This long article from Reason magazine is must reading. (H/T ECM) The author, Greg Lukianoff,  is the the president of FIRE (Foundation for individual Rights in Education). Here are some of the scariest parts: Other codes promise a pain-free world, such as Texas Southern University’s ban on attempting to cause “emotional,” “mental,” or “verbal harm,” which includes “embarrassing, degrading or damaging information, assumptions , implications , [and] remarks” (emphasis added)

The rest is here:
How secular leftists restrict free speech on college campuses

Dean Baker Truthout, January 11, 2010 See article on original website The deficit hawks in Congress are pushing again to establish a special commission to deal with the problem of the deficit. They are trying to include a provision establishing such a commission as part of a bill to increase the country’s debt ceiling. The deal is that this commission would produce a set of recommendations to reduce the deficit.

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Does Congress Want to Default on the National Debt?

Dear Friends of CEPR, I have a new book out this month: False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy . I felt the need to write this book because, remarkably, the people who somehow could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble still could not understand the bubble even after it wrecked the economy. It was as though their house had burnt down in a fire and they were checking on the burglar alarm.

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My New Book

Dean Baker Boston Review , January/February 2010 See article on original website Wall Street bankers, along with the rest of the players in the financial industry, like to think of themselves as swashbuckling capitalists. They battle cutthroat competition with one hand and oppressive government bureaucracy with the other.

The rest is here:
The Big Bank Theory: How Government Helps Financial Giants Get Richer

Story from the UK Telegraph . (H/T Weasel Zippers via ECM) Excerpt: The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel

See the article here:
What are the consequencs of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue?

January 27, 2010 The Great Recession: How We Got Here and How We Get Out 7-9pm Main Library, Shambaugh Auditorium University of Iowa 125 West Washington Street Iowa City, IA  52242 CEPR Co-Director Dean Baker will be speaking on the subject of the current economic crisis.  Contact Colin Gordon for additional information.

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The Great Recession: How We Got Here and How We Get Out

January 8, 2010 Vote Expected Next Week to Absolve Honduran Military of Crimes, Even as Murders Continue For Immediate Release: January 8, 2010 Contact: Dan Beeton, 202-239-1460 Washington, D.C. – The international community should offer no support for planned amnesty for the perpetrators of the Honduran coup, Mark Weisbrot , Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said today

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Proposed Amnesty Serves to Whitewash Honduran Coup, CEPR Co-Director Says

January 8, 2010 (Jobs Byte) By Dean Baker January 8, 2010 Hours worked fell by 3.8 percent over the decade. The economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December, driven by continued job losses in construction and manufacturing. While the current data still show a 378,000 job gain for the decade, these numbers will be lowered by approximately 824,000 when the benchmark revision is incorporated into the data with the release of the January employment report.

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Economy Loses 85,000 Jobs in December, Ends Decade With Job Loss

January 6, 2010 (Housing Market Monitor) By Dean Baker January 6, 2010 Pending home sales in the Northeast and Midwest were down 25.7 percent. The National Association of Realtors reported that pending home sales fell 16.0 percent in November, hitting their lowest level since June. Remarkably, this decline appeared to surprise many analysts.

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Pending Home Sales Plunge in November, Exactly as Predicted

January 2010, Dean Baker Although the national debate on financial transactions taxes has just begun, there have been a wide range of responses arguing that the tax is either undesirable or unenforceable, or both. This paper presents a brief response to these criticisms.

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Responses to Criticisms of Taxes on Financial Speculation

January 18, 2010 Coface Country Risk Conference: The Trends of the Global Economy in One Day CEPR Co-Director Dean Baker will be giving a talk entitled “Households and Companies in the United States and in Europe: Spenders or Savers?” at this conference in Paris.

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Coface Country Risk Conference: The Trends of the Global Economy in One Day

Dean Baker Truthout, January 4, 2010 S ee article on original website We need to cut the budget deficit because the foreigners are taking over. That is the word according to a new report, “Red Ink Rising” from a commission financed by the Peter G.

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Peterson-Pew Commission Uses Jingoism to Advance Budget Agenda

Dean Baker The Guardian Unlimited , January 4, 2010 See article on original website The Washington Post is a paper with a proud legacy. It has done much important reporting over the years, most notably its coverage of the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of President Nixon. Unfortunately, it seems to have abandoned its journalistic standards

See more here:
The Washington Post: R.I.P.

Mark Weisbrot Kansas City Star (MO) , January 3, 2010 McClatchy Tribune Information Services, December 31, 2009 Raleigh News & Observer , December 31, 2009 Bellingham Herald (WI), December 31, 2009 Lexington Herald-Leader (KY), December 31, 2009 Sacramento Bee , December 31, 2009 Appleton Post-Crescent (WI), January 2, 2010 Green Bay Press-Gazette , January 2, 2010 San Diego Union-Tribune , January 2, 2010 Arizona Daily Times (AZ), January 3, 2010 La Crosse Tribune (WI), January 3, 2010 Bradenton Sunday Herald (FL), January 3, 2010 Oil City Derrick (PA), January 4, 2010 Franklin News-Herald (PA), January 5, 2010 Denver Post , January 5, 2010 Newark Star-Ledger , January 5, 2010 There are right-wing voices claiming that the government is an obstacle to economic recovery in the United States, irresponsibly piling up debt, burdening future generations, and ruining the investment climate. For them, we only need to rely on the private sector to get us out of our worst slump since the Great Depression

See more here:
Public Spending Still Key to Economic Recovery

Story here in the UK Telegraph . (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM) Excerpt: Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned. They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating

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Britain to be hit by coldest winter in 100 years

Story here from Breitbart . (H/T ECM) Excerpt: Oil-rich Venezuela ushered in 2010 with new measures rationing electricity use in malls, businesses and billboards, as Hugo Chavez’s government aimed to save power amid a crippling drought

Continued here:
Communist Venezuela introduces energy rationing in 2010

2010 is a pivotal and important year for we conservatives. Every election year we are always told by someone that, “this is the most important election ever.” So we get out and do our duty, vote for the candidate of our choice and watch as things in Washington pretty much remain the same but with a few different faces. Almost as if our vote had little or no impact on the direction of our Nation or the minds of the so called, “representatives,” that we placed in Washington.

View post:
2010 Conservative Revolution Not Another Reagan Revolution

Neil Simpson has a post analyzing the giving patterns of Robin Hood Democrats . Excerpt: Consider how these Liberal heroes want to take your money to “give” to others but can’t manage any real and significant giving themselves.  If Joe Biden , for example, can’t afford to give more than 0.2% over his roughly quarter-million dollar income (that is point-two percent, not two percent — only $369 per year), then how could he possibly afford to pay increased taxes?  Oh yeah, there will be loopholes for him and those who vote for the tax increase bills.

Read more:
Do leftists practice what they preach about helping others?

Story here at National Review . (H/T ECM) Excerpt: In recent years, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave between $10 million and $25 million to the foundation run by the husband of our current Secretary of State. “Friends of Saudi Arabia” donated at least another million, perhaps another $5 million

Original post:
Which foreign countries contribute to the Bill Clinton’s foundation?

ENTITLEMENT PROGRAM – A federal program that guarantees a certain level of benefits to persons or other entities who meet requirements set by law, such as Social Security, farm price supports or unemployment benefits. It thus leaves no discretion with Congress on how much money to appropriate, and some entitlements carry permanent appropriations. Since 1970, the historical ratio between defense spending and entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has flipped.

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A Huge Problem Requires a Bold Solution pt. 2

Story from Life News . (H/T ECM) Excerpt: International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) recently released its annual performance report for 2008-2009. Despite an economic downturn and a slight decrease in annual income, the abortion industry giant boasts of increased activity across all of its lines of work — including condom distribution, advocacy and abortion services

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Planned Parenthood does over 1.1 million abortions worldwide

Found at Hugh Hewitt’s blog , (but it isn’t formatted properly there! It’s all jumbled up – so I applied a regular expression transform to add line breaks to my version below) Thanks to Apologetics 315 . —- HH: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show

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MUST-READ: Transcript of debate between Greg Koukl and Michael Shermer

Consider this story from the American Spectator . (H/T ECM) Excerpt: On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel , David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer , ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns — if any — from the Bush Administration. “The idea was that we’d show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could,” says a staffer in the counsel’s office.

Originally posted here:
Are Democrats fixing national security or fixing the blame on others?

ECM and I have a disagreement about David Warren. I don’t think he’s analytical and evidential enough, and ECM thinks that he’s an excellent writer of essays. Please read this short essay on the proper role of pleasure, and then leave a comment explaining which of us you agree with

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David Warren on western civilization and the place of pleasure

2010 is the beginning of a new decade and the year of the conservative revolution as we take back our country standing on true Constitutional principles and the values of our Founding Fathers. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have had their fifteen minutes of fame and their destruction of our country ends in 2010

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Happy New Year 2010 – The Year Of Conservative Revolution