In a piece titled “Delusions of Wisdom” (“without a hint of irony”) Paul Krugman weighed in on the state of economic journalism these days:
Both Jonathan Chait and Charles Pierce have a field day with a Politico piece titled, without a hint of irony, Crafting a boom economy. In said piece they talk to various Very Serious People, and divine the insider consensus on What Must Be Done — which mainly seems to involve, naturally, cutting Social Security and Medicare while reducing corporate tax rates.
What I find remarkable about this piece is that after everything that has happened these past five years or so, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen still take it for granted that these people actually know what they’re talking about; the whole premise of the article is that the insiders really do have the key, not just to good policy, but to achieving a dramatic rise in the growth rate.
Butt wait! There’s something in a Paul Krugman article that I completely agree with!
But the real lesson is that those insiders are not only self-dealing, but profoundly ignorant and wrong-headed. It’s too bad that so many journalists still can’t see that.
Hee. I don’t mean to inject race into the debate, butt isn’t that just the epitome of the Pot calling the Kettle black?
In fact, I probably shouldn’t inject the word “pot” into the debate either.
Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, dude.
A person has to be so careful with their words these days. Butt getting back to Mr. Krugman: as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day…
Although some clocks are so broken they’re only right once a day – probably digital
You can’t blame Pauly for having a big head; after all, how many other economists have been singled out by Big Guy as one of the really Big Brains - and in the prestigious business journal Rolling Stone no less:
Do you read Paul Krugman?
I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman's obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there, but I also read some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going. There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan's on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there. The New Yorker and The Atlantic still do terrific work.
Of course, in the same interview Big Guy also gave a shout-out to a few other luminaries from the Age of Enlightenment:
Obama did offer lavish praise for a couple liberal pundits--Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, the New York Times's Paul Krugman, and Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan. "I don't watch a lot of TV news," said Obama. "I don't watch cable at all. I like The Daily Show, so sometimes if I'm home late at night, I'll catch snippets of that. I think Jon Stewart's brilliant. It's amazing to me the degree to which he's able to cut through a bunch of the nonsense – for young people in particular, where I think he ends up having more credibility than a lot of more conventional news programs do."
So in case you’ve been at a loss to explain what’s going on here in After America, there it is: the culture has been taken over by fake news entertainers, communist economists and anti-Semite bloggers.
Now, for a quick update on the Michigan Goon squad: largely unreported elsewhere, union thugs at the Right to Work protest trashed the cart of a hot dog vendor who had been hired by the Americans for Prosperity group, just before they slashed and destroyed their tent with people still trapped inside. The small business owner, Clint Tarvor is black. I wouldn’t mention that except for the fact that the thugs morons low information union voters apparently hurled racial epithets at him and that would normally, in our hyper-racially sensitive times, be news; say if it had been a Tea Party protest or something.
Clint Tarvor, former owner of a hot dog vending cart
“Everyone that had a ticket I had given a hot dog to,” the 63-year-old owner of Clint’s Hot Dog Cart and Casual Catering told FoxNews.com. “So when two guys, one with a mask, came to get their hot dogs, I didn’t think anything of it because they had tickets and I was just there for a job.”
He described the action that ensued as “violent.” Only minutes after he’d handed the two men their hot dogs, the pair tore down the tent, turned over his serving tables, smashed his hot dogs, tossed a cooler filled with sodas and spilled his chili.
“I kept explaining that I was just here to do a job, that I wasn’t on anybody’s side, but when people started calling me racial slurs, my friend who works at the Capitol told me I had to get out of there, so I crawled out,” said Tarver, who is black.
Wow! Those Tea Party hooligans union thugs low information voters sure are violent. What? You didn’t see that on the news? A vicious racial attack like that, on a black man just trying to do get a fair shake in order to be able to pay his fair share? That’s really news, right? Well, maybe one of those NYT columnists will cover it later. I guess the problem is that by contracting to provide services to a conservative organization, you’re considered “scab” labor.
Sheeze! It’s not like Clint was serving hot “dogs”
Oh, and don’t worry: those heartless Republicans took full responsibility and raised enough money online to pay for Clint’s lost food and equipment with enough left over for him to take a nice trip to Florida if he wants to.
That’s all I have time for today folks. Butt if you would like a complete update on the Michigan Goon Squad, check out The Other McCain where Smitty has a rather thorough list of updates and links, and an explanation for why we haven’t heard Big Guy weigh in on the violence and lack of civility on the part of his union buddies:
White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to condemn the increasing violence and threats by union members in Michigan, merely telling reporters Tuesday that “the president believes in debate that’s civil.”
When asked by a reporter about a claim by Michigan state Democrat that “there will be blood” should Republicans pass a union-choice law in Michigan, Carney professed ignorance and then downplayed the comment.
“I haven’t see those comments, and I’m not sure they mean what someone interprets them to mean,” he said.
Smitty observed that we probably haven’t heard anything from Big Guy about the incident because: “… if Barack Obama had had a son, he wouldn’t have looked like Steven Crowder.”
Or as Paul Krugman might put it, “without a hint of irony:”
…the real lesson is that those insiders are not only self-dealing, but profoundly ignorant and wrong-headed. It’s too bad that so many journalists still can’t see that.
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