Archive for 2011

ED DRISCOLL: The Rock’em Sock’em Populist…Washington Post? “As the quotes above from the JournoList illustrate, whatever rock’em, sock’em slugfest the Post thinks it’s in, the paper has been on the receiving end of most of the blows in recent years, as it increasingly loses its fight with reality, who tends to be a rather unmerciful sparring partner.”

Related: Instead of reporting on the “Fast and Furious” operation, the Washington Post was on its PR team.

POINTS AND FIGURES: The Market is Crashing Tonight, What Should You Do? 6 Definitive Steps for Your Money. “This post is designed for the average Joe Six Pack citizen sitting at home and wondering if his mattress is better than the market to build wealth.”

Plus this: “A lot of folks out there will say this whole thing is politics. Some of it is. But most of it is simple math. By the way, 70% of the political donations at S&P went to Democrats. Well over 60% at the other ratings agencies went to the donkeys. Politics wasn’t the major piece in the downgrade.”

DEBT DOWNGRADE: TIME FOR AN OBAMA APOLOGY.

He should say he’s sorry for his failure of leadership. Sorry for his utopian economic illiteracy. Sorry for putting ideology above political wisdom.

That would be the manly, the honorable thing to do. Admit he was wrong about what needed to be done to fix the U.S. economy.

What will he do? He will blame Standard & Poor’s. Or George W. Bush. Or the Tea Party. Or all three.

Pretty safe bet.

LONDON: Police Let Gangs Run Riot And Loot. “Britain’s biggest police force is facing criticism after it let looters run riot in north London for almost 12 hours, in some of the worst scenes of street disturbances seen in recent years.” Well, it’s not like they’re smuggling incandescent bulbs or something, you know, serious.

HOW TO LOOK LIKE THINGS ARE GREAT: “Job hunting is an insane way to live. You are a depressed, scared, unemployed person and the key to getting out of it is to make yourself into a happy, confident, go-getter.”

But the really interesting stuff is in the comments.

MARKETS: ‘Sunday Night, Pray’ and Other Thoughts From Traders.

UPDATE: A Wall Street reader emails:

For me, it’s Sunday night, DRINK. Like thousands of my colleagues around the world, I am sitting in front of markets screens when I should be with my family.

Is there a disaster? Not yet…a 2% drop in US stocks, interest rates twitching less than a tenth of a percent, and a tiny move
in the dollar, are nothing compared to the scenarios we’ve all wargamed over the weekend.

The ritual insults, er statements, by various monetary and govt authorities are parsed for anything non-obvious. Nothing there.

Time to pour a tall vodka, and chill out. There’ll be plenty of time to panic later.

There usually is.

OF THE NON-GOVERNMENTAL VARIETY: Extreme Debtors.

SO THE CURRENT DEMOCRATIC TALKING POINT IS THAT THE TEA PARTY IS SOMEHOW RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEBT DOWNGRADE — because everyone knows that when you’re using your MasterCard to pay your Visa bill, it’s the person who doesn’t want the limit raised who’s the real source of the problem. But Canadian reader Kate MacMillan notes this story on how the Canadian province of Saskatchewan has gone from a “fiscal mess” to a debt upgrade by following Tea Party-like policies:

Rather than quickly spending its newly-earned wealth, the provincial government has put its tax revenue toward paying the bills. S&P gave special credit to Saskatchewan for its “low-and-declining debt burden.” As of March 31, the province’s fiscal year-end, Saskatchewan’s debt totalled $4.6-billion, representing 38 per cent of this year’s projected operating revenues and only 8 per cent of its gross domestic product. Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio sits at around 35 per cent.

Low debt burden. She adds:

Saskatchewan is governed by the right-of-center “Saskatchewan Party”, with tax reduction, low resource royalty policies that encouraged potash development, and enticed energy industry investment away from neighboring Alberta.

So, I guess we can call that a “tea party upgrade”.

Heh.

UPDATE: Reader Sean-David Hubbard emails: “There were folks calling for us to follow Canada’s example during the healthcare debate. How come those same people aren’t calling for us to follow Canada’s example during the debt debate?” Because this example doesn’t lead to more political-class control.

DEBT DOWNGRADE: Blame LBJ?

MATT WELCH:

Those (many) who are rubbishing the eminently rubbishable S&P tonight are generally not grappling with something we’ve been talking about for years around these parts: The current fiscal trajectory of the United States is not just deteriorating rapidly, it’s definitionally unsustainable. That’s not crazy libertarians talking, that’s Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke. . . .

I eagerly look forward to this being blamed on libertarians, but even more than that I truly look forward to the day when the political class in this doddering country recognizes that you can’t just wave away a spending spiral by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Indeed.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: “Like many other women, I feel I am a poor negotiator. This is not a good time to be bad at negotiating. Because I would like to be a better negotiator, and because men make more than women, I thought I would observe how men negotiate. This is what I learned.”

From the comments: “I take it you’ve never been to Asia.”

THE GUILD STRIKES BACK: “A Senate bill that would encourage the growth of alternative training programs for teachers and principals, some of which would not be based at colleges or universities but would have the authority to give certificates considered the equivalent of master’s degrees, has come under fire from higher education organizations that argue Congress should focus on higher education institutions in efforts to improve teacher quality. . . . The academies would be exempt from restrictions the bill describes as “unnecessary”: teacher and principal academies would not be required to hire faculty with advanced degrees, faculty members would not be expected to conduct research, and the academies would not need to be accredited.”

HOW A VIDEO GOES VIRAL. Here it is:

A REVIEW OF THE Ruger LCP. I’ve fired one of these quite a bit, and found it to be very accurate, even out to 15 or 20 yards, which is surprising in such a small pistol.