Take My Word for It

Too lazy to link, but apparently Forbes magazine named Matty-Y and Ezra Klein two of the 25 most influential liberals in the media.

I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the fact that Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd are also on the list, but holy-shit. What the fuck is going on?

Brad must be really proud of me for not mentioning how Matty-Y, by himself, is two of the 25.

Way to Think, Megan

25 Nov 2008 12:15 pm

Another way to think about Paulson

A friend IM's:  "For all those salivating at the thought of a second New Deal, this is what 'bold, persistent experimentation' looks like -- kinda  messy."  Indeed.  My question:  will consumer confidence be bolstered more by confident persistence (possibly in the wrong direction), or by a hypermanic government that seems willing to try anything?  Or will neither work, and we're simply hosed?

Hosed is much too mild a word. I suppose that usage means the only standards left at The Atlantic are FCC standards. 

As I'm so far off the grid, underground, etc., your whole "economy" thing has little or no effect on me, & I haven't been paying the closest attention to capitalism's latest ("It's a natural, boom & bust business cycle") atrocity, but it seems to me that Ms. McArdle is no farther out at sea than any other half-baked pundit/talking point retyper w/ this one. It's pretty much reduced to "Nothing like this ... ever before ... duh!" & at that point it degenerates into econ groupiedom, as evidenced here.

25 Nov 2008 12:27 pm

Deep bench?

I have to disagree with Ezra Klein:  Obama's got a much, much better economics team than Bush started out with.  I agree with his endorsement of Glenn Hubbard.  But Paul O'Neill wasn't exactly an a-lister even before he turned out to have fantastic(ally entertaining!) verbal impulse control problems.  And Larry Lindsay did not match up to Larry Summers in stature, though of course what he got fired for was not being incompetent, but telling the truth.  Bush's second term team has actually been pretty stellar, but his first term left a lot to be desired.  Unfortunately, Bush's second term team--and the incoming Obama team--have had a lot higher hurdles to jump.

In real life sports analogies, there's generally a record involved. This being an entirely new, world-wide situation, everybody's a rookie. 

But if the real issues for McArdle are bolstering consumer & market confidence (in order to get started on another boom & bust cycle) why don't any of these fucks stop to consider that a house of cards, backed by absolutely nothing, finally & completely dependent on such human emotions as greed, fear, hate, pain, rage, resentment & so forth is as stupid an idea as has been concieved by any alleged science short of Mengele's experiments on human beings.

Shoulda Been a Sports Commentator

Ezra Klein is making sense:

And while a week ago, I would've given Ohio to McCain, the economic crisis has cemented Obama's leads in a lot of traditionalist Midwestern states that McCain could otherwise have contested (...) The map is shrinking for McCain. But polls are coming out in places like North Carolina and Indiana that suggest Obama is surprisingly viable. So his map is expanding. And he has more money. That, fundamentally, is the position you want to be in right now.

Yes, my son, a shrinking map for McCain surprisingly corresponds to an expanding map for Obama. However, it isn't that McCain is losing in Midwestern states while Obama is winning in Southern states. In reality, McCain is losing Southern states while Obama is winning in the Midwest. The conclusion that winning states is good for Obama is completely sound, though you may want to provide more evidence for the true skeptics.

I'm so glad there are people being paid to tell me these things. And I love how good at writing they are.

Ezra, stupid enough to believe a sound-byte

I don't know why I'm so eager to insult people today, but if I can't insult Megan I'll insult her friends.

So I strolled on over to our favorite ambiguously gay blogger's house and, like the lazy ass that I am, took a gander at a few of his most recent posts

This one caught my eye. He quotes Al Gore saying "Here's the difference, when the demand for wind and solar goes u, costs go down. When demand for oil and gas goes up, prices go up." and gives an enthusiastic "True dat girlfriend!" before ducking his head, checking to ensure that no one saw, and typing a muted "True enough."

You know what's also true? The difference between driving to work and skydiving to work is that when demand for skydiving goes up, prices come down! We should totally invest in skydiving, ASA-FUCKING-P.

You see, dipshits, oil is an entrenched part of our economy and there are not many easy ways left to utilize it more efficiently (and no, fuck nuts, replacing the entire US fleet of cars with slightly more efficient models isn't actually easy), which is why its demand is inelastic and supply is limited.

Renewable energies are a fringe market, not even close to fully implemented that hardly even glimpse the economies of scale that oil does, let alone have seen the hard core research that oil has seen for like the past million fucking years.

If we had a renewables based economy and there was a demand spike, guess what, PRICES FOR ENERGY WOULD STILL GO UP.

I'm all for renewables, but let's try not to muck up the cause with a bunch of "being a fucking moron" along the way, eh?