A federal judge has denied a permit allowing the anti-war march on February 15 to march to the U.N., saying that heightened security concerns posed by up to 100,000 protesters would threaten the public safety and security of the U.N. Instead a stationary rally will be allowed five blocks away. The judge says it is constitutional to ban all marching in Mahattan.

NY Newsday also reports that the NYPD has approved no permits for demonstrations since the fall of 2002.

Apparently things like the St. Patrick’s Day Parade don’t have the same kinds of security concerns that political speech does.

A reminder: I’ll be joining this group, assembling at the NYPL on Fifth Avenue. If you’re going to be there, send me an email if you don’t have already have my cell phone number, so we can meet up.

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Update: Jim Henley has good ongoing coverage of this.

The Economist has an interesting article on a recent paper by Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern. The article has a link to the full paper for my hardcore economics readers. As someone who travels there regularly, I have always been uncomfortable with standard economic analyses that show that Europe is much poorer than us, because I just don’t see it, even ignoring the median vs. mean issues involved in comparing countries with radically different wealth distribution profiles.

A significant part of his argument is that GDP is so bad at measuring things like quality of life. Our spending on air conditioning and heat, because our climate is harsher, counts towards our higher GDP. So does our inefficient transportation system — we spend more on cars and roads rather than on public transit — and the fact that we spend much more on home and business security plus prisons, since we have a much higher crime rate.