Back to Miss Manners

I'm a brute, no foreplay yet again.

Have the Republicans "lost" Jindal?:

As a viable candidate in 2012? Yes. He was already competing with Huckabee and Palin for the same slice of the base, and he's brown. He's toast. Of course, Megan disagrees, because she's stupid.

And now, for the next few posts, a soundtrack.

Playboy dips a toe into investigative journalism:

Sure, I live with a former employee of one of the entities I'm pretending have been slandered, I've interacted with Boss Koch personally and hope to tap that (money) ass, I'm wrong about several of my claims, and I don't even attempt a direct answer to the majority of the detailed charges in the piece, but.... ummmm...
They're poopyheads.

Is this why Playboy took the article down?:

See, sure, maybe there's some astroturfing at play here, but that whole claim whut two groups with a shared origin and ideologically identical agendas who communicate back and forth on many levels of their organizations are working in concert is a total conspiracy theory. Y'see, these large organizations don't like each other personally. They both fell for the same girl junior year and, well, you know the rest.
And I'm with Megan, when someone at an organization known for astroturfing and the like says they're not astroturfing, that's good enough for me. Why would they lie?

(Grass) roots:

It does strike me that perhaps some of the people who linked the article without wondering about its weak sourcing just couldn't quite believe that ordinary people would be moved to protest a gigantic government spending package. They don't think of that as something one protests about. War, yes, taxes no.

Megan? Only about 2000 teabaggers showed up nationwide. That's not a protest, it's a weak turnout for a minor league baseball game.

Tea party follow up:

I'm very fortunate not to work for an organization that has ethics. Here's some unquestioned spin straight from the main organization accused of dishonest public relations mixed with indignation that anyone would ever impugn the good name of such a fine, fine group of people who are such heroes.

Overall, I'm pretty surprised that Playboy let the piece go up, left it up so long, and then took it down with no notice. To be sure, bloggers speculate all the time. But they make it clear that that's what they're doing. And when it seems clear that they've made an error (and those assertions about the Koch family now seem to, at best, require some good sourcing), bloggers update their posts. They don't vanish them and hope that no one will notice. I'm contacting Playboy's offices for comment, but not holding out all that much hope.

Final word, for the moment, goes to the bloggers in question, who are quite capable of speaking for themselves.

What is Jean-Claude Trichet thinking?:

A year ago, if you had asked me, or most economics journalists, or most economists, if America would have another Great Depression, I would have said no. Thanks to Milton Friedman, we knew what had caused the Great Depression: the Fed's inappropriate tightening in the wake of a financial panic. We could not do that thing, and would therefore not have another major crisis.

Or you could have asked Paul Krugman or all the other non-Friedmanite/Hayekians who, a year ago, were saying the recession Megan was pretending didn't exist was only going to get catastrophically worse. But, as always, since Megan got it completely fucking wrong, that means she knows more about the topic now than someone who was correct from the goddamn beginning and she hasn't been completely discredited. She's still on wingnut welfare, she doesn't have to acknowledge reality.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am in love with Peter Suderman, which is convenient, because we are dating:

TL; DR.
Also, I don't care if I know what you did last summer.

And we're back up to date. Whoopee and shit.