Make Michael Scherer stop: There is a battle looming in Congress, a contest that will pit many of the most powerful companies in America against each other, potentially reallocate trillions of dollars in spending, and literally impact the future health and well-being of each and every American. No one knows how the conflict will end, …
Hats off to Perry
Today’s reporter chat on the Washington Post was quite interesting. I got Perry Bacon to take the following question: Re: more “class warfare”: Since you’re bravely taking a lot of tough questions today, how about this one: is it fair to conclude that most in the national media identify with elites — political elites and …
Memewatch: too fast, too furious
It’s interesting to watch these things evolve. Brooks last week: But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the …
Memewatch: revote in MN
We’ve already seen two Washington Post reporters write in favor of a revote in Minnesota. Now Rasumssen is out with a small sample poll in which a small plurality favors revote and the Politico is already pimping it: But when asked whether there should be another election to determine — a prospect raised by Coleman …
Bad news about productivity
From Bloomberg: U.S. worker productivity in the fourth quarter unexpectedly fell as the economy shrank even faster than companies cut jobs and hours. Productivity, a measure of employee output per hour, fell at a 0.4 percent annual rate, the first decrease in a year and much less than the 3.2 percent gain estimated last month, …
Dow 36000
Excerpt from an interview with the great Jim Glassman: So, ten years ago you predicted the Dow would reach 36,000. This week, the Dow fell to its lowest level since 1997, and 6,000 seems more likely than 36,000. On behalf of investors and readers everywhere: What happened? I think that people who read my columns …
Suck on this, Russian journalists
This is so sick, I’m not really comfortable joking about it. From Vanity Fair’s “Thomas Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions”: In 2001, Friedman advised the American citizenry to “keep rootin’ for Putin,” hailing the K.G.B. veteran as “Russia’s first Deng Xiaoping” and a strong force for reform. Three years later, Friedman announced in his most awkward …