Catching my eye: morning A through Z

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

  • The real story of the day, it seems to me, comes to us from Dr. Zin at Regime Change Iran: Iran is withdrawing its oil revenue deposits from foreign banks and bringing them home presumably to shield them from being frozen as part of potential sanctions. Let’s see now if, as Thomas Barnett tells us, lack of connection means danger then reducing connection means…
  • Amarji muses about a rather interesting question: why isn’t the business community in the Arab world interested in reform? I know what my answer would be. Like here “entrepeneurship” has come to mean “cleverly playing the system” and they’ve got a vested interested in the system just as it is.
  • Calculated Risk has two interesting maps to show us, one of migration patterns within the United States and the other of housing price appreciation. There’s another map should be added to the mix. Migration to the Sun Belt is, at least in part, an artifact of policy i.e. rent-seeking.
  • Now that’s funny. At least they’ve got a good sense of humor about it.
  • I haven’t checked in on the guy who’s trying to trade a paper clip for a house by bartering his way up lately. He’s up to a cube van now so it looks like he’s making pretty good progress.
  • Jack Balkin has a pretty good post on the current constitutional law orthodoxy and confirmation hearings as auto da fe:

    If nothing else, Supreme Court nominations have this interesting effect– they give us clues about what has entered the constitutional catechism, and therefore what different parties have given up fighting about and what they still believe is worth contesting in order to please their particular constituencies. The reason why nomination hearings have this effect is that no Administration wants its nominees to be thought outside the mainstream. To forestall that accusation, members of the Administration must decide what constitutional issues the nominee must accept as beyond question, and, conversely, what constitutional questions are still worth fighting over.

That’s the lot.

4 comments… add one
  • Afraid I am unimpressed by the Arab business post. The writer clearly doesn’t understand the business community nor socio-economic structures he’s talking about.

  • I would also note that both the commentators and the post you link to don’t understand what entrepreneur means, versus merely businessmen.

  • I find that, at least in the U. S., the term has been debased past recognition.

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