Davos Newbies

The newly released CommentPress is a wonderful idea.

This little tool is the happy byproduct of a year and a half spent hacking WordPress to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization—whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts. Out of this emerged a series of publishing experiments loosely grouped under the heading “networked books.”

I hadn’t come across their networked version of the Iraq Study Group report before. A really powerful new tool.

After a clunker of a column last week, the Financial Times’s Clive Crook is back on track with a reasonable plea to simplify the US tax system (subscribers only). What struck me, however, was his peroration:

Eradicating those treasured deductions is a enormous political challenge, needless to say. But it can be done. (British politicians used to think that mortgage tax relief was untouchable; it no longer exists.) Democrats need to weigh the difficulty against the prize.

I wonder if the Republican presidential aspirants who are ludicrously trekking to London to receive the benediction of Margaret Thatcher know about her tax radicalism. Sure, she reduced marginal rates of taxation. But she also eliminated tax relief on mortgage interest by first capping it (to the first £30,000 of a mortgage if memory serves) and then paring it away year by year. Who in the US wants to be that radical?