Of course everyone knew that student loan reform would have passed with votes from every single Democrat if it hadn’t been rolled into the health care bill:
In reality, Ben Nelson voted against reconciliation because of his opposition to student loan reform:
“That said, however, I will vote against the House reconciliation package of add-ons now before the Senate.
“Perhaps most troubling is adding unrelated student loan reforms that have never been debated in the Senate and would result in a government takeover of student lending. It’s not clear why we would, on the one hand, jeopardize more than 30,000 private sector jobs, while, on the other we are promoting job creation in every state to aid our economic recovery. Ending private student lending also would disrupt a relationship many Nebraska colleges tell me they prefer because private lenders provide their students with personal service, tailored loan packages and on-campus support.
And I have not read a single commentator other than McMegan say it was expected to pass on its own. Here’s a typical assessment:
And there is this: Student loan reform might not have passed the Senate as a separate bill.
Obviously, I don’t expect any kind of correction or retraction. We’re not at the Atlantic. Who gives a fuck what we say?
dmsilev
What I don’t understand is why folks like Ezra persist in taking Megan seriously. She pretty obviously doesn’t bother doing any real background research into the stuff she writes about, and really should just be dismissed as the Sarah Palin of bloggers. Yet, for some reason, people persist in debating with her with the assumption that a real debate is possible.
dms
Brian J
A friend (who reads this site but doesn’t comment) and I were discussing her problems understanding discretionary spending, when the conversation turned toward what serious publications we’d pay for. I said that while I still received The Atlantic, I barely ever read it, and that McArdle wasn’t helping. If I ever ended up calling and cancelling, I’d probably tell them it was because of McArdle, like some others here have supposedly done.
After all, that’s the free market response, eh?
mistermix
You’d think an economist like McMegan would know that the feds have been trying to push “direct lending” since the Clinton years, but have never been able to get it done because of the bank lobby. But maybe she was asleep in the 90’s — sure seems like it to judge from her blog.
NobodySpecial
Ezra, McMegan, Yglesias, they’re all part of the New Beltway crowd. Getting each other jobs, socializing with each other, covering for each other’s shortcomings.
The best part is figuring out which one becomes Bobo 2.0.
Leisureguy
I’ve often wondered (a) how in the world Megan McArdle got that job—is she the child of someone famous and connected?, and (b) how in the world she keeps the job. She seems routinely to get facts wrong, writes embarrassingly bad columns, and yet sails along fine. Weird.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
dmsilev:
Young Ezra is far from the only one. She counts as friends a lot of the bloggers on the left who live in D.C. Yglesias is another one(among others). And some of them get PO’ed when you comment on their site and call her McMegan.
DougJ
@NobodySpecial:
Bingo.
dmsilev
@NobodySpecial: That sounds about right. I guess we should be thankful that in this generation of budding pundits, the McArdles seem to be outnumbered by more sensible people. For now anyway.
dms
Cacti
How dare the Government take over the FEDERAL STUDENT LOAN program!
The “free market” demands that government assume all the risk, while private middle men add cost without adding value.
cleek
they are the Future Villagers Club.
that’s one reason i refuse to watch BloggerHeads: it feels a lot like TV training for well-connected proto-pundits.
though i suppose the three in question have all moved on to the big leagues by now.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Leisureguy: She is the child of someone connected(though not famous at all), though I bet you’d be shocked if I told you what her dad did(not sure if he still does it or not).
Will
I stopped reading the Atlantic years ago, after they moved to DC, chopped out most of the arts coverage and drifted rightward. Didn’t feel the need to pay for a publication that was trying to be the right-wing New Yorker.
The breaking point was reading an article about Iraq after Saddam Hussein and realizing that it was one of a string of articles I’d read that were creepily sympathetic to totalitarianism.
Violet
@cleek:
Exactly. And they’re hardly “Future Villagers” at this point. They’re pretty much “Almost There Villagers.”
NuVillagers will look slightly different than Traditional Villagers because they will have come up as a result of the New Media. Just because someone got famous as a result of writing a blog doesn’t mean they aren’t vacuous, don’t have a huge ego, or are any less of a toady.
me
How much money does Nelson get from Nelnet?
Ann B. Nonymous
@NobodySpecial: They’re personal friends. I wish they’d learn to check their friendship at the office door, but it’s too small and “collegial” a community for that. A tiny, tiny industry.
(At minimum, I’d like them to pick on this Suderman character, who seems like a disreputable piece of work, but apparently spouses, fiancees, and even friends with benefits are also off-limits. Probably why journalists and power brokers like pairing off so much, e.g. Les Aspin and Judith Miller.)
Keith G
@me:
Is that his hair spray?
Superman Lover
What the hell are you all complaining about? She said “I believe” that all the Democrats would vote for it. It like calling the President a “Socialist” – as long as it’s your opinion that your sharing, you’re covered. Defending Libertarianism is hard enough without having to live in reality.
NHDem
It’s actually even worse than that. The student-loan reform was in there because the budget that had been adopted included two reconciliation provisions; one for health care and one for education. That’s why the student loan section could get through reconciliation. Also, it most assuredly did not have 60 votes. I haven’t read an article by McMegan in months now and have to say it’s been everything I thought it would be.
Shalimar
She really calls herself McMegan? Having never actually read her personally, I just assumed that was a name coined by people making fun of her. Sort of like saying she’s the fast food of intelligible thought.
NobodySpecial
@dmsilev:
I have a real simple guideline when the New Village People are involved.
I trust whatever they say about as far as I can spit a rat.
mss
Regarding the original question here (why was student loan reform rolled in to HCR), I thought the deciding factor was the reconciliation process. The Senate can only pass one budget reconciliation bill a year, and so once Reid decided to pass HCR through budget reconciliation to avoid a filibuster, student loans had to be bundled with it if they were to avoid a filibuster too.
timb
@me: He is Nelnet. The freaking jagoffs. I worked there for two years in a call center and could never figure out why they existed. We did get a corporate meeting where the CEO explained how he built a guaranteed profit machine (thanks to Republican Congressmen and Ben Nelson) from “nothing [pauses] except for the small bank my father left me.”
I wish Dad had given me a small bank. Maybe I wouldn’t have frittered away such largesse on screwing beauty school graduates out of the incomes and robbing the Federal govt blind.
someguy
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
Nothing you could tell me about what a right wing man does could shock me.
Let me qualify that: if it doesn’t involve blowing rent boys in airport bathrooms, looting pension funds or destroying the environment, I would be surprised.
Citizen_X
Excuse me, I know McBargle has shown her flaws again and again, but why is there this hate for Klein and Yglesias? I am apparently behind the times. When have they suddenly, and now and forevermore, been dubbed the New Villagers?
Yes, they may eventually become part of the chummy DC establishment press, and may reduce themselves to spewing conventional wisdom. That may even be part of human nature. But for now I’d like to hear some substantive criticism, please. Give me a little bit more than cynical pronunciations about, “Ahh, they all suck!”
Bill H
@Cacti:
Nature does this better than mankind does. The parasite always devours just enough of the host to sustain itself without killing the host. It knows (well, not “knows” but…) that if it gets too greedy it will kill the host and thereby kill itself at the same time.
The banks got in on the Federal Student Loan program and were not satisfied with the mere pittance that they were able to take from it. They started taking more and more from it until someone with more than two active brain cells, like Obama who has significantly more than two, comes along and says, “Aha, methinks they are pillaging the program,” and kicks them the fuck out.
I rather doubt that Obama says things like, “methinks,” but I’ll bet he says “aha” once in a while. He leaves it to Biden to say, “Kick them the fuck out.”
kommrade reproductive vigor
McCurdles gives an excellent summary of these twits when they run up a fact they don’t like:
And then, they make a pathetic attempt to give validity to the random firing of neurons they call thoughts with:
Hey kids, let me introduce you to this swell new thing called FACT CHECKING. A few minutes of research, a quote or two and a link will go a long way to keeping you from looking like a total ass. Again.
Can’t be bothered? Then StFu or we will mock you another time.
Anya
@NobodySpecial: I think you are being extremely unfair to Ezra and Ygleisias. How could you compare the fact free nonsense from McArdle to their thoughtful commentary.
Montysano
OT, but I’ve just returned from a 2 day trip to the hive mind that is wingnuttia, “debating” with high school friends about the state of affairs. I learned that assassination may be necessary, and that nukes would handily solve all our problems in Afghanistan.
The topic at hand was Beck and Limbaugh’s assertion that Kagan wants to restrict free speech, particularly for beleaguered, oppressed wingnut patriot pundits. Of course, what Kagan said was the exact, precise opposite of that. So my question was: Beck and Limbaugh made an assertion. Was it accurate? Yes or no? 50-some comments later, after much yowling about Rachel Maddow and Al Gore, I learn that “it’s something she might say” and “although she didn’t say it, we know that’s how she feels”. Talk about a monkey fucking a football….
We’ve earned whatever awaits us beyond the rapidly-approaching event horizon.
cleek
@Citizen_X:
i don’t think they (all) suck. i like MY just fine, and though i don’t read Klein, i have nothing against him.
but they already are part of the chummy DC press. that they haven’t achieved true Villager status is a mere matter of time.
matoko_chan
DougJ, its like i said before.
McMeghan is the best the “conservatives” have got.
So Yglesias and Ezra give her welfare epics just to have to someone on the otherside to play with.
Sully knows shes a retard, but he has to link SOMEONE on the conservative bench that is under forty and female and willing to whore intellectually for conservative failmemes.
She’s an intellectual scrub, and a bonafide graduate of the University of Wrong.
But the bench of youngish intellectual conservatives is paper thin.
jnfr
Background on McMegan’s background. Funny how often libertarians turn out to have rich parents.
Tom Levenson
@mistermix:
That’s your mistake. McMegan is not an economist. She has all the knowledge of economics that comes with a b-school degree, which is to say, very little.
As for her policy knowledge: combine b-school with (I believe) a literature undergraduate degree, and you have someone with no actual academic training in anything she writes about.
Now of course you can learn stuff without benefit of a university or a degree, and you can write very well about it. (I certainly hope so, given what I’ve done with my East Asian Studies BA.)
But the point is that McMegan has no actual formal expertise in economics. She hasn’t earned the deference of even the weak argument from authority. You can’t give her the benefit of the doubt, the thought that even if what she says sounds off, she must know something the rest of us don’t. You can only judge her on the work…and that ain’t pretty.
Chris
Doug, you and I and most of the rest of us here know McArdle likes to lie to make her political points, but The Atlantic can’t afford to risk losing conservative eyeballs, or the famed Slate/TNR axis of pseudo-intellectual contrarianism that finds a way to take “what everyone knows” and show why “everyone” isn’t quite as smart as the Slate/TNR set.
Think of it as constituent-group politics meeting the demand of the market for something that’s “news” without being news.
(And, of course, TA can’t risk acknowledging that McArdle lies, or that they know she lies, or that anyone says she lies, or else her fans will bitch about “the liberal media elite.”)
DFS
@Chris: This raises the question of how she has “fans” in the first place. Are there that many dumb Randroid fucks on the internet jerking it to fantasies of a woman who agrees with them?
I mean I guess the answer is self-evident, but it sure is fucking depressing.
eric
To the extent that the Rat Pack does not go after McWrong because they are friendly, it is not so easy to go after your friend in a public “beating,” even if deserved.
Dillon
I don’t think the Atlantic commenter “McMegan” is Megan McArdle.
me
@Keith G: Nelnet is a large student loan company based in, guess where, Nebraska.
eric
@eric: it is my recollection that IF Stone refused to socialize with people he might ever write about for this reason (it is a vague recollection).
eric
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@someguy: I suggest you read this:
exiledonline.com/megan-mcardles-hypocrisy-exposed-portrait-of-a-libertarian-as-a-taxpayer-subsidized…
She hates on what made her dad rich(or rich enough to afford to send her to an Ivy League school).
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@jnfr: Not only rich parents, but rich parents that got rich off of that evil socialist plot called public works.
Cerberus
@jnfr:
Quelle Surprise. In sad point of fact, I’ve yet to meet a libertarian yet who didn’t depend on public assistance or money in some way (from tenured professors at public state colleges to defense contractors to people on Social Security and so on and so on…).
@DFS:
Yes, libertarians reek with out and out misogyny so that even the most self-esteem shattered woman often finds herself slow in trepidation at dating that. I mean, they openly admit to worshipping as their one, defining novel a book wherein the main character rapes the shit out of the main female character and she loves him for it because of how manly that makes him.
As such, women tend to avoid libertarianism like the plague and thus Randroids pretty much will do anything to hear from an attractive, young Randroid because they are too twisted to be able to land most women and besides most women have that unfortunate habit of thinking they are human beings and arguing with them or openly laughing at their puerile idea of their own intellect.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Citizen_X: It’s not hate for Big Media Matt and Young Ezra. The problem is they treat spouting from McMegan as serious discourse.
Joel
@NobodySpecial: One of these things is not like the others…
FlipYrWhig
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: Yglesias in particular seems to think of McArdle as the cheerleader who lets one token dork sit at her table and defends him against the other Mean Girls. From Klein-McArdle I pick up on more of a sparring-partner vibe, but from Yglesias-McArdle I pick up on unrequited love.
Will
Eric,
Seymour Hersch also refuses to socialize. Back when I was a newspaper reporter, it was common practice.
But that was the Bush Leagues, where reporters were lucky if they got paid enough to cover the bills. The big boys in DC are playing a different game, where being chummy can make you a millionaire celebrity.
El Cid
THE GOVERNMENT DIDN’T ‘TAKE OVER STUDENT LOANS’ YOU JACKASS MORONS.
THE GOVERNMENT JUST STOPPED PAYING FOR PRIVATE BANK INTERMEDIARIES TO USE THE GOVERNMENT’S OWN GOD-DAMN MONEY TO PROFIT OFF OF WITH INTEREST WHILE ASSUMING NO RISK.
God damn I hate these fucks.
El Cid
And, yes, it’s completely not cute that McAddled has a little peer group who thinks here uninformed Randian fraud propaganda is cute & worthwhile.
Tazistan Jen
@Dillon:
If you are right, the premise for this whole post is gone.
DougJ, is that actually Megan McArdle or not?
El Cid
@Tazistan Jen: You know, I was actually assuming this was known, otherwise the post… Good question.
someguy
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
Amazing. So he’s a corrupt, well-connected, corporatist hack. Kind of like a centrist version of Megan herself, except without the Randroid hatred of government. Nice. ‘Bout what I wouldn’t expect.
Bullsmith
IIRC, the commenter McMegan presents herself as the author of the posts she’s relentlessly defending. So unless the real McArdle is too lazy to check her comments or endorses a proxy puppet, it’s actually her. I think she’s far too vain not to pathologically defend herself. You can’t be that wrong that consistently without being deeply invested in your fantasies.
Marc
McMegan defends the posts in “I” form, so the grammar is mighty strange if it isn’t The Libertarian Elf herself.
NobodySpecial
@Anya: Matt ‘This war thing isn’t so bad’ Yglesias? Some of us have memories that stretch farther than last Tuesday.
Corner Stone
@NobodySpecial: Same problem I have with people glorifying spackerman.
Corner Stone
Damn. Fastball right above the knees and in the dead red middle of the plate.
/astros v sf giants
Brien Jackson
@cleek:
How so? Especially in Yglesias’s case?
MBSS
mcmegan is not megan mcardle
it’s actually rupert murdoch’s sock puppet.
Anne Laurie
@MBSS:
Which one? McArdle’s boy toy Peter Suderman?
t jasper parnell
@Citizen_X: MY is a dope. He has, what, a degree in philosophy? He sounds off on topics about which he knows nothing, e.g., insider trading shouldn’t be illegal; he assumes knowledge of things he about which he knows nothing, his post on German politics wrt coallitions etc was worse than superficial, and he thinks and is apparently thought of as a serious person. Sheesh.
DougJ
@Tazistan Jen:
I am almost positive it is her. And if it’s not, why is she letting a commenter impersonate her?