EcuProphets

The bigger, better bottle bill makes a great deal of sense. In the first place, it’s silly that a piece of plastic with a soda label on it gets recycled, whereas the same piece of plastic with a water label on it likely goes to the landfill. In the second place, it’s sillier that unclaimed nickels — deposits collected by retailers but not claimed by customers — go to the bottlers and not, say, New York State. (more…)

This is not a candidate endorsement post, although some might infer such. Instead, it is a meditation on how political communication works, as opposed how it used to work. (more…)

Here’s what New York’s Business Council says:

“For us to regain our competitive edge and keep New York’s economy strong, we have to reduce state spending and eliminate a billion dollars in new business-killing taxes and fees. Other states are already making the tough choices and cutting spending in these tough times. So let’s tell Governor Paterson and the Legislature to do the same.” (more…)

We know that we probably never will allow ourselves again to elect someone who can’t even get an old political saw right.

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I like to think that if the horse lobby had been more powerful a century ago, Henry Ford could have died a pauper and the United States would be a Third World country. When a society calcifies around its current status quo, it dooms itself. (more…)

This is annoying.

A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down the first law in the nation requiring airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground. (more…)

After a week of visits to Iraq by Important Old Men (IOM) reassuring us that the surge is working, it appears as though the linchpin to its “success” was

a) tens of thousands more American troops
b) General David Petraeus
c) Muqtada al Sadr
d) Who?

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There’s an old truism in advertising to the effect that if you have nothing distinctive to say about your product, you write a jingle.

In politics that “jingle” in the wake of nothing to offer is usually some variant of “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man.* You whip up the threat level, facts be damned, and the people frequently follow the jingle. At the state level, the handiest threats are criminals. (more…)

Last week Dick Cheney summarized his entire career in public service in one word, and went on to display his style by lying in the face of reality anyone could look up, talking with a straight face about “fluctuations” in public opinion polls and “improvement for the better.”

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Although I shed no tears for Eliot Spitzer, the core story most likely is the politicization of injustice by Bush America. (more…)