Archive for the 'Current Events' Category

First Tuesday After the First Monday in November

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 2, 2010
in Blogging, Current Events and Personal
. 10 Comments

I have my eleven spreadsheets. I have my three computers with their dozen open browser windows. I have the television I bought specially for this occasion. I have my XM Radio. I have my 20,000 calories worth of junk food. I have my remote control.

I also have my prognostications and my preferences, but I am not (quite) narcissistic enough to assume they’d interest you — especially when there is so much enlightened commentary available elsewhere on the net. I for one will be turning to Nate Silver for insights throughout the day.

I will go to the gym today, but aside from that I don’t expect to move much in the next 24 hours or so. Tomorrow, the web will be flooded with post-election commentary, with which I will not attempt to compete for your attention. I’ll see you Thursday, with something loftier to talk about.

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Feeling the Surge

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 13, 2010
in Current Events and Paul Krugman
. 20 Comments

Paul Krugman says there’s been no surge in government spending. I say there has been. Paul offers a graph in evidence. I look at that same graph and see a four-year surge.

Several commenters have insisted that I am ignoring Paul’s point — the point being that if we take the Bush years as a baseline, then there’s been no surge relative to that baseline. Really? Here’s federal government expenditure from the beginning of the Bush years to today. The blue line projects a continuation of the average annual spending increases under Bush. The vertical bar marks the advent of the Obama age.

(I constructed this graph from the invaluable FRED database at the St. Louis Fed.)

Now personally, I look at this graph and the main thing I see is a ten-year surge in federal government expenditures. But if you insist on taking the Bush years as a baseline — well, then what you see, starting in 2009, is an Obama surge. You might or might not want to argue that the surge was justified (or compelled) by economic conditions, but I don’t see how you can deny it’s there.

Continue reading ‘Feeling the Surge’

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Surgin’ USA

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 13, 2010
in Current Events and Paul Krugman
. 15 Comments

Paul Krugman offers the following graph as evidence that “spending hasn’t surged”:

Now, what I’m seeing here is something like a 25% increase in spending under the Bush/Obama policies of the past four years. Which makes me wonder exactly what it would take to count as a surge in Krugman-land.

********

On separate notes:

1) Yesterday’s post on rationality generated several comments that deserve responses. For the most part, I am reserving those responses for a separate blog post a few days down the line.

2) I just now hit a wrong button and deleted about 100 comments that my software had classified as spam, without first skimming through them. There is therefore a small but non-zero chance that I deleted a legitimate comment or two. If so, I very much apologize and hope you’ll try again.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Protection Racket

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 13, 2010
in Current Events and Outrage
. 24 Comments

Say you run a restaurant. And say a competitor announces plans to set up shop just across the street. What can you do to minimize the impact on your business?

Well, you could lower your prices. Or you could work on providing better service. Or you could send over a couple of guys who are really good at convincing people it’s not in their interest to compete with you.

Or say you run a personnel company that brings foreign workers into the United States. And say you’re worried about competitors who cross the border without your help. One option is to try doing a better job. Another is to send over about 1500 guys with unmanned aerial vehicles, new forwarding operating bases and $14 million in new communications equipment to tamp down the flow.

President Obama, with support from both sides of the political aisle, will be signing a bill today that allocates $600 million for “border security”. According to CNN, “The bill is funded in part by higher fees on personnel companies that bring foreign workers into the United States”.

I imagine the personnel companies will consider it money well spent. Let’s not lose sight of how ugly this is.

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HP Falter

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 9, 2010
in Current Events and Musings
. 28 Comments

hpHow important is it to hire the best person for the job?

Here’s a data point: On Friday, Hewlett Packard’s CEO Mark Hurd resigned unexpectedly — and pretty much instantly the value of HP stock dropped by about $10 billion. If we assume Hurd would otherwise have been around for another 10 years or so, that means shareholders think his departure will cost the company about a billion dollars a year. Which, incidentally, makes his $30 million or so in annual compensation look like a hell of a bargain.

Now maybe some part of that $10 billion reflects expected short-term losses due to the turmoil of an unplanned transition. But even if that turmoil were to cost HP a full month of revenue (which seems like a pretty extreme assumption), that’s still less than a billion — leaving over $9 billion to represent the difference between what the market expected from Hurd and what it expects from his successor.

Continue reading ‘HP Falter’

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Equal Protection

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 5, 2010
in Current Events and Law
. 45 Comments

A U.S. District Court has overturned California’s Proposition 8 (the prohibition of same-sex marriage), which, says the court, violates both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am very happy to hear that the courts are open to overturning legislation that violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Next up, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act!

The issues are pretty much identical. Here is the District Court’s reasoning in the California case (this is the Court’s summary of the plaintiffs’ position, which the Court endorses):

Continue reading ‘Equal Protection’

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Deflating the Deflation Scare

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 2, 2010
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 29 Comments

deflationSo apparently we’re all supposed to be worried these days about the specter of deflation. I am doubly baffled by this—I don’t see the problem in theory and I don’t see the problem in practice. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Start with the theory: We learned long ago from Milton Friedman (who might have learned it from Irving Fisher) that a little bit of deflation is a good thing. That’s because deflation encourages people to hold money, and people who hold money aren’t buying stuff, and when other people don’t buy stuff, there’s more stuff left over for you and me.

There are a couple of other ways to see this, though they all come down to the same thing. Here’s the first: falling prices are good for buyers and bad for sellers, but that all washes out. It washes out in the aggregate because each gain to a buyer is offset by an equal and opposite loss to a seller. And it more or less washes out for each individual, because each of us sells roughly as much as we buy (including the sale of our labor.) But over and above all that, deflation enriches the holders of money, because their money increases in value as it sits around. That part is pretty much (may Milton’s ghost forgive me for putting it this way) a free lunch.

Continue reading ‘Deflating the Deflation Scare’

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A Pencil in the Eye

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 19, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy
. 28 Comments

Okay, if Paul Krugman is going to keep on writing the same column twice a week every week forever, then I am going to keeping on objecting to it forever, though not, I promise, twice every week.

A couple of bullet points from his latest:

  • In response to the priorities of Senator John Kyl, Krugman writes: “So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.” Oh, for goodness’s sake. $30 billion in aid to the unemployed might or might not be good policy and 20 times that much in tax cuts might or might not be good policy; that’s beside the point here. The point is that these are quite entirely separate issues and one’s position on the first need not dictate one’s position on the second. Aid to the unemployed is costly. Tax cuts are not. Didn’t I just say this?

    • Continue reading ‘A Pencil in the Eye’

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The End of Racism

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 15, 2010
in Current Events, Humor and Rants
. 9 Comments

I was delighted last month to learn that racism in America has been thoroughly vanquished, as evidenced by the NAACP’s having nothing better to do than complain about a greeting card that shows cartoon characters encountering black holes as they hurtle through space. (“It’s very demeaning to African American women”. See if you can guess why, then watch the video below to check your answer.)

I realize that some will criticize the NAACP for over-reacting here, or for mis-reacting. But cut them a break. You don’t see them doing anything truly loonytunes, like, say, commanding the amorphous Tea Party movement to “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.” Right?

A hat tip to our frequent commenter Ken B. for pointing me to the video.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Cruel and Unusual?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 2, 2010
in Current Events and Law
. 30 Comments

Michelle Lyn Taylor, age 34, got drunk one night and tried to seduce a 13 year old boy by taking his hand and putting it on her breast. This was definitely Not Cool. Nevada prosecutors thought it was so uncool that they charged her with a crime (“lewdness with a child under the age of 14”) that carries a mandatory life sentence and then refused to plea bargain. (Two years earlier, a woman who had sexually abused two boys repeatedly over the course of a year was offered a plea bargain and served ten months in jail.)

In the videotaped sentencing hearing, which you can see in its entirety below, the judge seems bemused by the prosecutors’ choices but unmoved by the defense attorney’s attempt to raise a constitutional objection. The defense attorney, not entirely unreasonably, pretty much loses it.

Michelle Lyn Taylor is now serving a life sentence and will have her first shot at parole ten years from now. Does this strike any of you as reasonable?

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Teachers and Councilors

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 10, 2010
in Current Events, Outrage, Policy, Politics and Rants
. 28 Comments

S030409JB-0043.JPGThe White House has dispatched Christy Romer, a distinguished economist and chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, to rustle up support for emergency spending to keep teachers employed. Her piece in the Washington Post is remarkable for a complete absence of arguments in favor of spending this money on teachers as opposed to say, plumbers or cab drivers or pharmaceutical researchers or computer programmers or minor league ballplayers. (See for yourself.)

So why the singular focus on teachers? The answer, of course, is that unlike plumbers or cab drivers or pharmaceutical workers or computer programmers, teachers, through their unions, were major contributors to the Obama campaign.

All victorious politicians engage in the unsavory practice of diverting spoils to their most vigorous supporters at everyone else’s expense. In this, the current administration may be no more blameworthy than any other. But I’m pretty sure that sending out the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to defend these political payoffs marks a new sort of low. Traditionally, the Council is composed of first-rate academics whose job is to give good counsel and remain above the political fray. Shame on the President for debasing that noble mission, and shame on Christy Romer for going along with it.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Beetlejuiced

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 9, 2010
in Current Events, Pedantry and Science
. 66 Comments
I’m not pompous; I’m pedantic.
There’s a difference.
—The Calligraphic Button Catalogue

Just about a year ago, a team of scientists reported that Betelgeuse—the bright red star in Orion’s shoulder—appears to have shrunk by about 15% since 1993. That would mean the diameter’s been shrinking at about 1200 miles an hour for all that time.

Such shrinkage—if it’s really happening (it’s hard to be sure)—could be the precursor to a supernova explosion, which would be way cool. The mathematician John Baez computes that a supernova Betelgeuse might be roughly as bright as the full moon, or maybe up to three times as bright.

Surprisingly, it took almost a year for this information to be widely reported on the Internet, but in the past few weeks, a number of sites have cropped up touting the upcoming supernova, and, as you might expect, a few prophecying doom. You can ignore the doomsayers; at a distance of 600 light years, Betelgeuse is too far away to hurt us.

Browsing the various science forums (such as Discover‘s), I’m struck by how often the following simple question comes up: Given that Betelgeuse is 600 light years away, is it or is it not true that it would it would take 600 years for us to notice any explosion? Or to put this another way: If the sky lights up with a new moonlike object tomorrow night, does that mean the explosion took place 600 years ago?

A pretty good answer—and the one that’s being given on all those science forums—is “yes”. But that can’t be exactly right, at least not for all of us, because at any given moment some of us are sitting in our living rooms while others are driving on the Interstates. Relativity tells us that if we’re moving relative to each other, then we must disagree about the times of distant events.

Continue reading ‘Beetlejuiced’

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Nanny Nanny Boo Boo

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 7, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 40 Comments

I guess this is why I never got that call from the New York Times.

To be a Times contributor, you apparently have to write like Mara Gay, who penned these lines for a front page article last week:

New York may soon become the first state to offer employment protection for nannies.

The state Senate passed a bill of rights for domestic workers this week, a measure that would require employers to offer New York’s approximately 200,000 household workers paid holidays, overtime pay and sick days.

Supporters say the step will provide needed relief to thousands of women — and some men — who are helping to raise the children of wealthier New Yorkers without any legal workplace rights beyond the federal minimum wage.

Now, you see, if I had been writing this article, it might have opened more like this:

Continue reading ‘Nanny Nanny Boo Boo’

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What’s Worse Than An Oil Spill?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 4, 2010
in Current Events, Economics and Musings
. 39 Comments

Let’s try for a little perspective. The BP oil spill threatens to cause something like $10 billion worth of damage. That’s pretty bad. By contrast, an extra trillion dollars worth of federal spending threatens to cause something like $300 billion worth of deadweight loss (that is, underproduction due to tax avoidance and disincentives to work). That’s 30 times worse. How is it that so much angst about the former seems to be coming from people with a history of shrugging their shoulders at the latter?

Both $10 billion and $300 billion are extremely rough guesses, but the $300 billion figure comes from the widely cited estimates of Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, according to which a one dollar tax increase triggers about 30 cents in deadweight losses. Since a trillion in new spending means a trillion in new taxes (either now or in the future), we get $300 billion in deadweight loss.

Of course $10 billion worth of oil-related damage is still big enough to be worth a goodly dollop of angst. But keep these things in mind:

Continue reading ‘What’s Worse Than An Oil Spill?’

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Maple Tree Economics

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 3, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 20 Comments

mapleIn his speech at Carnegie-Mellon yesterday, the President lamented the growth of federal spending and proposed to attack the problem partly by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Can you say non sequitur, boys and girls?

Now as it happens, I’ve got this maple tree in my yard that’s been growing much too fast for my tastes. In fact, it’s been growing far faster than I have. But inspired by the president, I’ve found a solution. I’m going to stock up on E.L. Fudge Double Stuf cookies so I can grow faster than the maple.

The President raises the real problem of excessive spending so that he can misdirect your attention to the phony “problem” of excessive government debt—that is, an excessive gap between spending and tax revenues. This is very like my raising the real problem of my overlarge maple tree in order to misdirect your attention to the phony “problem” of an excessive gap between the height of the maple and the size of my waistline—giving both me and the President equally flimsy excuses to do exactly what we wanted to do in any case, namely gorge out on junk food or let taxes rise.

Continue reading ‘Maple Tree Economics’

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That’s Rich

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 24, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Rants
. 31 Comments

“It’s now crystal clear what the Tea Party stands for” says Frank Rich midway through a column that makes it crystal clear what Frank Rich stands for, and it isn’t pretty.

Whatever you may think about the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a whole, it indisputably narrows property rights by allowing politicians to dictate the policies of private businesses. Not only is it perfectly reasonable to find that at least a little disturbing, it’s perfectly unreasonable not to find it a little disturbing—even if your ultimate judgment is that it’s a necessary means to a desirable end. Even avid supporters of the Patriot Act ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about privacy, even avid supporters of capital punishment ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about false convictions, and even avid supporters of the Civil Rights Act ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about property rights.

Frank Rich, who equates Rand Paul’s expression of those concerns with nostalgia for the Confederacy, thereby makes himself as scurrilous as those who equate reservations about the Patriot Act with being “on the side of the terrorists”. The “gotcha” game is bad enough when a single thoughtless remark becomes the pretext for dismissing an entire movement. Here the pretext is a single thoughtful remark.

If we are to discredit everyone who is capable of subtler thought than Frank Rich, then there is no hope for the level of public discourse.

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Fair and Balanced

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 6, 2010
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 15 Comments

Having linked recently to a Fox News segment hosted by a close evolutionary cousin of a sea cucumber, I am delighted to balance the scales with this clip of a thoughtful and literate three-way conversation about Arizona’s anti-immigration statute, featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano, the journalist Jack Hunter, and my hero, George Mason University’s inestimable Don Boudreaux.

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The Jobless Recovery

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 5, 2010
in Current Events and Economics
. 28 Comments

Mark Skousen, the editor of Forecasts and Strategies, and the proprietor of FreedomFest (where I’ll be speaking on multiple topics this July) sent me the above graph, highlighting just how very jobless this recovery has been, even compared to what we saw after the severe recession of 1981. (There’s been nothing nearly as bad in the intervening three decades.)

What accounts for the difference? The glib answer is “Obama versus Reagan”, but there are plenty of alternative stories. I find some of those stories more convincing than others, but the one thing I’m sure of is that I haven’t put in the kind of hard thought or careful study that entitles me to a strong opinion. I’d be interested, though, in hearing what you guys think.

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Missing the Big Picture

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 30, 2010
in Current Events, Law, Outrage, Policy and Politics
. 32 Comments

Writing in the New York Times, law professor Kris Kobach promises to rebut all the major objections to Arizona’s new anti-immigration law and proceeds to ignore all the major objections. Professor Kobach’s idea of a major objection is “It’s unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them”, whereas my idea of a major objection is “It’s idiotic, hateful and destructive to put obstacles in the way of productive activity.”

The number of “unauthorized aliens” in Arizona at any given moment is estimated as just under a half million—about the same as the number of Jews in New Jersey. Over half the text of the Arizona law is devoted to penalizing employers who hire these people. Now suppose for a moment that the New Jersey legislature were to pass a bill penalizing anyone who hires a Jew. Would Professor Kobach defend this law, as he does Arizona’s, by pointing out that it doesn’t require anyone to carry a driver’s license?

The anti-immigration hysterics keep warning us that foreigners want to come over here and exploit our welfare system. The insincerity of that stance is exposed whenever, as in Arizona, its proponents set out to prevent those very same foreigners from coming here and working.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The English Patient

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 20, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 31 Comments

whiteheadA friend living in England (the philosopher Jamie Whyte, actually, whose writing has graced this very blog) sends along a little vignette for the benefit of my American readers who see European health care systems through rose colored glasses.

A 64 year old breast cancer survivor suffering severe back pain is told she’ll have to wait five months for an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon through the National Health Service (NHS). She therefore (and perfectly legally) chooses to pay 250 pounds (about 385 dollars) for a private appointment. He puts her on a waiting list for surgery to remove a cyst from her spine, surgery which is routinely covered by the NHS. But the NHS decides that since she can afford 250 pounds for a private appointment, she can also afford 10,000 pounds (over 15,000 dollars) for private surgery. They therefore deny to provide her the surgery for which she’s been paying taxes her whole life.

This was not an isolated incident; until recently, cancer patients were routinely denied further NHS treatement after privately purchasing lifesaving drugs that are not available through the NHS.

More details here. It’s worth reading the comments, where readers excoriate the patient for “queue jumping” because she used the price system to signal her high demand for medical services. Note that nobody complains about “queue jumping” in the market for, say, oranges, because oranges are not rationed by government bureaucrats and therefore do not generate queues.

The lesson, I think, is that once an inefficient bureaucracy becomes entrenched, a certain fraction of the electorate becomes incapable of imagining anything better. In this case, that fraction seems to have forgotten first that some people need medical care more desperately than others, so that “queue jumping” can be desirable, second that private payments to doctors actually call forth more medical care and therefore shorten queues, and third that maybe it would be better to have a system that didn’t require queuing in the first place.

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Tax Relief, Obama Style

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 16, 2010
in Current Events, Economics, Policy and Politics
. 41 Comments

What a relief. Now that April 15 is out of the way, my tax rate is back to zero for another year.

At least that’s the way the President of the United States seems to have it figured—your tax burden, according to him, is measured by what you’re paying right this moment as opposed to what you’re obligated to pay in the future.

taxburdenThat’s the only possible interpretation of his statement last night that Tea Partiers (and others) should be thanking him for cutting taxes. The reality is that President Obama, like President Bush before him, has rather dramatically raised government spending and therefore has raised your taxes. To say otherwise is like saying you got your new swimming pool for free because you put it on your credit card.

Once the money is spent, the bill must eventually come due—and there’s nobody around to foot that bill except the taxpayers. We are locked into higher current spending and therefore locked into higher future taxes. The president hasn’t lowered taxes; he’s raised and then deferred them. To say otherwise is—let’s be blunt—a flat-out lie.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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A Tale of Three Economists

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 12, 2010
in Current Events, Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy
. 12 Comments

Halfway through reading Paul Krugman’s New York Times piece on green economics, I had my snarky retort all ready to go. Then in the second half he went and got all reasonable on me. I still don’t buy his conclusions, but (sadly for readers who like fireworks), he’s not (at least in this instance) nuts.

Continue reading ‘A Tale of Three Economists’

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What Really Went Wrong

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 17, 2010
in Current Events and Economics
. 25 Comments

bankrun

Banks, by their nature, are susceptible to bank runs. Depositors panic and demand their money back, the bank doesn’t have enough cash on hand to meet all the demands, this generates even greater panic and even more demands, and pretty soon the bank is selling off assets at fire sale prices in a desperate attempt to placate the depositors. Back before Federal deposit insurance, this used to happen from time to time. According to Yale’s Professor Gary Gorton, author of Slapped By the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007, it happened again recently. The great crisis of the past few years was just another bank run, pure and simple.

Continue reading ‘What Really Went Wrong’

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Current Events

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 22, 2010
in Current Events
. 11 Comments

Pictured above is the Harvard-educated professor with twin reputations for brilliance and abrasiveness whose destructive rampage has shocked the nation. After a promising early career, the professor’s behavior had recently turned erratic and antisocial, including complicity in the takeover of a major manufacturing firm and conspiracy to take over an entire industry comprising approximately 15% of the economy. The professor is also suspected in the expropriation and squandering of hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars. Old friends and admirers are shocked and saddened.

The other big news story of the week was Tiger Woods’s apology, which merited a full two pages in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. I was going to blog my thoughts on this, but my friend Nathan Mehl has said exactly what I wanted to say, and said it so much more brilliantly than I could possibly have said it myself, that I’m going to send you over there instead.

Click here to comment.

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