And, if I were a better person, you would be reading my interview with David Kurla, CEO of IkoToilet/Ecotact in this space. But I’m not, so go to his website, especially the links for school, urban, and slum toilet provisions, and then see this John Sauer piece at the Huffington Post, and check out the […]

Moody’s had always assumed banks and their securities were “Too Big to Fail.” Not any more: Moody’s Investors Service will no longer assume that holders of the securities will benefit from government support to shore up troubled lenders, after the global financial crisis proved this wasn’t the case, Moody’s said in an e-mailed statement today. […]

Bob Somerby has been on a rant at The Daily Howler that “liberals” do not understand the Stupak Amendment. Unfortunately, claims he makes about Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and their guests do not apply to Laurie Rubner. At the Health Affairs blog, Ms. Rubner is direct and to the point: From the very beginning, […]

Passionate defenders, gather ye round: “Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: ‘one nation under God,’” said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. “Well, there’s a reason they put that right at the […]

No place to pahk the cah.

For the record, both my daughters were vaccinated today, under government supervision at no cost to us, in a procedure that took less than 10 minutes—including getting a five-year-old to take her coat off and, post shot, put it on again. Via Felix Salmon’s Twitter feed, without further comment. (cross-posted from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo)

As I am arguing on the same side as Henry Kaufman, and against the kind-hearted Mark Thoma, does the phrase “left-of-center” at the top of this blog have as much Memory Meaning as the Suzanne Vega song from Pretty in Pink? Kaufman: During the Greenspan years (1987-2006), the Fed clearly failed to recognize the significance […]

First, David Leonhardt argued that this recession was good for workers. Now, Floyd Norris apparently has decided to mix and match data. (I wonder if the fact many NYT employees who are looking at their 45-day severance offers is having an effect on its economic coverage.) One of the standard “economist jokes” is about the […]

I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]

Among the people who have been updating The Theory of Finance for the ObamaNation is Gregg Sommerville, whose job depends to some significant extent on people not believing the following riff: More music below the fold. The Bailout Rap and the Subprime Mortgage Blues