It doesn’t matter that Kthug is a Nobel prize-winning economist. Joe-Scar has his beliefs, and he is sticking to them.
And the decline of western society marches onward.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.
DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.
I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.
Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.
Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”
There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.
Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.
Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.
This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.
Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.
There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.
Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.
“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly
When I was faster i was always behind.
Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.
Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.
Hill Dweller
Krugman rightly cites this abomination of a column and some flailing in Europe as signs of desperation from the austerians.
Squint Scarborough is a half-wit, but that is a feature in the Village.
Litlebritdifrnt
Joe believes what he believes and he has his willing sychophants regularly booked on the show to agree with him and call Krugman an idiot (see Ratner, Ford, et. al.) What is amusing is that Joe is taking to Politico almost daily in order to rebut Krugman. Methinks it is not going to turn out well for Joe. They need to get Mika’s dad on the show to call Joe an idiot all morning again.
Flukebucket
I was once told that economics was not a science but was a religion. I will never understand any of it.
Poopyman
How many times does one of us have to write some variant of “Forget it Jake, it’s Politico”? It actually makes sense that JoeScar got published there,although I suspect there would have been a lot of takers.
Litlebritdifrnt
Oh BTW I have a kitten on my lap and a puppy at my feet. Life is good.
General Stuck
Scarborogh is a four square moron, spawned on the Redneck Riviera. But it should also be obvious that our economy is suffering from some long term structural problems, that really aren’t debt related, for now. Or that short term stimulus can readily fix. For now. But you got to keep the patient breathing in the meantime, and government spending is the only way to do that.
PsiFighter37
Maybe if Joe talked about why dead interns were in his office, I’d bother to pay any attention to the crap that leaks from his excuse of a brain.
Fuck him, and fuck all the Laffer supply-siders who think the trickle-down unicorn and the austerity neopluradon will magically fix stuff. At least if the sequester goes through, these clowns may see some pain in the D.C. area, which basically was unscathed by the recession. Someone needs to open their eyes.
Mister Harvest
“Fixing this horrible, horrible problem that is horrible because it is horrible will require us to punish lots and lots of people who are poorer than I am. Really punish them. Not just a little bit, but really really punish them. I get all tingly when I write that.”
dr. bloor
Ugh. Forewarning about links to Politijoke, please.
Litlebritdifrnt
Listen Joe has the same problem that my local RWNJ radio host has, he is able to have two completely and utterly contradictory positions in his head at the same time and then spout lyrical about them. For example just this week he (my local RWNJ radio host) was saying that “government doesn’t create jobs” while hosting an entire show with his guest the lobbyist for “Alliance for Cherry Point’s Tomorrow” (ACT) who is making sure that the local Military bases are not impacted by the sequester and thereby devastating the local economy which said RWNJ host tells us on a DAILY fucking basis is the largest payroll in Eastern NC.
Because we have had snow this weekend I am sure that on Monday he will begin the show with “how is that global warming thing working out for you” and then laughing his ass off while hosting a show JUST THIS WEEK on “sea level rise” and the impact it is going to have on insurance rates for coastal properties and what we can do about it.
These people are insane. We all need to accept that and just figure out how to work around them.
WJS
Finally, someone realizes what we’ve known all along: Ronald Reagan did nothing to save Social Security or deal with America’s problems.
It takes a brave, brave man like Joe to tell it like it is–Reagan was a fraud. And President Clinton was a much better President than Joe will ever admit.
Redshift
Derek Thompson at the Atlantic had a nice post about Scarborough’s whining. The forgotten element of the argument is that Krugman’s point was not just that we shouldn’t be focusing on the debt now, but that the Beltway crowd is incapable of focusing on more than one thing, so they should be focusing on jobs now. Scarborough insisted that they can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” and then spent the entire week, in every outlet available to him, yelling about debt and deficits and never mentioning jobs once.
hitchhiker
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Appears to me that that’s exactly what the president has decided.
Redshift
C’mon, let’s not get authoritarian here. The key here is that Krugman is highly trained and knowledgeable, and that he presents compelling evidence to support his position, not that he’s a bigwig.
El Cid
Paul Krugman may have lots of facts and carefully constructed arguments and logical comparisons, but Joe Scarborough has what Krugman doesn’t: a loudmouth, boorish ability to substitute volume and an appearance of shocked incredulity for these namby-pamby whiners going on about what is or isn’t true, etc.
El Cid
@Redshift: Except that the key there is that JoeScar has neither compelling arguments nor any other type of qualification or achievement which would suggest a worthy role in influencing in any way great or small a national debate on economic policy.
Chris
@Flukebucket:
Depends whose economics. For Communists and Randroids, it’s a religion. But Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes did just fine treating it as a science.
Villago Delenda Est
Scarborough is, quite simply, a waste of skin.
Mandalay
Scarborough’s article is shamelessly cutting and pasting from another article by an economist from the RAND Corportation, and using a call to authority: you don’t have to believe me, this stuff is coming from the RAND Corporation!!!
But it is telling to read the original article, and see what Scarborough chose not to cut and paste:
Funny how Joe loved the RAND article so much that he copied negative chunks of it word for word, but carefully skipped the parts that reflected badly on Republicans: political squabbling hurting the economy, the need for increased government revenue, and the need to cut defense spending.
Scarborough is a fraud.
Litlebritdifrnt
@hitchhiker:
Thank the FSM for that too. You simply cannot reason with people like that. It is time we, as well as POTUS, realized that.
muddy
He always looks so funny to me, because they use so much white concealer around his eyes, to make them less gimlet-like. The whole area just glows. It proves he’s an idiot, else he would ask them to do a better job. Probably he thinks he looks pretty that way. Fucking bitch.
22over7
This kerfuffle is only about Krugthulu embarrassing Joe on Joe’s own show. So Joe is wailing and gnashing about things he doesn’t understand because he’s not allowed to take Krugman behind the bleachers after school.
But the larger entertainment is the discomfort of the Villagers. Remember that Joe went badly off the reservation about guns. Fred Kaplan insulted Senate Republicans. Ruth Marcus slapped Senator Cruz’s hand in her last column, for being intemperate in public.
When David Gregory has a show discussing exactly how crazy the republicans have got, then we’ll know we’re winning.
Litlebritdifrnt
BTW go here
http://www.digitaltheatre.com/?gclid=CKz_kpf8u7UCFQY5nAodYy4A0Q
Where you can download the best of British theatre (for a fee) and watch brilliant plays like David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing. I literally LOL’d. It is a great production. I am going to download Jonathan Pryce in “King Lear” next because I love him as an actor.
waynski
Joe is the Hank Kingsley of politics. Hey now!
Ted & Helleno
What’s great though, John, is how Obama, immediately after taking the white House five years ago, asked the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman to join his administration to bring sanity and accountability back to the financial sector.
What they have achieved over the last four years is nothing short of…
…oh wait.
Never mind.
Buffalo Rude
I, for one, welcome and encourage more imbeciles like Squinty to hang their bare asses out there for credentialed economists like KTHUG to empirically kick all over the place.
DH
And The Mustache of Understanding feels the same way:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-unparalyze-us.html?hp
Since asking anyone to read Freidman’s prose is like asking someone to eat broken glass, I will simply give this gem of an insight in his column here if you don’t want to be a masochist
and read the whole column:
“I believe there is now a group of Republican politicians and C.E.O.’s who would meet Obama in the middle”
Where are these persons? On the Moon?
katie5
Used to stream JoeScar every morning. He woke me up by getting my blood boiling. In the past month, he’s become unhinged about the debt. We use the word unhinged a lot but Scarborough gets so worked up that he’s started screaming at his guests. So much so that he makes Ed Rendell uncomfortable. Tragedy is that Mika, the one voice of relative reason, now believes this shit.
katie5
@22over7: But JoeScar went off the cliff on the debt way before Krugman showed up. I was flabbergasted that Krugman was allowed on Joe’s show, so much is he surrounded by nolabels sycophants.
muddy
@Redshift:
I imagine he got that “bigwig” title, by presenting compelling evidence in the first place.
waynski
Just to follow up: linky
katie5
@Redshift: @muddy: Yet another example of right-wing selective acceptance of science. It’s good science if it supports their POV. Or it’s bad science, in which they undercut all science. My way or total annihilation. The asymmetry is breath-taking.
waynski
@katie5: This. I tuned out of Morning Austerity months ago.
katie5
@waynski: Plus his inflated badge of courage in adopting these causes. Guy acts like he should receive a purple heart for his stances. Unfortunately, that’s what draws viewers to his show–the nobility of the iconoclast. Freakonomics takes to MSNBC.
El Caganer
@DH: In the middle of what? On second thought, I’m not sure I want to know.
And that Rand senior economist must be some mega-heavy dude, so much so that Joe could neither mention his name nor link to his writing.
Steeplejack
Oh, jeez, the site has gone full bork on me. Suddenly I appear to be getting some variation of the mobile site on my laptop.
ETA: And now I’m back to the regular version. Trippy.
balconesfault
More troubling for the future is that private domestic investment—the fuel for future economic growth—shows a strong negative correlation with government debt levels over several business cycles dating back to the late 1950s.
Well yeah. When the economy crashes, government debt goes up, and private domestic investment goes down. Duh.
My Truth Hurts
Joe is right about Paul Krugman. Just as right as he was about Nate Silver.
What a hack.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Steeplejack: I get the mobile site on the next post (Open Thread) but not on any of the others. And I can’t click it back to the desktop version.
Strange things are happenin’.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
IMO, the problem with a lot of economists is that they can’t admit that their field is social science. They love to pretend that the models they come up with are as immutable as Newton’s Laws, but economics doesn’t exist without people.
Heliopause
Gotta hand it to Scarborough. It’s obvious that if you took a random turd from either Krugman or Nate Silver, cut it in half and then divided the remainder by fifty, it would still be about a gazillion percent smarter than him. Just what makes that little old ant think he can move a rubber tree plant?
angler
This is good for Krugman and the Keynesians. Scarborough plays for the Washington Generals, and is being dunked on and pantsed as did the Harlem Globetrotters to their set up men. More proof of MSNBCs liberal bias that they make this doofus the voice of the right.
RSA
@Mnemosyne:
As a non-economist, I have that impression too. The data are so equivocal that you can see different schools of thought with diametrically opposed theories about what’s going on and what to do to change things. And values creep in without being acknowledged, I think.
qwerty42
John wrote:
John, John, John … your attachment to credentials and the various things that might qualify you as “someone who can speak knowledgeably about …” is so old-fashioned. These days, it is about sound-bites, and slogans, and “strongly-held” ( erroneous, no matter) beliefs and whatever else can be used to deceive the populace. Really, you need to get with it.
Roger Moore
@DH:
This is quite true. The President has offered to use a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases to reduce the deficit. The Republicans and CEOs are willing to meet him halfway by accepting the spending cuts but not the revenue increases. Isn’t that fair?
WereBear
I do think he’s been overlooked. Sounds like a great “Lear”!
Mike G
Shorter Republicans:
My ignorance is better than your knowledge. Because I can shout louder. Also Jesus.
waynski
@Mike G: Perfect.
liberal
@muddy:
Yes, but there are certainly “Nobel”-winning economists whose views aren’t predicated on real-world data. Like all the RBC-advocating ones.
Applejinx
@muddy:
I can still see him. Not enough.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Litlebritdifrnt: Thank you for the link. I saw Jonathan Pryce live at the RSC in Measure for Measure and have always wanted to see him perform in Shakespeare again. Do you know if there is a service charge for converting pounds into dollars, or the price so reasonable and the product so fabulous one doesn’t care?
Frank
Reminds me of the days when Andrew Sullivan used to do this with Krugman. What fun it was as Sully would go down in flames, again and again.
Rex Everything
It doesn’t even begin to matter to the Joe Scarboroughs of the world that Krugman has been right about everything for at least 10 years (and there’s an easily accessible track record there), while the austerians and deficit hawks have been wrong about everything.
SFAW
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Yeah, his Infiniti commercials (i.e. the Zen ones) were the apotheosis of that high art.
Tomolitics
Joe Scar is getting pantsed again, just like he did by Mika’s dad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mk18af8z9Y
And for those playing the home game, Zbig is right about Taba and Joe Scar is WRONG (quelle suprise):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taba_Summit