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LIBERAL HATE AND VIOLENCE

A Libertarian Economist retracts a swipe at the left-after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think.

Pakistan is currently the flashpoint of international politics due to numerous reasons. Among the broad array of factors that make Pakistan highly essential and important country in world politics, the two main factors are the geographic location of Pakistan as well as the international War on Terror. Pakistan is located right in the middle of some great powers of the world that are Russia, India, China, similarly the country like Iran is also a neighbor of Pakistan. The presence of the United States along with International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries has also significantly increased the importance of Pakistan in World Politics. Other factors that make Pakistan the central point of interest in world politics are the alleged presence of wanted extremists across the Pak-Afghan border, Nuclear Capability, State of the Art Missile System, one of the most professional and capable Military and Spy Agency and the hub of international trade.

Hurricane Katrina was the deadliest and most destructive cyclone of the Atlantic hurricane season. Over 1,800 people died in the hurricane and subsequent floods; total property damage was estimated at $81 billion. Despite massive death and destruction, the Republicans are comparing the technical rollout of ObamaCare to the one of the gravest human disasters in the history of the country. I say the comparison is a bridge way too far.

The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Politico are just some of the outlets in need of a real retraction

Via Sociological Images (by way of the Economic Mobility Project) is an interesting chart showing downward class mobility among blacks and whites. Each bar represents the percentage of children who end up in the bottom fifth of income earners by race and income of the parent:

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I'm increasingly convinced that it's a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers - those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else's expense.

The federal deficit is a serious challenge in the long run. The real emergency is how many people are still out of work. That's the deficit that matters. Almost nothing can do more harm to a nation's cultural, social, political, and of course economic fabric than sustained high joblessness. And of nothing can do more, faster, to reduce a federal deficit than a restoration of economic growth. That political and media attention got hijacked to a fake debt-ceiling "emergency" is 1937 all over again -- but worse, because in principle we had the real 1937 to learn from.

There has been much concern about financial contagion between Europe and America. But the real problem stems from another form of contagion: bad ideas move easily across borders, and misguided economic notions on both sides of the Atlantic have been reinforcing each other.

Andrew Sullivan supported George W. Bush for president in 2000 and praised his initial reactions to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the years since, Sullivan's become disgusted by the moral morass of American torture and Bush's stalwart defense of it. But Bush, Sullivan writes in a cover-story epistle to the former president in the Atlantic, is the only person who can amend torture's stain on the country. So Sullivan appeals to the conservative and Christian roots he shares with Bush and calls for the former president to "reject categorically the phony legalisms, criminal destruction of crucial evidence, and retrospective rationalizations used to pretend that none of this happened. It happened." Bush must, Sullivan writes, say a public mea culpa to the American people, as Ronald Reagan did in response to the Iran-Contra scandal. If not, Sullivan warns that a future president might "resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the same polarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you now because it is within your power-and only within your power-to prevent that from happening."

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government-a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.

As conservatives bash the left-leaning populist protesters, Larry Lessig and Gary Johnson are trying to win them over. Is 'liberaltarianism' alive? 

"Q. How does your background as a constitutional law and civil rights litigator inform the way you approach research and writing as a journalist? One of the primary skills one learns as a litigator is to make one's case by beginning with first premises, establishing their truth with evidence, and then compelling the conclusions you want others to reach. That's how I try to write now. I think that if you want to make an argument, there's an obligation to lay out the premises for it, provide evidence for it, allow readers to assess the documentation for themselves. That belief probably comes from the way judges and juries need to be persuaded that an argument is true. Beyond that, I chose to litigate constitutional and civil rights cases, and to represent plaintiffs, because I wanted to use my abilities to empower those who are vulnerable and powerless and who are being mistreated by the powerful. That, to me, is a primary purpose of the Constitution itself, and, when done correctly, a core purpose of journalism. That's what I try to do now as well in the work I do. I'd much rather be at war with corrupt elites than serving their interests."

Last summer, the White House authorized a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries and giving the military's combatant commanders significant new authority to conduct unconventional warfare.