Isaiah J. Poole

Greece finally reached an agreement today on the measures that will accompany the new loan package from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund. The measures agreed on are draconian. Given the death blow to domestic demand that the new wave of austerity will produce, the Greek economy, already seriously depressed, will grind to a halt.

"Right of conscience" and "religious freedom" is the party line for the opposition to a measure that says employers will have to offer insurance plans that cover contraception. But it hasn't always been. Amanda Marcotte on Twitter pointed to a story from summer 2010 by Dana Goldstein, in which the Catholic bishops' reasons for opposing birth control coverage were not at all about religious freedom, but actually about opposition to sex.

We learn that 90 percent of the parts of an iPhone are made outside the U.S. Then we hear Jobs (as in Steve) say: "those jobs aren't coming back." But wait a minute. The parts we are talking about are microprocessors, memory chips, displays, circuitry, and chip sets. These are all the kind of advanced, high-tech, capital intensive, knowledge intensive, not cheap-labor intensive products in which economists, business leaders, and political leaders always say America has a comparative advantage because it is the technology leader. Why are South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan supplying the memory chips and micro-processors and displays instead of the United States? As a leading U.S. negotiator on these issues for some time, I can tell you.