My Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) and I went to a new restaurant in our neighborhood last evening. We were told it had a great concept and that we would be impressed.
We were. But just like American Idol is really nothing more than Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour with better production values, this "new" restaurant was really not that different from a place my father used to take me to 40 years ago.
Two seemingy unrelated stories from the last 24 hours must have had a huge effect on the sleeping habits of Republican political strategists.
First, what was increasingly assumed the past few weeks became a reality yesterday when word leaked that 6-term GOP Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) will announce tomorrow that he's not running for reelection.
I am a huge Yankees fan.
I grew up in Brooklyn. Although I have one memory of watching the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, by the time I was old enough to develop a loyalty to a team the Yanks were the only one left in New York. I can still give you the names, numbers, and positions of every player on the 1961 Yankees. I still grieve over Bill Mazeroski's homerun in the seventh game of the 1960 series against the Pirates. Thurman Munson and Bucky Dent will forever be heroes.
Never mind the polls; sometimes you just have to read the tea leaves.
The LA Times reported this week that the effort in California to change the way that state's electoral votes are distributed has collapsed because of a lack of money. Later reports indicated that there had been only one primary funder and the organization had been in turmoil.
Here's one thing you haven't read about Alan Greenspan's book: It confirms the death of microeconomics.
That's obviously a bit too strong. As Steven Levitt and his blockbuster book Freakonomics and Tyler Cowen and his recently published and wonderful-to-read Discover Your Inner Economist have shown, there still is some role for microeconomic analysis when thinking about individual behavior, especially if the goal is to entertain and sell books.
But the second half of Greenspan's book, the part that, as CNBC's chief economics correspondent Steve Liesman first reported on the day the book was released, will have a far greater impact, seems to put to bed the notion that government policy is based on microeconomics. Macro appears to be, and over the past 40 years have been, much more important.
