Month: September 2009

James Surowiecki gives no quarter to the inflation hawks:

In the past ninety years, the U.S. has had only one sustained bout with high inflation—in the seventies. That track record should engender some faith that central bankers are going to be responsible, and that a healthy industrial economy isn’t prone to regular inflationary spirals. It hasn’t. Instead, we’re always about to relive 1974 all over again, which is why last year, as oil prices rose, we were bombarded with references to “stagflation.” In a way, there’s something profoundly puritanical, in the original sense of that word, about the inflation hawks: we are always on the verge of sinning, always about to succumb to our worst impulses. Even the rhetoric of inflation—the “debasement” of the currency—carries a moralistic tinge.

Weigel corrects Politico:

A debate about the power of the executive branch and the collapsing trust between the president and the Senate — it’s the constant filibusters of presidential nominees that really started this process of end-runs around confirmation hearings — would be healthy. But so far this “czars” debate seems like a witch hunt egged on by sloppy reporting.

The Dish missed this story from last week:

Provisional data from 2008 indicates that the Massachusetts divorce rate has dropped from 2.3 per thousand in 2007 down to about 2.0 per thousand for 2008. What does that mean ? To get a sense of perspective consider that the last time the US national divorce rate was 2.0 per thousand (people) was 1940. You read that correctly. The Massachusetts divorce rate is now at about where the US divorce rate was the year before the United States entered World War Two.

These enclaves of intellectual freedom have long been the enemies of theocrats. And Ahmadi turns the screws on the students he has lost for ever.

Taxes will be necessary to close the massive fiscal hole caused by Bush and Cheney and the recession. Neither party is proposing this. Bruce Bartlett explains why.

A reader writes:

The hysteria among the members of the conservative base is the central issue now, even more than jobs, Afghanistan, or health care. And it's a good issue for the President, both because those folks are so hysterical that hanging that tag on them should be pretty easy, and also because it's an issue that can serve as a container which holds almost all of the other issues.

If the President can win over the middle on the hysteria issue, the other side becomes marginalized more or less across the board.

There's another point that ought to be made about this craziness. There have always been a lot of people with crazy political opinions in our country. It's not the existence of these folks that's different now. The difference is the deal with the devil one of the major parties has made by embracing them. 

I'm not sure why they've done it, because it seems like a losing strategy to me, and beyond that, it seems like a strategy that could only be embraced by someone who is utterly and completely devoid of patriotism. The only real explanation that I can come up with is that the interests of "movement conservatism, the business" trumps patriotic conservatism as a political philosophy in the GOP.

The power of the conservative industrial complex – utterly cynical enterprises like Eagle Publishing and Fox News, for example – is real and has done a huge amount to destroy an uncynical and constructive conservatism. But again, until someone in the party who has authority takes them on, until we get a GOP Sistah Souljah moment against the Malkins and Coulters and Becks and Hannitys, the cancer will keep spreading. If you think Mitt Romney is capable of this, dream on.

Salvador Dali apparently needed the money (or just really loved Lanvin chocolate):

The evolution of Darwin's book visualized.

(Hat tip: Big Picture)

Greg Sargent parses a new Gallup poll:

It finds that for all the hoopla about the success of the town hall hooliganism, voters remain basically deadlocked over the proposal, with a quarter of voters saying they still have “no opinion” on whether they want their member of Congress to vote for it. That’s not all: It also finds that a surprising 28% of independents are undecided, too. The independent vote, of course, is one of the key battlegrounds of the health care wars. While independents are tilting against the plan right now, the large bloc of undecideds suggests there’s plenty of room to make up ground.

Ambers takes the same view of affairs as I did in my column. Beep beep.