The Republican Response

I thought for a moment the universe might collapse when Jindal (Republican Governor of Louisiana) used the catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina (after six years of a Republican President) as an example of bureaucracy run amok.

P.S. The apology was nice.

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On the predicted collapse of the US

Let me just say, on behalf of all Canadians, that you can keep Montana. We don’t want it.

Vermont has a coast!

You learn something every day. It sounds dull, but I am genuinely excited about this revision to my knowledge of American geography.

And you thought the culture wars were protracted

A call to remake the South in the North’s image – for the third time.

Lucius Septimius Severus, African-Roman Emperor

While acknowledging that the Roman Republic/Empire was complex and long-lived enough to provide us with dozens of questionable parallels for any scenario, I think we can agree that they are always neat.

We do not know for certain whether or not Septimius Severus was black. That is itself significant. One historian writing three hundred years after his lifetime claimed that he was ‘dark’, and one or two portrait statues appear to show him with African features. But the vast majority of images that survive make him look like any other Roman emperor before him – his whiteness over-emphasised by the shiny white marble in which he was so often portrayed. This was not a black man claiming the imperial throne for himself. This was the Roman imperial machine turning a man of colour into an emperor more or less indistinguishable from all his predecessors. The machine was making sure that race did not show.

Shades of Obama?

(photo credit)

Obama is the president elect

This blog approves. You can find a few more photos like above of the Grant Park rally from this Flickr user, or by searching Grant Park.

Cowen: protest non-voters are poseurs

The people who think they are being instrumentally rational by not voting are probably deceiving themselves more.  They are actually engaged in an even less transparent form of expressive behavior (protest against the voting system) and yet cloaking that behavior under the guise of instrumental rationality.

Link. If you have not already bookmarked Marginal Revolution, you are missing out.