Is $1,200,000,000,000.00.  That’s the expected 2009 Federal budget deficit.  Since the current Federal debt is estimated at a “mere” $10.6 trillion, this means that we’re expected to add nearly 9% in a single year to a debt accumulated over 233 years (since 1774).  This nu...

President-elect Barack Obama will soon be naming Cass Sunstein, an old friend of his from their University of Chicago Law School days together, the new head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA oversees regulation throughout the U.S. government. Basically, Sunste...

Before commenting on Lawrence Lessig’s latest call to abolish the Federal Communications Commission (he issued a similar call for the FCC’s abolition earlier this year, which I commented on here), let’s recall what Tim Lee posted yesterday about “Real Regulators“: Too m...

Back in June, Adam Thierer and I denounced (PDF) Kevin Martin’s plans to create broadband utility to provide censored (and very slow) broadband for free to all Americans.  The WSJ reports that this scheme is now at the top of Martin’s December agenda: The proposal to allow a no-smut, ...

One of my favorite things about Matt Yglesias's blog is that he's considerably better-informed than his commenters, and is willing to say things that he knows perfectly well will piss them off. The latest example is a post where Matt opines that "the movement, started under Jimmy Carter then of cour...

Whatever one thinks of the merits of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger and Google's immediate and vociferous opposition to it, Ed Felten is 100% right when he says of Google's actions: "Complaining has downsides for Google too -- a government skeptical of acquisitions by dominant high-tech companies could ...

This is the Ron Paul netroots campaign boiled down to its essence: I love how 2/3 of the video is an homage to the endless Enterprise fly-bys in The Motionless Picture. Hat tip: Threat Level...