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Here’s Jill Lawrence at Politics Daily : After talking to five economists, I can give you the bottom line: Spending the money differently probably wouldn’t have changed our circumstances much. But the economists took diverse paths to that conclusion, and they have varying opinions about where to go from here…

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It’s Not the Size of the Stimulus.

Tim Mak synopsizes a farewell to the troops delivered by outgoing chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Christina D. Romer. Unbowed, Romer says debt is still the answer: “While  we’d all like to find the inexpensive, magic bullet to our economic troubles, the truth is, it almost surely doesn’t exist.

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Romer Regrets

On the face of it, this looks like one of the cases where the ACLU should be commended for defending the free speech rights of people with whom it does not necessarily agree: Andy McDonel wants to fly the Gadsden (”Don’t Tread on Me”) flag from the roof of his house in Laveen, Arizona, and the state chapter of the ACLU says he is entitled to do so. The problem: McDonel is not fighting an intrusive local ordinance or boneheaded state law; he is fighting the rules of his own homeowners’ association, rules that he accepted when he bought his house.

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Let His Freak Flag Fly?

Writing in The Wall Street Journal , former Reason staffer Bill Kauffman reviews Hardy Green’s new book The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy . Though Green’s focus is mostly on private municipal enterprises like Hershey, Pennsylvania and Gary, Indiana (named after U.S. Steel Chairman Elbert Gary), Kauffman highlights Uncle Sam’s destructive contribution as well: Although Mr

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Capitalism and the Company Town

As President Barack Obama helpfully explained last night on the TV, the Iraq War is over. ” Time to turn the page ” and end “the American combat mission in Iraq.” Except for the 50,000 or so troops still there, who will no longer be “combat troops” but advisors, traffic cops, social workers, and bake-sale overseers. Who will stay there until the end of 2011 (or longer, if you believe folks such as Washington Times’ national security correspondent Eli Lake, or the thousands of U.S.

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War Is Over (If Obama Wants It) or, Mission Accomplished Redux

From Frank Rich’s rehash of Jane Mayer’s recent hit piece on the philanthropizin’ oilmen Charles and David Koch: When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. You might be wondering why the author thinks a campaign that wanted to abolish the FBI and CIA was “to the right of Reagan.” It looks like Rich is just recycling Mayer’s New Yorker story here: Mayer wrote that the Ed Clark/David Koch ticket “was running against Ronald Reagan from the right.” In fact, Clark is pretty much the sole Libertarian presidential nominee to have consciously presented himself as running from the left

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The Cold, Crisp Taste of Koch

She famously declared that Mikhail Gorbachev was a Soviet leader she could “work with.” And now documents obtained by The Guardian , after a long Freedom of Information Act battle, reveal that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did indeed work with the future Soviet leader, when he was a top official to the brittle, expiring General Secretary Constantine Chernyenko—to prevent Moscow from funding the sinister, pro-Soviet leader of the National Union of Miners (NUM), Arthur Scargill. As The Guardian writes, “The NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, had stepped up efforts to raise cash from the USSR; Soviet miners had responded by donating more than $1m from their wages.” Well, as is pointed out further down in the piece, Soviet miners didn’t donate anything; rather, leaders in the Kremlin, who were skilled in the requisition of property and wages, would use money from state coffers to underwrite Britain’s striking miners, who threatened to topple the conservative government inhabiting Number 10 Downing Street. Scargill the Intransigent, who outraged mainstream opinion by sending a NUM leader to Libya in search of funds, just six months after a British policewoman was shot and killed by Qaddafi’s goons in London, effectively destroyed Britain’s influential trade union movement

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Da, Prime Minister

Mark Hemingway : Rather than a political broadside directed at the White House, Beck took another page from King’s book: He gave an upbeat speech, focusing on religion as a positive force for change. “Go to your churches, synagogues, and mosques!” Beck proclaimed. He also suggested “teach[ing] in our churches the principles” to fix our politics.

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Mellow Gold: Glenn Beck Fiesta Roundup

The New York Times today has a one-page, two-story feature searching for clues to explain President Barack Obama’s unpopularity. One boils down to crazy people think he’s a secret Muslim , the other lets John Podesta make a semi-interesting argument that Obama has sullied his image by being a legislative president after sweeping into office on an above-it-all, post-partisanny campaign.

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Wait, the Economy Is Lousy and Obama Is Unpopular? How Could That Ever Be?