All Life Is Problem Solving

In “Democracy and Spreading Knowledge Transparently,” I wrote about President Obama’s tendency to exclude certain policy alternatives in explaining his thinking to us. In his world-wide Town Hall event, he showed another variant on the theme of lack of knowledge transparency in his public communications. This time the subject was Marijuana Prohibition and his reply […]

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It’s time to end this blog series. I’ll begin with a brief guide and links to each of the fourteen previous blogs and end by repeating my proposal for a National KM Center, or Knowledge Accountability Office (KAO) responsible to the Congress of the United States. The Guide — Part One dealt with the context […]

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President Obama, both in his campaign, and in his Administration, has emphasized the importance of transparency in Government. This very day, as I write, he’s running “a world wide” on-line town hall to give people a chance to answer questions, hear his unrehearsed replies, and understand at least some of the thinking behind his views […]

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Today Naomi Wolf posted an important blog reporting on an interview with Michael Ratner, a well-known US constitutional scholar, at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Columbia Law School. Wolf interviewed Ratner, seeking his opinion on the significance of the John Yoo memos released by the Obama Administration. He replied, in part:

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I owe the title of this blog to William Greider who, in talking about the present upsurge in populism in the US, said: “At the center of this story is Obama, who inherited the Democratic Party’s awkward straddle between monied interests and working people.”

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The notion behind the idea of “Lemon Socialism” is that government policy creates arrangements that largely privatize the gain from economic activity if there are profits, while socializing losses, if they result. The just leaked Obama Administration plan for coping with the financial system’s “toxic assets” is another creation of the Lemon Socialists. This weekend […]

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Maxine Waters (D-CA), in reply to a hectoring interview from Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC, related to the AIG bonus fiasco, spoke her version of the truth about how the sausage is finished in the US House of Representatives. Rep. Waters made it clear that no representative can read, or does read, all of a major […]

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In the aftermath of the inquisition of Edward Liddy of AIG yesterday, the commentariat is offering one of their favorite narratives, hypocrisy; and Claude Rains saying that he’s “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in this establishment,” to describe the utterances of the various Congresspersons who vented all over Mr. Liddy yesterday. […]

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As we watch the Obama Administration work through the very real accumulated challenges faced by the United States, it’s becoming more and more apparent that this administration is very consequentialist in its decision making, that its primary current goal is to get us out of the mess the economic system is in, and that it […]

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Here’s a bit of hysterics: Private equity company Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis. “Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half,” […]

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