JUST WONDERING. Okay, I�m not stupid enough to think that I just won a seven-figure sum in the Australian lottery (for starters, I didn�t enter it). But reading through the email I just got made me wonder: How does this scam work? According to Valentino von Kahn (Mrs.), the �coordinator� of the Australian Lottery who �signed� the email, I�m to contact a bank in the Netherlands and give them the following information: name, phone number, fax number, address, and amount won.
JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NOT SO FAST. From our June print issue: Mike TomaskyassessesPeter Beinart's new book, The Good Fight, and finds that, when it comes to Iraq, there are accounts still to be settled.
WALL: ACTUALLY BAD, ACTUALLY EXPENSIVE.Jonah Goldbergthinks the arguments against walling off the southern border are all bad. Except, of course, for the symbolism argument which he concedes is good. The other main argument is that it's too expensive. He doesn't actually think that's a bad argument either, but he says of folks who make it "one gets the sense that even if it were cheaper, they wouldn't favor a wall."
FREELANCERS AND TEAM PLAYERS.Matt has some useful thoughts on the difference between a freelance crook, like Bill Jefferson personally enriching himself through abuse of his office, and the kind of systemic, institutional corruption practiced by the Republican congressional majority and typified by the major corruption scandals on that side of the aisle.
IMPRESSIVE. There's a lot of blogosphere outrage, including hereat TAPPED, about this morning's New York Times story on Hillary Clinton's marriage. I'm not so sure there should be. This story answers an essential question for Hillary-watchers, and knocks down one of the major raps against her as a candidate, the allegation that she is a coldly calculating person so ambitious she stayed in a sham marriage just so she could run for President one day.
MORE ANALYSIS THAN YOU EVER WANTED ON THIS TOPIC. In regards to the morning's big Clinton story, it really is all a matter of emphasis. As Mattnotes, the actual article spends most of its time hinting that the Clinton's don't have much sex (I'll get back to this in a moment). The piece admits that, since the start of 2005, the Clintons have seen each other, on average, 14 days out of every month. Also since the start of 2005, Bill Clinton has quarterbacked a multibillion-dollar foundation and ran the government's response to the tsunami while Hillary has kicked her traveling into high gear to prepare for her presidential bid.
It is now 36 days since the Washington Post published an article that reported that Mexico's economy has grown at a world record 17.5 percent annual rate since NAFTA was implemented in 1994. (According to IMF data, annual growth averaged 2.9 percent.) They have refused to print a correction despite repeated calls and e-mails from my colleagues at CEPR.
The Post has a very strong policy on correcting errors, which was printed in a recent column by the ombudsman ("Policy vs. Reality in Correcting Errors" 5-7-06; B 6):
WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GLASS HOUSE YOU HAVE! To follow up on Matt's post about Ramesh Ponnuru's complaints that we, among others, won't review a book that we haven't been sent review copies for, I just did a search on a book I quite like: The Medical Malpractice Myth, by Tom Baker. Baker is a law professor at the University of Connecticut and one of the nation's foremost authorities on insurance issues.
