Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

President Obama apparently decided to support the omnibus budget bill late Thursday morning, December 11th. He supported the bill because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told him the threat of a government shutdown in the first quarter of 2015 was otherwise a real one, and the President should act quickly to get that off the table. The next few hours appear to have been hectic ones, as alliances formed and shifted both for and against the bill, across party lines. The bill came to be called "cromnibus," apparently for "Continuing Resolution Omnibus." [Personally my first impression was that the "cr" stood from "cram." Alas not.] At 9:37 Thursday evening, the bill passed the House, 219 to 206. Obama and House Speaker Boehner had both kept enough of their troops in line to get the result they both wanted. The Senate passed it on Saturday night, with a vote of 56 to 40. The 40 who voted "no" included both Elizabeth Warren and Te...

The Cyprus/bank/bailout story is big. Really big . Too much for me to handle in my own voice just now. So I'll just provide a few links, following chronological order, in this post and the next. The above photo is Cyprus' finance minister, Michael Sarris. By February 28, Cyprus was clearly 'next up,' the new center of the ever-shifting limelight in Europe's traveling crisis over banks and sovereign debts. The new president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, said that day that though Cyprus would have to negotiate terms of a bail-out, "no reference to a haircut on public debt or deposits will be tolerated." A big EU meeting in Brussels began on March 3d, and involved a good deal of discussion of the matters that Anastasiades had tried to wish off the table. Skipping ahead a bit ... by March 14th, EU officials, as well as those from the IMF, were in round-the-clock talks on a bail-out of Cyprus that would include a depositor sacrifice, known politel...