GenXJamerican

I came across this article via the Signals vs. Noise blog. While the entire piece is 100% on target, this passage really spoke to my current situation:

But the worst are the ones that become slaves to their clients--often driven by the fear of losing one.

And fear leads to underbidding. And underbidding leads to… pulling all-nighters to make an impossible deadline on too few resources. (And the dark side is in there somewhere.)

It’s more fuel to do things differently when I (finally) start my own business.

Trying to find some information about Bush’s latest appointee to the Supreme Court, I found two comments especially troubling:

"The reaction of many conservatives today will be that the president has made possibly the most unqualified choice since Abe Fortas who had been the president's lawyer. The nomination of a nominee with no judicial record is a significant failure for the advisers that the White House gathered around it. However, the president deserves the benefit of a doubt, the nominee deserves the benefit of hearings, and every nominee deserves an up or down vote." — Manuel Miranda, chairman of the conservative Third Branch Conference

"This is a smart move. You try to pick a nominee that Democrats won't be able to criticize as much because they are a woman or minority. This is a classic Clarence Thomas strategy."

— Artemus Ward, Northern Illinois University political science professor.

For other reactions, see the full version of the article (free registration required).

They are minority opinions to be sure, the bulk of the comments so far range from polite to unalloyed praise for Harriet Miers. Still, I shudder at the mention of Clarence Thomas in connection to anything at all. Few things in politics have made me more angry than his nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall’s record as a lawyer, his tenure as judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (none of his 98 majority decisions was ever reversed), and his record as solicitor general of the United States (winning 14 of 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court), stand in stark contrast to Thomas' brief and unremarkable tenure as an appeals court judge. Thomas was notable only for being a black conservative (and his alleged conduct while head of the EEOC). To replace a lion of civil rights like Thurgood Marshall with someone so opposed to what he’d fought his whole life for was has always disappointed me.

What’s sad is that Artemus Ward is probably correct. Miers won’t have enough of a paper trail for anyone to effectively oppose her–unless a significant amount of conservative reaction falls along the lines of Mr. Miranda’s commentary.

I was listening to C-SPAN on the way into work and one of the callers had an interesting question: why are the people suffering in New Orleans being called “refugees” in the press when people in Florida suffering from hurricane damage aren’t?

I checked out the Wall Street Journal this morning and sure enough, there was that word. Checked the Washington Post, same thing. Was the caller being overly sensitive? Maybe. Was he reading some racial connotation into the use of the word? Probably. But it may also be that the press has been sloppy in how it uses words. Usually you see the word “refugee” in the context of someone fleeing another country from religious or political persecution. The people in New Orleans aren’t running from some dictator, they’re from here. They’re just unfortunate enough to be too poor or too ill to get out of the way of the storm in time.

Paul Krugman seems to believe so. Check out his complete column in the New York Times online (free registration required).

I live in what Krugman describes as the “Zoned Zone”, a few miles north of D.C. in Wheaton, Maryland. While a townhouse in my neighborhood recently sold for about $400,000, it took 2-3 weeks. I think they started out asking for $450,000 and had to drop the price some. Another bit of information I got, which supports Krugman’s idea somewhat, is a conversation I had with a realtor a month or two ago. He was essentially trolling my neighborhood for people interested in selling their townhouses and I asked him about some new ones being built (a 5-10 minute walk from my townhouse). He said the price tags on those went as high as $800,000, but that the builders were having to rent them out because they couldn’t sell them at that price.

Between this information and the increasing popularity of interest-only loans, real estate prices have to come back to earth sooner or later.