Yes, they are back again. We have another paper claiming that the stimulus did not create jobs. Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor, professors at Western Ontario University and Ohio State respectively, have a new study of state level employment that purports to show that the stimulus cost more jobs in the private sector than it created in the public sector. I'll just quickly note a few problems with the paper.

With an exercise like this, you always have to worry about the problem of cherry picking. It is very easy to run 1000 regressions in an hour. Inevitably, you find 4 or 5 of these 1000 that show you almost anything. (Our standard of significance is a result that you would not get by random chance more than 10 times in a hundred. This means that if you ran 1000 regressions of things that had nothing to do with each other, you would expect 100 of them to have statistically significant results.)

For this reason, you usually want to run your regressions a variety of different ways to show that the results do not depend on some arbitrary specification. It doesn't look like they have done this, or at least they did not show much evidence of such robustness tests in their paper.

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"Who is Obama? Now We Know," read the sub-headline on a May 5 column in Commonweal by the liberal and beneficent Washington Post pundit E.J. Dionne, exulting over the "profound blow" that the killing of Bin Laden had dealt to American war-mongers who'd been calling the president weak.

The same war-mongers -- or muscular interventionists, as they're called inside the Beltway -- had characterized Jimmy Carter as weak and even Ronald Reagan as having lost his nerve during his second term. Unfortunately, such nattering nabobs of "national security" have to be taken seriously in Washington, so, last week, Dionne brandished that most formidable of Beltway weapons, Inside Knowledge:

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Nicholas Kristof's bombshell article yesterday probing into the notes, letters and thinking on Afghanistan by Richard Holbrooke has a number of good journalists, including Politico's Ben Smith, scrambling to reassess where one of the Democrat Party's foreign policy titans really stood on America's longest war.

Thanks to Kati Marton, the late Richard Holbrooke's wife, Kristof was given access to key files and notes of Holbrooke's in her possession -- and with these, Kristof has painted a compelling picture that Holbrooke strongly believed that the Afghanistan War needed to be ended through tough-minded negotiations and eventual reconciliation with the Taliban.

Just as important, Holbrooke felt that the Obama administration has over-militarized its tool kit for dealing with Afghanistan and winced when General David Petraeus referred to him as his "wingman." During the Bosnia War, the tables between the diplomatic team and the Pentagon were reversed -- with General Wesley Clark delivering the military moves that Holbrooke needed and directed.

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On the surface it appears that President Obama has given up on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and, given the evidence, it is difficult imagining that there is something different beneath the surface. To wit:

Special Envoy George Mitchell resigned, clearly angry at the lack of support his peace efforts received from the White House. (His resignation letter was about as curt and cold as any in recent memory).

The announcement of his resignation followed reports that the President's Thursday speech on the Middle East will, amazingly, say virtually nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A day after Mitchell's resignation came news that the President has decided that he will speak at this month's AIPAC conference, the traditional setting for pandering to the Israeli government and, more significantly, to Israel-centered political donors. (This just in -- the typically one-sided AIPAC-drafted Hoyer-Cantor resolution that AIPAC will be pushing hard at its conference and afterwards).

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Thanks to then Embassy of France to the US Minister-Counselor for Economic Affairs, and now recently returned Embassy Minister of Finance, Jean-Francois Boittin, I met Dominique Strauss-Kahn for a one-on-one meeting in 1998. Boittin, working single-handedly to correct my over-familiarity with Asia by a productive junket to Paris, said "You must experience Strauss-Kahn; there is no one else like him in France, and perhaps the world."

As France's Finance Minister, when I met him, Dominique Strauss-Kahn had emerged in the French Socialist party as its leading, sometimes reluctant, sometimes bullish globalist. Europe was hard-charging into deepening its internal arrangements, and Strauss-Kahn had helped engineer technically and politically his nation's forfeiture of the French franc and the embrace of the Euro.

But Strauss-Kahn was never a manic neoliberal nor what financier George Soros derisively calls a "market fundamentalist." Strauss-Kahn, even when we discussed his views of the global economy in 1998, was a storm of contradictions that nonetheless made sense.

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TIME IS running out. Israelis know that. So do American Jews. If Israel refuses to cease building settlements in the West Bank, the newly unified Palestinian government will ask the UN General Assembly to ratify it as a new and sovereign state in September. Only Israel and the United States are expected to vote against the adoption of this resolution.

What then? Israel will no long be occupying "territories." It will be in violation of international law by occupying a sovereign state. As my late uncle would have said, "This can't be good for the Jews."

Such a vote is hardly the best way to create a two-state solution. Yet this just may happen, deepening world opinion against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and causing rippling consequences that may endanger the very existence of Israel as a sovereign nation.

Jewish voices from the left have been trying to prevent this for decades. Tikkun Magazine just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. J Street, a relatively new Jewish-American organization that seeks a fair and just negotiated peace agreement, attracted over 2,000 participants in early March to its second national conference in Washington D.C.

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The great historian Maitland famously said, what is now in the past was once in the future. I do not know if the era of unregulated competition in wireless communications is yet in the past - that is for others to say. But I can relate what was once in the future: namely, I can tell you what Congress and the FCC hoped was the future of wireless communications at America at the pivotal time in the early 1990s when competition policy met the three forces of technological change identified by John Malone in a speech at the Yale School of Management in 1991: digitization, microprocessors, and fiber optics. This seems as good a time as any to relate what was then thinkable, but not inevitable.

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People in Washington have incredibly bad memories. The last time that the United States balanced its budget was just a decade ago. Even though this is not distant history, almost no one in a policymaking position or in the media seems able to remember how the United States managed to go from large deficits at the start of the decade to large surpluses at the end of the decade.

There are two often-told tales about the budget surpluses of the late 1990s: a Democratic story and a Republican story. President Clinton is the hero of the Democratic story. In this account, his decision to raise taxes in 1993, along with restraint on spending, was the key to balancing the budget.

The hero in the Republican story is Newt Gingrich. In this story, the Republican Congress that took power in 1995 demanded serious spending constraints. These constraints were ultimately the main factor in balancing the budget.

Fortunately, we can go behind this "he said/she said" to find the real cause of the switch from large budget deficits to large surpluses. This one is actually easy.

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The subtitle of William McGowan's Gray Lady Down -- What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means For America - all but ensured its dismissal by book-review editors who aren't drawn to anything quite so portentous.

According to the book's website, McGowan tried to gin up a controversy over the fact that the Times didn't review it, despite book-review editor Sam Tanenhaus' supposed promise to him that it would. No controversy ensued, because Gray Lady also wasn't reviewed in Times rival Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, or in the Washington Post, or in any other major daily. Or in Bookforum, The New York Review, or any other thoughtful venue.

So McGowan has been haunting the conservative noise machine's studios and websites, hawking his claim that while "The New York Times was once considered the gold standard in American journalism," now "it is generally understood to be a vehicle for politically correct ideologies, tattered liberal pieties, and a repeated victim of journalistic scandal and institutional embarrassment."

Language like that has been ricocheting around the conservative echo chamber for so long now that it almost echoes itself. So why is the decidedly un-conservative, ever-young Washington Monthly publishing a review of McGowan's book by yours truly? And why am I writing still more about it here?

Click here and read the review to see how McGowan miscarries his mission to rescue journalism from political correctness by succumbing to another kind of ideological partisanship, one that trumps his good intentions. Then, if you care about journalism, return here to think further with me about how to distinguish attacks like his from serious criticisms of papers like the Times that do need to be made.

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One of my regrets in life is losing the chance to debate Mitt Romney and whip his ass.

It was the fall of 2002. Mitt had thundered into Massachusetts with enough money to grab the Republican nomination for governor. Meanwhile, I was doing my best to secure the Democratic nomination. One week before the Democratic primary I was tied in the polls with the state treasurer, according to the Boston Herald, well ahead of four other candidates. But my campaign ran out of cash. Despite pleas from my campaign manager, I didn't want to put a second mortgage on the family home. The rest is history: The state treasurer got the nomination, I never got to debate Mitt, and Mitt won the election.

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I hope that the Senate passes a bill creating the green bank called CEDA - Clean Energy Deployment Administration. I hope that the House passes a similar bill and that CEDA is well-funded. We need to put in the Department of Energy's toolkit a useful, continuously available financing arm, so that projects that emerge from research and development can get access to deployment capital. Private investors at later stages need to help DOE routinize the financing process and early stage investors need to have enhanced prospects for rewarding their risk-taking.

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The real battle for the soul of the GOP started today with a speech on Wall Street by Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Wall Street and big business fear Tea Partiers won't allow House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling without major spending cuts - and without tax increases on the wealthy. Wall Street and big business know this would be unacceptable to the White House and congressional Democrats.

The Street and big business want to tame the budget deficit but they don't want to play games with the debt ceiling. Credit markets are fine at the moment, but if the debt ceiling isn't not raised within the month - weeks before August 2, when the Treasury predicts the nation will run out of money to pay its creditors and its other bills - credit markets could go into free fall. The full faith and credit of the United States would be jeopardized. Interest rates would skyrocket. The dollar could plummet.

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After a week of non-stop Osama Bin Laden, Washington is now returning to the battle of the budget deficit and debt ceiling.

All over Capitol Hill Republicans and Democrats are debating spending caps and automatic triggers, and whether to begin them before or after Election Day.

But if you don't mind my asking, what about the economy? I'm not talking about the economy five or ten years from now, when projections show the federal budget wildly out of control or when foreigners might start dumping dollars.

I'm talking about the here and now economy - the one Americans are living in day to day.

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On September 12, 2001, the New York Times reported on Binyamin Netanyahu's reaction to the news of the attacks in New York and Washington:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu ... replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.''

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Over the last couple of days, I have talked to many senior level correspondents and executives at major Arabic news networks including but not limited to Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. I asked them what they thought their viewing audience "needed to see" regarding the death of Osama bin Laden.

The answer has been consistent and uniform. Not withstanding any decision to release a "death photo" of Osama bin Laden -- which I personally believe should be released, photos of bin Laden's corpse being scrubbed, and receiving final Muslim death rites should be released simultaneously.

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