As E.D. notes, Ted Olson will probably be called a RINO after this appearance on Fox News Sunday. Here’s what it takes: believing in the Bill of Rights, the 14th amendment, and an independent judiciary. It’s worth watching just to see him demolish Chris Wallace’s “but you’re a conservative!” questions, including one about how he could possibly agree with Hollywood Liberal Rob Reiner.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
Where The Chilly Winds Don’t Blow
DougJ asks us all a question:
if you were the business and economics editor of Atlantic, would you devote blog posts to analyzing Michelle Obama’s vacation habits?
To understand why McMegan exists at The Atlantic, you need to realize that the magazine doesn’t really care about business or economics. All the other writers there are interested mainly in politics and culture (except perhaps for James Fallows). Nobody else there is qualified to judge McMegan’s output — I doubt they even care that much about what she writes. Similarly, I would guess that most of the readers of The Atlantic don’t give a shit about business or economics, since the website is top-heavy with political and cultural commentary.
Writers who are serious about business and economics write where there’s an audience for those topics, and where the publication takes those topics seriously. Take Felix Salmon at Reuters, or even Paul Krugman at the Times, as examples.
So, McMegan is a hothouse flower. She doesn’t have to put up with any criticism or scrutiny from people that matter to her (colleagues and editors), so can do stuff like blithely ignoring order-of-magnitude errors. When a serious, knowledgeable writer comes across her work, the usual reaction is a jaw drop. And when she emotes about topics like Michelle Obama’s vacation, she probably gets a pat on the head, because she’s writing at a magazine that cares about politics, not economics.
She’s irrelevant to the real conversation about her topic, and we’d be best to mainly ignore her, except to point and laugh, occasionally.
A Simple Point, Often Forgotten
[…]Let’s focus instead on a more basic question: why does America have regulators?If companies always agreed with regulators’ rules, there would be no need for regulators. The very point of a regulator is to do things that companies don’t like, out of concern for the welfare of the market or the consumer. […]
Regulatory capture is so ensconced in our political system, and media is so receptive to the complaints of companies being regulated, that this simple point is often forgotten.
(via)
Tokenism
When I was in college in the ’80s I worked a summer job in the investment department of a big corporation. This part of the company managed a couple of billion dollars in assets, so they had a lot of MBAs from big-name schools. They were all white and mostly male. The company had a diversity program, so the department’s management was told to hire someone brown.
Management resented that they were forced to do that, so they engaged in some malicious compliance by hiring a black college athlete who had barely graduated from college. He was such a terrible writer that one of the managers hired the English teacher from his kids’ private high school to give this guy writing lessons. He partied hard, came to work late, and generally fucked up. After a few months, he had learned the game and quit because he had found a better job. The now-smarter management scoured the rest of the company to find another black man and gave him a giant promotion. This guy had better work habits and could write, but he knew nothing about investments. More tutoring ensued. For all I know, that guy is still working there today.
The way that this company treated the black men it hired didn’t tell me a lot about African Americans. But it sure told me a hell of a lot about how the older, white managers thought about African Americans. They couldn’t conceive that a black person would be qualified to do a MBA’s job, so they didn’t even bother looking for a qualified applicant. Even though they wouldn’t have looked twice at a white male with the same qualifications, the man they hired was unfireable because they needed a token, and because they were pisspants scared that he would turn around and accuse them of racism.
This was the ’80s, and the people running the department had grown up in the ’30s and ’40s in a very segregated city. If I went to the same company today, I’d be surprised to find the same attitudes. That’s why I just don’t why Michael Steele is still working at the RNC. I thought full-on tokenism of the type I experienced in the ’80s went out with shoulder pads and ankle warmers.
Mensch
Fareed Zakaria returns an ADL award and the $10K that went with it:
[…] I cannot in good conscience hold onto the award or the honorarium that came with it and am returning both. I hope that it might add to the many voices that have urged you to reconsider and reverse your position on this issue. This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come. Whether or not the center is built, what is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain your reputation.
Zakaria’s action and letter are an interesting contrast to Anthony Weiner’s public silence and weasel-worded, evasive missive on the same topic.
Hard To Argue With This
Air your disgust in this open thread.
Shell Game
With a record number of people on food stamps, it just makes good fiscal sense that Congress keeps cutting that program to pay for other aid programs.
For some reason, this little snippet from a Lindsey Graham interview seems relevant:
We have been in Korea for, you know, since the end of the Korean War. We’ve been in Europe since World War II, nobody cares.