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 insured its dismissal by book-review editors not drawn to anything so Portentous in media criticism.

According to the book's website, McGowan tried to gin up a controversy over the fact that the Times didn't review it, even though Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus supposedly had promised him that it would. No firestorm ensued, because Gray Lady also wasn't reviewed in Rupert Murdoch's Times-loathing 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 damning 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 an ideological partisanship of his own 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 Timesreported 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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Right-wing politicians and media figures have increasingly been comparing U.S. policies they don't like to the Holocaust, causing serious concern in the Jewish community.  When called on their  offensive exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust, they invariably respond that they "love Israel." Glenn Beck is famous for this but he's far from alone. (As far back as 2003, anti-tax warrior, Grover Norquist explicitly compared inheritance taxes to the murder of 6,000,000 Jews). 

AP reports that on Saturday in New Hampshire, Rep. Michele Bachmann compared America's "huge tax burden" to the Holocaust, adding that future generations will ask what Americans living today did to preserve "economic liberty" just as she wondered what the world did to stop the Holocaust. 

"I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action," she said, referring to the Holocaust. "But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to."

Also on Saturday, former Gov. Mike Huckabee invoked the Holocaust while addressing the National Rifle Association. The AP reported:

[Huckabee] spoke mostly about how he had come to Pittsburgh to "celebrate America and celebrate its values" — including God, family, and a Second Amendment meant to safeguard freedom, not just hunting and target-shooting.

But he suggested that the next election would determine the future of the country, by telling a story about a comment his daughter wrote in a guest book after his family visited a Holocaust memorial in Israel years ago.

"Why didn't somebody do something?" Huckabee said she wrote.

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Yesterday, the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project revealed that among six predominantly Islamic countries, Muslims in the Palestinian territories "voiced the most support for the assassinated al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden." Something like a third of respondents admired him and trusted that he "would do the right thing in world affairs."

Yesterday, also, Hamas officials in Gaza condemned the killing of bin Laden, and Ismail Haniya, the leader of the Hamas government about to sign a unity deal with Fatah, calling it a "continuation of the United States policy of destruction." PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad strongly condemned bin Laden and applauded his death. But credible reports suggest Fayyad, among every Israeli's favorite Palestinians, will likely be ousted from the prime minister's job as a consequence of the deal.

It is hard to imagine more perfect evidence for Netanyahu's case that Israel has no partner; that the unity deal should result in the West's boycott of the Palestinian government; and that continuing the war on terror means strengthening Israel's hand in dealing with the territories. And just to show it is not afraid to lead, Netanyahu's government, led by Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, announced that Israel has suspended the routine transfer of customs and VAT paid by Palestinians to the PA, some $88, or about 70 percent of PA revenues.

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The death of Bin Laden affords the United States a rare opportunity to rethink the whole War on Terror meme that has dominated our foreign and domestic security policy for 10 years. As the authors of the extremely important National Strategic Narrative white paper recently wrote,

As has also been cited, security means far more than defense, and strength denotes more than power. We must remain committed to a whole of nation application of the tools of competition and deterrence: development, diplomacy, and defense. Our ability to look beyond risk and threat - to accept them as realities within a strategic ecology - and to focus on opportunities and converging interests will determine our success in pursuing our national interests in a sustainable manner while maintaining our national values.

Since I'm a red-blooded American boy, I'm glad that we got him, and I'm impressed that President Obama did it with something like a tight spiral on a forward pass.

Yet this victory puts me in mind of something my father taught me one afternoon long ago when he broke the crust of his silence about World War II to recount an experience he'd had as a Tech 5 corporal in the 277th Battalion US Army Corps of Engineers, as it made its way across Germany in the winter of 1945.

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In the wake of the recession brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble many people have called for a new economics. There are certainly grounds for arguing that we need a new economics, but the bigger problem is that economists will not even adhere to the old economics, or at least not when it runs against the accepted thinking in political circles.

This is perhaps most obvious in the response by economists, or lack thereof, to the large U.S. trade deficit. In a system of floating exchange rates, the adjustment to a large and persistent trade deficit is supposed to be a decline in the value of the currency. That is 100 percent economic orthodoxy.

Economists ridicule the people who worry about jobs being lost to imports by telling them that new jobs will be created in other sectors of the economy. There is some logic to this story, but an essential part of the picture is supposed to be a decline in the value of the dollar.

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There's something valid in "great man" versions of history, including those focusing on the diabolically great: Without Adolph Hitler, it's unlikely that German racism, especially anti-Semitism, would have become as shattering and unspeakable as it did. Without Osama bin Laden, Islamicist terrorism probably wouldn't have become as maniacally effective and widespread as it has.

But while these men had tremendous catalytic and/or poisonous effects on the societies they touched, that was partly because they were channeling dark, swift undercurrents that were already running in those societies. And that's partly why the damage such leaders do in harnessing the undercurrents often outlasts them.

Learning of Osama bin Laden's demise, I can't help but recall L. Paul Bremer III's announcing in Baghdad the capture of Saddam Hussein: "Ladies and Gentlemen, We got him!" And Iraq's troubles were over, right?

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