I think Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog might be on to something.
Why July, though? Because congressmen are out of town?
by John Cole| 47 Comments
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Excellent Links
I think Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog might be on to something.
Why July, though? Because congressmen are out of town?
by John Cole| 65 Comments
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Free Markets Solve Everything, Republican Stupidity, Clown Shoes
Ed Prescott is a Nobel-prize winning economist. But according to Stephen Williamson, an economist who attended a presentation given by Prescott on Wednesday in Montreal, Prescott believes the recession is President Obama’s fault. (Italics mine)
Ed Prescott did pathbreaking work in the economics profession, and his Nobel prize is well-deserved. His work with Finn Kydland made macroeonomists more quantitatively disciplined, and serves as a benchmark for most of the work done in macro in the last 30 years, including New Keynesian economics, models with financial frictions, and incomplete markets models. However, I doubt that there were any people in the room yesterday who took Ed seriously. Ed’s key points were: 1. Monetary policy does not matter. 2. Financial factors are the symptoms, not the causes, of the recent downturn. 3. The recession was due to an Obama shock, i.e. labor supply fell because US workers anticipate higher future taxes.
Perhaps Prescott delivered a more nuanced explanation of this thesis than Williamson’s summary does justice to. But on the face of it, there’s really no other way to describe it than complete lunacy.
Just for starters: The National Bureau of Economic Research dates the recession as beginning in December 2007, a month before Obama won his first caucus vote. We’re not only talking about some amazingly prescient workers here, but also some very confused people, since a majority of them went on to vote for Obama, even as labor markets imploded. And what to make of the fact that the employment picture has improved throughout Obama’s term of office, despite the fact that, if anything, higher taxes are more assured now than they were before his election?
Wingnuts come in all shapes, sizes, and levels of education.
by DougJ| 37 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute
When I talk about things that I hope are hit by meteors, I sometimes forget to mention the Aspen Ideas Festival. That’s an oversight on my part. Steve Clemons has some solid coverage of VSPs (David Gergen, Niall Ferguson, Mort Zuckerman) fear-mongering about debt (I couldn’t make it very far through this clip but what I saw was pretty awful):
I don’t know if this is snark or what but I like it:
As Niall Ferguson was racing out — mouthing from the stage to Pom and Fiji Water entrepreneur Lynda Resnick that he just couldn’t do dinner with her and Barbra Streisand that night — to get to London to give a talk at St. Paul’s Cathedral titled “‘Men, Money and Morality: How Can Trust in Banking Be Restored”, I asked him whether he had any concern about a 1937 redux.
by DougJ| 79 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, General Stupidity, We Are All Mayans Now
I think M. J. Rosenberg (my favorite TPM cafe person) is onto something here:
I guess the reports that Jeff Goldberg is about to publish a neocon magnum opus calling for bombing Iran are true.
[…..]Following the Iraq pattern (Goldberg was lead boy in the Iraq pro-war chorus) his piece won’t come out until the fall. As Karl Rove said last time, you don’t roll out a new product (in this case, war) in August.
Rosenberg thinks Obama may go along with it. I’m skeptical about that, but I wonder if the very liberal New Yorker magazine will publish another Goldberg piece like this one from 2002:
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction clearly are not meant solely for domestic use. Several years ago in Baghdad, Richard Butler, who was then the chairman of UNSCOM, fell into conversation with Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s confidant and Iraq’s deputy Prime Minister. Butler asked Aziz to explain the rationale for Iraq’s biological-weapons project, and he recalled Aziz’s answer: “He said, ‘We made bioweapons in order to deal with the Persians and the Jews.’ “
Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction are focussed on Israel. “Israel is the whole game,” Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. “Saddam is always saying publicly, ‘Who is going to fire the fortieth missile?’ “—a reference to the thirty-nine Scud missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War. “He thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with biological weapons.” Chalabi added, “This is the only way he can be Saladin”—the Muslim hero who defeated the Crusaders. Students of Iraq and its government generally agree that Saddam would like to project himself as a leader of all the Arabs, and that the one sure way to do that is by confronting Israel.
In the Gulf War, when Saddam attacked Israel, he was hoping to provoke an Israeli response, which would drive America’s Arab friends out of the allied coalition. Today, the experts say, Saddam’s desire is to expel the Jews from history.
The experts do say interesting things, don’t they?
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Manic Progressive
This kills me:
On the Left, a False Choice Fuels the Growing Civil War Over Obama
There is a civil war on the left over Barack Obama. The fault lines are jagged, and depending on the issue, porous, but broadly, the split is along two fronts:
1.) Those who believe that critiquing — and occasionally opposing — the president on issues such as gay rights, civil liberties and national security is healthy and necessary and those who believe that Obama’s progressive critics are going too far, reinforcing rightwing attacks and undermining his presidency.
When talking about false choices, it is probably best not to start with a false dichotomy. There are lots of us out there who think healthy critiques and opposing the President are good things yet who also believe some progressive critics are going too far and not helping at all.
Of course, I’ll have to ask what Grover Norquist thinks to be sure. Also, Rahm is the suxor!
by DougJ| 80 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute
Jon Chait and Brendan Nyhan had some good pieces last week about how Peggy Noonan’s columns are essentially mystical in outlook. Obviously, you don’t need them to tell you that; nevertheless, I was happy to see two semi-VSPs touch on one of the things we rant about here regularly.
I would argue that David Brooks’ columns are also essentially mystical (believe it or not, I’m tired of talking about Bobo today, but everyone’s talking about his anti-stimulus idiocy in the comments). Yes, he wears glasses and talks about Hume, Burke, and Niebuhr, and even cites quantitative studies (from National Affairs and Steve Sailer, which aren’t so different when you get down to it). But there’s no evidence he understands any of the quantitative arguments — the citations are one and two-line throwaways, and he failed high-school math according to yesterday’s NY mag profile. The imaginary businessmen from Racine, Washington he communes with at the Applebee’s salad bar are no more real than the dolphins who saved Elian Gonzales.
I don’t find Nooners and her ilk to be all that toxic; sure, Brian Williams loves her, but she’s openly superstitious, and sometimes openly drunk. Mysticism dressed up as high-brow analysis is toxic. Using totebag-friendly pseudo-intellectual references to argue in favor of pointless wars and irrational economic policies is much more damaging than drunkenly blathering on about magical dolphins.
by DougJ| 47 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
I was about halfway through this extended NY Magazine Bobo blowjob, as the hesitation marks on my wrists prove, when these gems from Matt Taibbi came in:
Matt Taibbi on True/Slant called Brooks, among other things, a “spineless Beltway geek” on a “pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred” who “looks like a professional groveler/ass-kisser” and is “the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley look-alike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back.”
You know, for all I care Matt Taibbi can claim the government risks a 26 quadrillion dollar loss on its TARP investments, as long as long as he keeps writing stuff like that.