Ever More Shorters

let's do this.

Bed, bath and beyond:

A good night's sleep is a luxury item for anyone who isn't me.

Is nationalization contagious?:

If the Fed takes over Citi the cooties will make them social outcasts. I feel nauseous just thinking about it. Fed cooties Fed cooties!!

Rodge Cohen to Treasury after all?:

Shit, Megan's prognosticatory (don't care if it's not really a word) jinx strikes again. But you gotta love it when even Matty Y thinks she's being glib.

Penny wise, pound foolish:

Andy Rooney called and told me he finds my writing boring.

The face of despair:

Rampage shootings in Alabama and a German school. As a friend pithily noted that other day, "2009 just, well . . . sucks, doesn't it?" Yesterday seems to have been the distilled essence of 2009.

Update: On the other hand, every cloud has a silver lining.

That's the entire post, links not reinserted.
So yes, Megan thinks there's a silver lining to shooting sprees, which are primarily relevant as indicators of what kind of year she and her friends are having.
I'd say I'm being unfair if she hadn't also written "on the other hand", without an introductory hand. Have her undergrad English profs killed themselves yet?

Good question:

Tigerhawk asks:

"If we on the right are calling this class warfare, why isn't the left indulging us by actually making it so?" After all, people make money in academia, too, and if we lie about shit we can pretend a government commitment to helping make higher education possible is kinda like a bailout.
Btw, if you follow the link that got Tigerhawk all "boolah boolah" you'll find that

Higher education’s bible—The Chronicle of Higher Education—publishes a survey of college and university presidents’ compensation packages each year. The most recent appeared November 21, 2008. Presidents were grouped by types of institution to promote comparability. For our purposes the most important distinction was between presidents at public research universities with at least 10,000 students (like Ohio State University) and presidents at private universities with very high research activity (like University of Chicago). In university lingo, “research” means lots of “government research grants.”
The 184 public research universities had 59 presidents whose 2007-2008 compensation packages were worth more than $500,000. The average for this $500,000-plus club was $654,000.
Of the 32 research-intensive private universities, 31 had 2006-2007 presidential compensation packages worth more than $500,000, the average being $895,000.

Shocking, isn't it? Some of these heads of massive universities are making over a million dollars a year. And they haven't even orchestrated the implosion of the world financial system.

Jamie Dimon: "Bad regulation drives out good":

Oddly, someone who is philosophically opposed to government regulation of the markets supports having one central regulator of limited power who would obviously never be corrupted or co-opted, meaning the idea would never collapse on itself and is a great plan.

Banks start giving back:

Megan is torn. On one hand, banks are run and owned by rich people, so giving them money is good. On the other hand, she thinks she owns the billions in bailout money being handed out.

But even if they are splendid all around chaps, I don't actually want to give them large sums of my hard-earned cash. Deeply sympathetic though I may be to the problems of maintaining a moderately large co-op apartment and a really modest place in the Hamptons on a mere $500,000 per annum, I fear that unless the need is dire, I must reserve my dollars for the more pressing problem of maintaining a miniature row-house and a bullmastiff on journalist wages.

What if we make sure your $28.7 billion in taxes portion of it only goes to banks employing people you know personally, Megan?

Douthat to the Times:

There's one thing that will eternally puzzle me about Ross Douthat; what the hell has he ever done that should make anyone give a fuck what he thinks?

Offering congratulations to my colleague, Ross Douthat, on his new job as a New York Times columnist seems almost redundant--he was so clearly the only man for the job. If conservatism, and the Republican Party, can be rescued from their current crisis, I expect Ross to be the one swinging on a rope through the flaming wreckage to pull them to safety. That he has managed to become the leading voice of thoughtful conservatism at such an appallingly young age is a constant source of wonder to his colleagues--and crises of confidence in those who have meandered all the way to thirtiy without getting a New York Times column, or even leading a small band of Oakeshottian guerillas on a suicide mission against HHS.

I'll leave it to Roy to give examples of the thoughtfulness of Douthat's conservatism.

Obama too sunny?:

Sure, when the Bush Admin lied about the economy I would evangelize for the Good News, but now I'm takin the man to the mats.

The US is not France:

Let's ignore the sophistry of Megan arguing the quantifiable superiority of France's health care system has no actual meaning, if you stop and ask what "meaning" means, and instead play along and think of other things the US is not. The US is not a small pile of pine cones. The US is not a middle aged woman named Ethel. The US is not the infrared portion of the light spectrum. The US is not 15 tons of gas on Jupiter mixed with a few pieces of naan bread.

I think this is the full list of things the US is not, so I can stop now. Also, we're all caught up.