2009.
American liberals have a habit of withdrawing into cynicism and ennui at the most inopportune moments. The 2000 presidential election, and subsequent recount, was one such moment.
The protagonist of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, is a hatchet man for hire. The Omaha company that employs him, which goes by the Orwellian name Career Transition Counseling (CTC), rents him out to other companies to fire employees they don’t have the courage to fire themselves. He flies about the country, touching down briefly in Kansas City or Tulsa or Miami, to walk into offices he has never visited and tell workers he has never met that they are being let go. There are tears, and rages, and Bingham accepts them with unflappable grace.
Too much going on today for this blogger to cover. Fortunately, I'm not alone on the beat...
Reform without a public option would still be a progressive victory. Chris Bowers
But if progressives give ground on the public option, what will they get in return? Ezra Klein
After four quarters of decline, GDP finally grew, and at a pace--3.5 percent annually--not seen since the summer of 2007. As my colleagues Alan Berube and Bill Galston point out, and as I argued last month, signs of economic growth don’t necessarily mean a rapid recovery, a sustained recovery, or even a recovery that feels meaningful to the vast majority of Americans. But that’s not the horse I want to ride today. Instead, I want to read the tea leaves (the details of the GDP numbers for the third quarter of this year) to see what they suggest about the geography of the recovery--which metro areas are likely to be recovering and which aren’t.
First, the obvious.
Now, the not-so-obvious.
Congressman John Murtha passed away today. Below, you'll find a recent magazine feature that we ran on him--and the town he represented for 36 years.
By far the most troubling aspect of these anti-reform demonstrations is what Josh Marshall has called their "authoritarian mindset." It's something, he rightly notes, we've seen before:
It's taken countless hours of TV crime-drama ("Crime Story," "Miami Vice") and nearly a dozen feature films (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice again), but in John Dillinger, Michael Mann may finally have found an ideal vessel for his particular vision of masculine cool: stylish, charismatic, unflappable, adept at violence but not hungry for it.
On the morning of June 7, 2008, Matt Drudge showed up at the National Building Museum in Washington, where Hillary Clinton was scheduled to give her concession speech. At the entrance, Drudge found his host, Tracy Sefl, a Clinton campaign staffer who, the day before, had offered to meet Drudge at the event. Throughout the campaign, Sefl had served as the Clintons' preferred back channel to communicate with the mercurial operator of the Drudge Report.
Florida is known as "The Sunshine State," but it is one of the few states where rain could actually make a difference this Tuesday.
Republicans are no longer denying the scientific basis for global warming. That's good news for those of us who have grown accustomed to the continued existence of things like polar sea ice, various forms of life, and Miami. The bad news is that Republicans, having seen the light, have fallen back on the possibly even more annoying stance of simply refusing to do anything about the problem.
Early last spring, outside a guesthouse in Kabul where I was staying, an injured Afghan man limped up to the locked gate. He wore a blazer with suede elbow patches and leaned on crutches. Because a suicide bomber had attacked the building not long before, a guard blocked the entrance of the unannounced supplicant. The fact that the man refused to give his name didn't help his case.
You hear a lot of complaining, and rightly so, about Hollywood's tendency to churn out safe, unimaginative pabulum--the remakes, the sequels, the blow-everything-up movies. Less remarked upon is the opposite problem: The studios' inability (or unwillingness) to make B+ movies, competent, mid-sized genre films that are formulaic in the good sense. There was a time when Hollywood excelled at producing such solid but unexceptional fare--Westerns are the classic example--but no longer.
In Hollywood, the one thing as inevitable as death and taxes is sequels. They roll them out, year after year, the 2s and IIs, the Returns and Revenges, and Strikes Backs and Strikes Agains. For decades, the first rule of making a successful sequel has been simple and unchanging: Figure out what you did right the first time and do it again.
Johnny Mercer, one of the master artisans of pre-rock popular music, was driving with some friends to the Newport Jazz Festival one summer in the early 1960s when a Chuck Berry song came on the radio. Mercer listened closely and grinned, as one of his car mates, the film-maker Jean Bach, recalls. Soon he was singing along, beaming. Mercer leaned his face into the rushing air and slapped out the beat of the song on the side of the car that Bach's husband had rented for the weekend--a big red convertible, ideally suited to the moment. Bach isn't certain what record was playing, but she recalls it as something in the vein of "School Days" ("Hail, hail, rock and roll!") or "No Particular Place to Go," the latter of which was a top-ten hit in the summer of 1964. Nor does she know what Mercer was thinking as he rocked and rolled up Interstate 95, although she remembers the occasion as "a picture of freedom."
The Haitian police who stumbled upon Eddy Arbrouet one night last May thought he was a dangerous bank robber, but they probably didn't know just how dangerous until Eddy and his gang opened fire. Amid the hail of heavy-caliber bullets, one cop dove for cover under a pile of banana leaves; another radioed for reinforcements. Help arrived and, miraculously, the police escaped. But Eddy Arbrouet remains at large and--at least for now--the police dare not tackle him again.
After an hour in Italy, I wish I'd become an architect. After a week, I begin to think it's not too late. When I gel home, I'll take some stones, pile them up, cover them with stucco, paint my wall a nice earth color, let it age, plain a vine to spill over the top, have a fountain bubbling nearby, and invite everyone over for an aperitivo. The spell of those old stones can hold me clear across the Atlantic.
ON DECEMBER 7, 1982, I met with five Nicaraguans and two Americans in an executive suite at the Four Ambassadors Hotel in downtown Miami to rehearse for a press conference we would be holding the next day. The Nicaraguans were prominent (and in my case not so prominent) opponents of the Somoza and Sandinista regimes who were to be introduced as directors of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), that is, the contras. The Americans were CIA agents. The one in charge, known to us as Tony Feldman, was accompanied by Thomas Castillo, one of his several assistants.
This piece was originally published on August 24, 1968.
William Faulkner located Mulberry Street so precisely and described its major industry so vividly in one of his early novels that lustful visitors from the rural mid-South memorized the passage and used it as their guide to the rows of dingy houses where three-dollar whores did business until the military authorities forced the city to clean up the neighborhood during World War II.
