Anyway, David Brooks has written it for me and I’ll just hand you over to him: “Obama’s Very Good Week”.

And for Obama’s “black” problem, Ishmael Reed: “What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama”.

Enjoy.

But what I really love is this quote (bold) in what is a very good post on the strategy behind the negotiations:

In all these cases, Republicans have argued that it’s not the policies they oppose — it’s that Democrats aren’t paying for them. But perhaps the most important enabler of the deal is that Republicans don’t care about paying for them, either. The basic deal was that if the Obama White House would give the Republicans their unpaid-for tax cuts, Republicans would give the Obama White House their unpaid-for tax cuts.

I have some observations on Obama’s “socialist” problem but right now (which is when I wrote this, not right now) I’m off to finish an essay.

Will your insurance company pay out if you were involved in a collision (with a tree/pole/another car) after swerving to avoid an animal? [Yeah, random things enter my head all the time]. My thoughts were they’d make the driver take most of the hit since he/she* had the choice between hitting the animal and swerving – potentially more costly if you collided with another car.

After some Googling, I found some advice from The AA (corroborated on other sites). Their advice:

"At 60 miles per hour, hitting a deer is serious – not just for the animal but car occupants as well. A natural reaction is to try to avoid the collision but as a result, drivers may miss the deer and hit other vehicles or trees which could be even worse…”

…

Try to avoid swerving – hitting a tree or an oncoming car could be worse than hitting the deer

Which, I think, is safety information to reduce the chance of fatalities occurring.

As regards insurance, I think they’d pay for repairs but you’d lose any benefits you had:

Around 6 per cent of all claims involve missing the deer and hitting either other vehicles or most commonly, trees.

…

"That high cost tells its own tale," Douglas adds. "Cars can easily be written off in a collision with a deer and car occupants are often injured. Not only that, an increase in premium is likely to follow as some or all of any no-claim bonus will be lost, unless it’s protected."

* Choosing “he/she” was a weirdly difficult choice. “He” would have led to complaints of sexism, as would “she” – “Are you saying women are bad drivers?” Not worth the hassle… although no one reads this.

It’s just "another" example in a loooooong list of examples of Progressive/Liberal/Socialist hypocrisy. BTW, a progessive is the same thing as a liberal is the same thing as a socialist. There’s absolutely no difference in their political idealogy. I’m not going to squeeze Fascist in to that group but there does exist some striking similarities there as well. And guess what peeps, Hitler started with what was it again, oh yeah, healthcare. Then he declared the crisis so great that he had to dissolve the government and become "Fuhrer" in order to hasten decision making and reduce partisanship… Say it ain’t so Joe!

I’m not Joe, but it ain’t so.

AND:

Sarah Palin responding to yesterday’s North Korean attack:

"We gotta stand with our North Korean Allies”

Yes, it is my 101st post yes, I have not contributed anything useful to the internet 101 times and yes, it is a reference to Room 101.

I wish I had the bile in me today to go advanced menstrual on Howie, who was a decisively early adopter of all the traits—fatuousness, near-religious myopia, imperviousness to basic comprehension, dogged almost-Confucian commitment to churning out colorless text in such reliably prodigious volume every single gosh darn bleeping day that any of his editors who are not in a coma already are probably still too overwhelmed combing it all for copy editing errors to notice how extraordinarily awful he is—the "journalism" business would later come to deify.

The power-sharing that goes on between Number Ten and the Treasury is now working in the interests of both, to a much greater degree than it did under Blair. The split is actually Humean to the core. Clegg and Cameron represent fairness, decency and the common good; Osborne represents objectivity, facts and economics. The former want a better world, but know little of its reality. The latter knows about its reality, but doesn’t care what happens to it. Osborne unleashes trolleys down hills, while the rest – and the Lib Dems in particular – are tasked with pulling leavers, pushing fat people off bridges and diving in front of the odd trolley themselves, all in the hope that this minimises the suffering.

Read the rest.

Western officials should have realised this Summit would be different when they arrived in Seoul to find their phones and blackberrys didn’t work. The problem was that Korea’s nationwide 4G network was too advanced. On early negotiating missions, key UK officials found themselves communicating with London via gmail, on rented phones.

That was never a problem in Pittsburgh, or Toronto. But as George Osborne liked to point out, this was the first G20 Summit not hosted by a G8 country – and, he might have added, the first where G8 countries didn’t call the tune.

Read more here.

Why are they doing so well? The major reason is the amount of investment they do. As an example, see Tom Friedman’s NYT oped:

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

You never hear about these types of investments in the western world, which suggests we need to increase the aid our governments give to investing companies AND make it worth their while to switch to new products and methods of production.

Many will point out that we are already involved in industrial policy in the energy sector, it’s just that our industrial policy favors dirty energy. The important thing is, Matt Yglesias tweeted yesterday, “that we have bad industrial policy now and should make it explicit and improve it”. I can agree with this sentiment, but I would modify it to say this: we have bad industrial policy now, and we should prove we can fix the existing problems before expanding it’s scope and aim. Now there is a lot of overlap between these two notions, and a fair bit of semantics, but there is at least one crucial difference: I’m arguing if we don’t have good reason to believe we can fix some of the current systematic problems, then just killing bad industrial policy is greatly preferable to attempting to build good industrial policy.

The problems our current industrial energy policy is that it doesn’t have, in fact doesn’t allow, the characteristics that we want of a healthy dynamic industry. In order for industrial policy to work in the long-run it needs to be able to allow subsidies to cease for products, companies, and even industries that become outdated. This means it has to be effective at identifying these industries, and capable of cutting off life-support.  This is what the creative destruction of capitalism provides, and our current policies do not.

I agree with Matt that dirty technologies like coal and oil shouldn’t be given preferential treatment over clean ones like they currently are. Nor should ethanol, our largest attempt at a green industrial energy policy that almost everyone recognizes does not pass cost benefit. Yet if we can’t wind down the inefficient, environmentally devastating subsidies to these industries, why should we believe that the government will ever be able to hit undo if they accidently pick the wrong “winner” this time around, or if today’s “winner” becomes tomorrow’s “loser”?

The reason industrial policy has this problem is that it is explicitly geared towards creating jobs. Once those jobs are created, the goal for policy-makers becomes preserving those jobs. This is the antithesis of creative destruction, and a huge impediment to progress. What happens if we build this giant “green economy” supporting millions of middle class jobs and then a cheaper and more environmentally friendly technology comes along that makes them all redundant? Will the politicians who decide our allocations of energy via mandate and subsidy allow those jobs to go away and progress to occur, or will they fight tooth and nail to preserve the inefficient status quo?

For these reasons I find the idea of an NIH for green technologies compelling. Moneys are doled out by competitive grants to researchers with proven track records and good ideas, and the emphasis is on creating technologies, not jobs. But with respect to subsidies, mandates, and other command-and-control industrial policy, I don’t see how they will overcome the failure problem.

BTW, I haven’t made this explicit yet, but ECONOMICS IS A MASSIVE RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY.