Such a Journalist

Amusing fact of the day:

Our muse just "investigated" the credit crisis by applying for credit cards! Yes, that's real behind the scenes work there gumshoe!

You might say "Well, some journalists would only apply for a single credit card, so MM really is going the extra mile" to which I rejoinder "Actually, this moron only MEANT to apply to one but accidentally applied to three because she's retarded."

"She can't be that retarded, can she?" you ask. Well, yes, and also, she forgot that you shouldn't be checking out lots of new lines of credit while you're looking to buy your first ever house.

Our intrepid journalist: stupid enough to do things of no merit to anyone and harm herself in the process. Natural selection at its finest.

Another valid delay

my mom is having 'routine' open heart surgery Tuesday, so Megan (again) doesn't rate. I'll be back when I regain the head space to deal with her inconsequential drivel.
My mother isn't in bad condition now or at terrifying risk, but it is open heart surgery.
Hopefully, I'll be back very soon.

Oh, Jane, You're so Modest

Pat yourself on the back, hun:

My first internet bon mot was Jane's Law: the devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

WOW! That is quite the "good word" as the French say. Why, it's catching on so fast that a Google search of "Jane's Law" lands a monstrous 1,430 hits. I'm sure the fact that, of the first 30 or so links, all but one have nothing to do with what she said or are links to janegalt.net is just a... typographical error or something.

Someone should email Google about the error in their code.

Are all libertarians dishonest?

Megan is dumb. But before you can re-know that, here's some background between the Rauchway-Tabarrok debate:

Yesterday, Eric Rauchway called the WSJ a liar for saying this (among other things):

"As late as 1938, after almost a decade of governmental “pump priming,” almost one out of five workers remained unemployed."

This isn't true for two reasons. 1) The one-in-five statistic uses unemployment data that doesn't includ relief workers. 2) Unemployment dropped from 32-38, so using the word 'remained' is a flat out lie.

Alex Tabarrok then wrote in response:

"Historian Eric Rauchway says this is a lie [the above quote about pump priming and unemployment], a lie spread by conservatives to besmirch the sainted FDR. Nonsense. In 1938 the unemployment rate was 19.1%, i.e. almost one out of five workers was unemployed, this is from the official Bureau of Census/Bureau of Labor Statistics data series for the 1930s. You can find the series in Historical Statistics of the United States here (big PDF) or a graph from Rauchway here. Rauchway knows this but wants to measure unemployment using an alternative series which shows a lower unemployment rate in 1938 (12.5%). Nothing wrong with that but there's no reason to call people who use the official series liars."

Now, even if the use of the WSJ's & Tabarrok's unemployment stasticis is defensible, the WSJ was still lying by saying that unemployment "remained" at one-fifth. This is obvious to all, so Rauchway's rebuttal contains a cogent defense of why the stastics he uses are better. He writes:

"The problem is, Tabarrok quotes the old, bicentennial edition of HSUS. And in that edition, you find Lebergott’s unemployment data, which was assembled before Michael Darby, Robert Margo, and David Weir’s work."

Megan see's all this, and Tabarrok's obvious stupidity and dishonesty, and writes:

"Alex Tabarrok takes Eric Rauchway to the woodshed and spanks him so hard my butt hurts. As a general rule, it is a bad idea to title an exceptionally misleading and/or ignorant post "Stop lying". "

Eric Rauchway, Ph.d., minted historian, scholar of the great depression whose works have been published by the Oxford University Press, was called "ignorant" by Megan McArdle, dumbass.

She really doesn't even bother to have a pretense of intellectual honesty or seriousness.

A moment of bliss

I know, I said I'd go back to ragging on her today, but I'm putting it off one last time.
Today is for walking around with a goofy grin on your face, listening to your favorite music, n letting your eyes well up a bit.
I'm gonna go by the WTC site and... reflect a bit.
75 days.

What Megan Says

She says it's in the bag for Sen. Obama.

Seeing that typed by Megatron herself makes me nervous. Her track record, as a voter or prognosticator, is not very reassuring. The Senator's grandmother dies, & she sympathizes, then:

At least his victory is secure enough that he doesn't need to have divided attention at a horrible moment.

Doesn't need to divide his attention, either, what w/ victory being secure & all.

Comments not as vicious as at some RW sites, but there's always one, isn't there?


A Shorter (concept by a couple dudes I forget right now):

Whither conservatism?
Ross ponders the future of conservatism and comes away depressed:

I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism -

That Goldberg is a prime example of a conservative says whither conservatism is headed.


Then: Anecdotally, the cops are under orders to collect more revenue. So here's what happens in a recession. Choices must be made. Etc.

I'm starting to think that Megan should have become Goldberg's liberal fascist school-teacher from Barnard or whatever bullshit it was he made up, because it's getting like eighth-grade civics in here, when I realized she must've been ticketed lately. Oh, the troubles white people in the big city go through. What a complicated world where one must know to get the eff out of the way of a freaking ambulance/fire-truck, whatever.

And while it is politically easier to step up enforcement of rules no one has ever heard of than to have an onerous debate about the budget, it is corrosive to civil society to make people feel that they can be randomly and unfairly hit up for extra cash. The nature of modern American law is such that no one can know, or obey it, fully; things like stop sign waits and emergency vehicle passage vary from state to state, and time to time, so that no one ever knows exactly what the law is. Cracking down on trivial violations invades the safety zone that allows us to rub along without too much disrespect for the law.

Elements of Style: Read that last sentence.

Uh-uh, I Ain't Puttin' My Foot in That!

No predictions from this (occasional) contributor. What's McArdle have to say, anyway?

And while saying nothing, in reference to the new (to this reporter) web-design at The Atlantic, I can only add: "Whatever, dude."

Because OT Posts are SO MUCH More Interesting than MM These Days

Two things:

First, I was thinking this morning in the shower about how Obama and Bush pare kind of similar in a way.

(ducks)

No no no, NOT LIKE THAT. What I mean is, in 2000 Bush played himself as a "compassionate conservative," essentially trying to say "yeah, I'm conservative but not too far out there" all the while sending signals to his base that he was, in fact, way way out there.

Obama has also presented himself as a left-leaning centrist, but, me, I'm pretty optimistic that he's a lot more liberal than he's been campaigning on and that upon entering the Oval Office Obama will rip the mask off and show the world just how liberal he really is, just like Bush did in 2001. I'm guessing a lot of other people further to the left feel somewhat similarly.

The fact that I hated Bush for pulling that shit but am almost banking on Obama to do the exact same thing is one of the biggest bits of hypocrisy I've ever noticed in myself, and I'm going to spend most of today thinking about it, I guess. (Update: I wrote the draft for this post this morning and then spent the rest of the day preparing my cryostat for a bake-out and pump down, completely forgetting to my early morning revelation. Damn you, grad school!)

Second, in a bid to become the next big "political analyst" I'm going to make this prediction about the election. I STAKE MY REPUTATION ON on the declaration that almost all of the polls will be wildly wrong. It's hard to say in which direction, but I'm guessing that Obama wins by an even larger margin than anticipated. Note my reputation is staked on the first claim. I'm not so sure about the latter claim.

If I'm right, I expect to be hired by the New York Times by the end of the week.

Place holder post

Holy fuck was Megan stupid. She said

some crap about how poor people probably deserve to be poor

This is an outrage against the once proud legacy of the Atlantic the likes of which we haven't seen in at least 10 days.

C'mon, the election is tomorrow. Eff Megan in an entirely metaphorical way.

Ok, there is this:

In case you haven't noticed, The Atlantic has a special feature on the home page: our crack reporting staff is twittering the election. The entire feed, including me, Josh Green, Marc Ambinder, and soon James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi, as well as some names you may not be as familiar with, will be Twittering for the next three days, so check early and often.

No.
Twitter has many valid and interesting uses. This is not one of them.
Anyways, see you Wed.
Just for the record, my prediction is an Obama win, ev total over/under of 300, just barely taking the over. (I see 301-311 as most likely. Or 291.)

Holy shit

Sarah Palin gets taken.
This is recent, too.
Gawddamn.

(Via TPM.)