Month: March 2013

So Not Surprised

No Comments

Joe Lieberman has taken a job with the Koch suckers at the American Enterprise Institute.

Digby nails the analysis:

This is a common project of the Right these days. They know that no one likes their ideas. Scarred by the experience in Iraq, few want to do it again in Iran. Few want to eliminate Social Security, give tax breaks to rich, loosen gun laws, or do any of the other things on the Right’s agenda.

So one of the Right’s strategies is to go trolling for morally deficient, easily corrupted neoliberal “Democrats” to assist their efforts at creating a “bipartisan consensus” to override popular will and common sense in the service of the conservative agenda.

I don’t know how much he’s being paid for this, but my guess is that it will be a lot more than he made as a Senator, because that’s how back loaded bribery works.

No promises, but if you toe the line, you know that you get a payoff when you retire.

Bradley Manning Speaks

No Comments

Somehow or other, the Freedom of the Press Foundation managed to get a tape of Bradley Manning’s statement to the court:

The court-martial proceeding of Bradley Manning has, rather ironically, been shrouded in extreme secrecy, often exceeding even that which prevails at Guantanamo military commissions. This secrecy prompted the Center for Constitutional Rights to commence formal legal action on behalf of several journalists and activists, including myself, to compel greater transparency. One particularly oppressive rule governing the Manning trial has barred not only all video or audio recordings of the proceedings, but also any photographs being taken of Manning or even transcripts made of what is said in court. Combined with the prohibition on all press interviews with him, this extraordinary secrecy regime has meant that, in the two-and-a-half years since his arrest, the world has been prevented, literally, from hearing Manning’s voice. That changes today.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), the group I recently helped found and on whose board I sit, has received a full, unedited audio recording of the one-hour statement Manning made in court two weeks ago, and this morning has published that recording in full.

The full audio:

Glenn Greenwald (link) is correct.  The level of paranoia and secrecy is truly bizarre, and when juxtaposed with his pretrial torture (really, that’s what it was), the intent is clear, to create a precedent which criminalizes much of what constitutes investigative journalism.

This Explains a Lot About Bob Woodward

1 Comment

The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, and finds the Washington Post scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate.

Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that he is completely incompetent when it comes to putting the facts he has in an accurate context:

A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.

………

Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.

………

Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

………

Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.

………

Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”

Here is the money quote:

Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.

My thesis about Woodward, and I’ve thought this for a while is that he’s kind of a big Hoover* for information, but he needs someone who can connect the dots to create actual meaning.

As I have followed Woodward’s solo career, I have increasingly given more credit to Bernstein.

*The vacuum cleaner, not the former FBI director.

Shades of Eric Arthur Blair*

No Comments

Yep, he looks totally sane

The Judge in the trial of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes is requiring that he be dosed with “truth serum” if his defense team chooses to plead not guilty by reason of insanity:

Legal and medical experts are questioning the decision of a judge in Colorado to allow James Holmes, the suspected gunman in the Aurora cinema shooting, to be tested with a “truth serum” should he plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Judge William Sylvester ruled that in the event of Holmes pleading insanity his prosecutors would be permitted to interrogate him while he is under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk. The idea would be that such a “narcoanalytic interview” would be used to confirm whether or not he had been legally insane when he embarked on his shooting spree on 20 July last year.

The precise identity of the drug that would be used has not been released, other than a statement that it would be “medically appropriate”, but it would most likely be a short-acting barbiturate such as sodium amytal.

William Shepherd, chair of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association, whose members include both prosecutors and defence lawyers, said that the proposed use of a “truth drug” to ascertain the veracity of a defendant’s plea of insanity was highly unusual in the US. He predicted it would provoke intense legal argument relating to Holmes’s right to remain silent under the fifth amendment of the US constitution.

Gee, you think, Mr. Shepherd?

And then there is this:

The proposed use of a “truth drug” has also prompted a critical response from medical experts. Dr August Piper, a Seattle-based psychiatrist who has used sodium amytal to treat patients who were mute or in a catatonic state and who has written research papers on the subject, said that this was “not a royal road to the truth”.

“First of all, people can still lie under the influence of amytal. More importantly, the person under the influence of the drug is susceptible to outside suggestion.”

Piper also questioned whether such a method could be used to find out the truth of what happened retrospectively. Though short-acting barbiturates might be beneficial in illuminating Holmes’s current state of mind, by opening him up to greater communication, it would be of doubtful use in determining his state of mind at the scene of the shooting eight months ago.

“To try and do this would be unlikely to yield useful information, and could pervert the course of justice by rendering the defendant susceptible to pressure,” Piper said.

This is bizarre.

What the f%$# is the judge thinking? They don’t even pull this crap at Gitmo or the CIA torture gulags.

*George Orwell.

This is Fascinating

No Comments

An analysis by Robert Parry suggests that both Watergate and Iran Contra were about covering up collusion to subvert US foreign policy for electoral advantage, something that the less sophisticated amongst us might call treason:

………

A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan photographed together in the Oval Office in 1991. (Cropped from a White House photo that also included Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.)

In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

………

Similarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.

………

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.

Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials. “It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said.

In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. “It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes said. “And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”

When I re-interviewed Veliotes on Aug. 8, 2012, he said he couldn’t recall who the “people on high” were who had described the informal clearance of the Israeli shipments but he indicated that “the new players” were the young neoconservatives who were working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later joined the administration as senior political appointees.

I really don’t think that “treason” is too strong a term here.

The assertion here is that the Watergate break-in was about trying to find files implicating Nixon in deliberately extending the war for electoral advantage, and the arms deliveries to Iran were payback for holding the Tehran embassy hostages from being released until after the elections.

It does provide some context to the “Third Rate Burglary” the brought Nixon down.

There were files on his interference, and he could not find them because a Johnson aide had taken them with him, and he was desperate to ensure that they would not be used against him in the 1972 elections.

Considering the 30,000 American deaths, and the million+ dead Vietnamese, Nixon and his merry band of rat-f%$#ers (their term) had to have been in a panic about this.

Seriously, Why are We Not Jailing these Mother F%$#ers

No Comments

Joe Nocera at the New York Times, takes a look at at how Goldman Sachs screwed over eToys when they managed their IPO:

ONCE upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.

 The eToys initial public offering raised $164 million, a nice chunk of change for a two-year-old company. But it wasn’t even close to the $600 million-plus the company could have raised if the offering price had more realistically reflected the intense demand for eToys shares. The firm that underwrote the I.P.O. — and effectively set the $20 price — was Goldman Sachs.

 After the Internet bubble burst — and eToys, starved for cash, went out of business — lawyers representing eToys’ creditors’ committee sued Goldman Sachs over that I.P.O. That lawsuit, believe it or not, is still going on. Indeed, it has taken on an importance that transcends the rise and fall of one small company during the first Internet craze.

 The plaintiffs charge that Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to maximize eToys’ take from the I.P.O. Instead, Goldman purposely set an artificially low price, so that its real clients, the institutional investors clamoring for the stock, could pocket that first-day run-up. According to the suit, Goldman then demanded that some of those easy profits be kicked back to the firm. Part of their evidence for the calculated underpricing of eToys, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint, was that Lawton Fitt, the Goldman executive who headed the underwriting team and was thus best positioned to gauge the market demand, actually made a bet with several of her colleagues that the price would hit $80 at the opening. (Through a Goldman Sachs spokesman, Fitt declined to comment. Goldman denies that it did anything wrong, about which more shortly.)

 ………

 Earlier this week, I tracked down Toby Lenk, the founder and former chief executive of eToys. Back when the S.E.C. was investigating I.P.O. excesses, the government deposed him. During the deposition, he mostly defended Goldman Sachs, even though he had the uneasy feeling that eToys had been taken advantage of.

 After the deposition, he recalled, the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents. He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients would support the stock. “That’s when I thought, ‘We really got screwed,’” Lenk told me.

 Although the experience still angered him, he now has 14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the country?”

 “What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what they did to the country in 2008,” he said.

The argument of the Vampire Squid* is that this was just business as usual.

The court may agree with them.

If they do, it is not a mark of Goldman’s innocence, but rather it is a mark of how thoroughly corrupt high finance in the United States actually is.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Your Daily Grillo

No Comments

The 5 Star Party will ask the Italian President to form the next Italian government:

Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement said on Sunday it wanted to lead Italy’s next government following last month’s inconclusive election and reiterated that it would not agree to an alliance with any other party.

The movement’s newly elected parliamentary leaders told reporters it would make this position clear to President Giorgio Napolitano when he begins consultations later this month on the formation of a government.

“Our proposal will be a 5-Star government,” the movement’s Senate leader Vito Crimi said after a meeting of its lawmakers in a Rome hotel.

It is unlikely that the other parties would accept a government led by the 5-Star Movement. This is partly because of policy differences and partly because although it was the most voted single party at the election, 5-Star has fewer seats in parliament than the center-left and center-right coalitions.

I think that Italian politics is going to get even more bizarrely surreal, which, considering Silvio Berlusconi’s multiple elections as Prime Minister, I did not think was possible.

BTW, here is a video of Beppe Grillo’s comedy routine from 1998.

Its a bit evocative of Carlin, though I think that there is a lot of Italian culture context that I am missing.

H/t Naked Capitalism for the vid.

Increasingly, Conservative Journalism Appears to be an Oxymoron

No Comments

This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, chief cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

So, the great triumph of the conservative gonzo journalism machine, the destruction has resulted in James O’Keefe paying a 6 figure settlement to one of the people he deceived:

James O’Keefe—the blonde bombshell who set the conservative world of hidden-camera YouTube movies ablaze—has just agreed to a $100,000 settlement to calm down the unjustly fired (and weirdly litigious about it) ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera. According to a copy of the deal, obtained late last night by your wonkettes and viewable after the jump, O’Keefe has also agreed to ink an 11-word non-apology apology, that sources close to reality are calling “insincere” and “suuuuuuuch bullsh%$.”

 According to the final 5-page agreement, signed by O’Keefe and his legal counsel Mike Madigan this past Tuesday, the boy detective now publicly “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” O’Keefe and his counsel have also consented to fork over the $100,000 within 30 business days of the settlement agreement’s being signed.

(%$ mine)

Of course, this news comes out on the same week that we had a spate of other revelations about the right wing media machine:

The best piece of journalism I’ve read in the last couple of weeks — and certainly the most perversely fascinating — came from Chris Faraone in the slickly rejiggered Boston Phoenix. It was the story of Nadia Naffe, a woman who signed up into James O’Keefe’s ratfking empire only to find herself the eventual target of said ratfking. Faraone’s piece is long, but you should read it all, as the kidz say, not just because Faraone is a terrific storyteller, which he is, but also because his story dropped just as the insular universe of rightwing faux-journalism seems to be imploding to all points of the compass.

(Faraone’s story on Naffe appears to be a chunk of an upcoming book. His earlier effort, 99 Nights With The 99 Percent, a collection of his insider reporting on the Occupy movement, is also required reading. I know, I know. You were told there wouldn’t be homework.)

First, there was the embarrassing revelation that a host of rightwing bloggers — and one from the port side, Jerome Armstrong — were on the fiddle with the Malaysian government to the tune of almost 400 large. (One of them, Ben Domenech, was a recidivist embarrassment, having previously lost a sweet gig with the endlessly credulous Washington Post because he was a proven thief of other people’s work.) Then, last night, it was revealed that Tucker Carlson’s vanity project, The Daily Caller, appears to have been caught trying to sucker its audience regarding the tale of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s patronizing of prostitutes. (TDC is standing by its reporting for the moment, although its explanation is rather heavy with the squid ink.) This is hardly the way you want to celebrate Holy Week commemorating The Passion Of Andrew Breitbart. On the other hand, maybe it is…

Being a polemicist is not necessarily antithetical to telling the truth, but it does appear to be so for the right wing media.

As to why, my guess is that this has a lot to do with the fact that their customers are not their readers as much as they are the people who bankroll them.  The Scaifes and the Kochs of the world have no concern with the truth.

Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel*

No Comments

Juan Williams has been accused of lifting whole paragraphs from a CAP research paper for an article on immigration:

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted — sometimes word for word — from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for the Hill newspaper.

 Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor’s note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.”

 But that editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem, and not the nearly identical wording that was also fixed.

 In a phone interview Thursday evening, Williams pinned the blame on a researcher who he described as a “young man.”

 “I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams told Salon. “I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn’t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.”

So, in response to accusations that he lifted whole paragraphs from a well respected left of center think tank, his defense is that he lifted whole paragraphs from his intern.

Let’s also be clear here:  An intern’s job is to do research, not write the article.   If you do a word for word copy in the notes, there is nothing wrong with that.  It only becomes a problem when it is transcribed word for word in your article.  (This applies whether you are copying and pasting from a think tank, or from you own f%$#ing intern!)

Let’s be clear here. The intern was not listed as a 2nd author on the article.

Considering his history, condemning the allegations of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas while himself being accused of inappropriate behavior, I was wondering when this sort of sh%$ was going to catch up with him.

Arrogance and stupidity are a toxic mix.

*I need to note that this turn of phrase was created by Atrios.

Something is Very Wrong With Me

No Comments

We went to Barnes and Noble to celebrate Charlie getting into a magnet program.

We got some books, and picked up some snacks.

Charlie wanders off and browsed some books, and he decided to glance through the erotic novel 50 Shades of Gray.

He opened up to a random page, and was rather nonplussed about what he encountered.

I wasn’t upset. This sort of exploration is all a part of growing up.

But when I looked at him, and I made a most unhelpful suggestion:

How about you do a YouTube based on this.

 You do a takeoff of 50 Shades of Gray based on the Smurfs.

 You could call it 50 Shades of Blue.

Charlie’s response was to complain that he could not get that image out of his head.  (I am afraid to Google it)

I am a bad, bad, parent.

Bummer………

No Comments

The Higgins Armory Museum is going to close at the end of this year. The collection will be merged with the Worcester art museum:

The Higgins Armory Museum, an 82-year-old Worcester institution with an internationally renowned collection of arms and armor that is the second largest in the country, announced Friday it will permanently close Dec. 31 after losing a long battle to raise enough endowment money to ensure its future.

The collection will be moved and integrated into the Worcester Art Museum, which plans in time to display all of Higgins’ core 2,000 objects. Higgins will stay open for the rest of the year and offer “top-notch” programs and events.

Although Higgins may not have succeeded in its long-term attempts to stay an individual entity, interim executive director Suzanne W. Maas said that she is excited the future of the collection has been secured and will be staying in Worcester. Meanwhile, Matthias Waschek, director of the Worcester Art Museum, said acquiring the collection gives the WAM “incredible opportunities.”

“Yes, we’re staying in Worcester,” Ms. Maas said in an interview Wednesday. “But I expect people to grieve the loss of this building as we grieve the loss of it.”

This is the arguably the best military history museum in the world.

I never went there when I lived in Massachusetts. Crap.

Science, Makes Indiana Jones Its Bitch

No Comments

Specifically, the crystal skulls have been shown to be a fake:

Humans seem to have a predilection for fake quartz-crystal Aztec skulls. Since the 1860s, dozens of skull sculptures have appeared on the art market purporting to be pre-Columbian artifacts from Mesoamerica, that is, created by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. Three such skulls have graced the collections of major museums on both sides of the Atlantic: the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the British Museum in London, and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

 ………

 So the team took a closer look at the skulls’ surfaces. As a benchmark, they borrowed a legitimate Mesoamerican crystal goblet from the Museum of Oaxacan Cultures, in Mexico. Then they used scanning electron microscopy to compare these surfaces.

 It turns out that the surface of the authentic goblet has irregular etch marks, a sign that the pieces were carved with hand-held tools. But the surface of the suspect skulls have regular etch marks, evidence that they were made with rotary wheels and hard abrasives, which appeared only after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Walsh says.

 Looking even closer at the British Museum’s skull, the team discovered green, wormlike inclusions in the rock. Raman spectroscopy revealed that the inclusions were an iron-rich chlorite mineral. Although this kind of trace impurity is found in rock crystal from Brazil or Madagascar, it is not found in Mexican crystal, Walsh says.

Note the Difference between the surfaces of thehand carved goblet (r) and the skull

Not surprised.

When you find artifacts that create this kind of “Ancient Astronauts” type hysteria, they are almost always bullsh%$.

Normally, He’d be Wanker of the Day………

No Comments

But today, after Pamela Sampson, Niall Ferguson suggesting that Paul Krugman is the victim of an abusive childhood:

In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is–though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Krugman’s response is to the point:

What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can’t handle professional criticism — which is all that I have ever offered — he should go find another profession.

Krugman is right.

There is a qualitative difference between the two arguments.  Krugman is blunt.  He has no problems telling people that he disagrees with that they are full of sh%$.

He’s blunt, but he does not pull the kind of crap that Ferguson tried to pull.

H/t Atrios.

This Must Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Written

No Comments

There are any things that can be said about the death of Hugo Chavez, but this takes the cake:

Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

To be fair, AP business reporter Pamela Sampson may not be a complete moron, she might simply be a sociopath ……… or it could be both.

You choose.

H/t Atrios.