Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Advertising That Your Child Comes From an Upscale, Graduate-School-Educated Home and Therefore Won’t Need Financial Assistance if (When) He or She is Accepted Into Yale.

One of the really annoying (at least to me) fads among late Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, mainly, I suspect, from the Northeast and the Washington, D.C. area, is the hyphenated-last-name thing for their children.  As in, say, Alex Seitz-Wald, a Millennial blogger at the Washington Post’s The Plum Line, whose post from this morning, […]

Is Margaret Thatcher Responsible for Silicon Valley, As David Brooks Claimed Recently?

[T]he myth of the welfare state fostering a lazy citizenry just doesn’t hold water. A group of small nations (combined population: about 25 million) that came up with Linux, Skype, Ikea, H&M, and Lego — to say nothing of well-written television shows and mystery novels, innovative designers and brilliant architects from Alvar Aalto to Bjarke […]

Will Obama Ruin the Economy to Ruin the Republicans?

Robert Waldmann notes a decent article defined by a ridiculous title (of course lifted from his musings): 1) Reasonable and reasonably honest conservative list update: Josh Barro is very reasonable and quite honest. But is he still a conservative?  He sure doesn’t always sound like one. 2) About  #1) see an example of the ness […]

Lifted from Robert’s stochastic thoughts on media

Lifted from Robert’s stochastic thoughts on media: Wish I’d Typed this Bill Nothstine · Top Commenter · Living Liberally And, to be fair to Romney [brief interlude while Bill clutches frantically, Strangelove-like, at the hand that just typed those words], if he said it on TV that can be considered at least prima facie evidence […]

Yves Smith takes aim at Malcolm Gladwell

Yves Smith has a very long post on Malcolm Gladwell: Yves here. Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project, which stands for “Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics.” Its approach is to provide information about the background and funding sources of well-recognized journalists and pundits so that the public will be […]

Notes toward A Blog Post on Chrystia Freeland’s Interview of GE CEO Jeff Immelt

UPDATE NOTE: The following isn’t complete. Many of my notes from the latter part of today’s interview can be found on Twitter, hashtagged #Immelt. At the moment, I both (1) don’t have easy access to them and (2) have other things that need to be done. Feel free to look there, and/or mention anything you […]

Bleg – Yesterday’s FT (US PDF)

One advantage the electronic subscribers have over us print people when dealing with The World’s Worst Newspaper Website(TM) is that if they forget to download a holiday (read:not printed in the US) issue, they can access the phosphors without having to deal with The World’s Worst Newspaper Website. Anyone have a PDF of yesterday’s FT […]

PSA

Edmund L. Andrews (most recently of the NYT and being pilloried by Megan McArdle for having the gall to marry a woman whose previous marriage ended in bankruptcy) has joined Andrew Samwick, Stan Collender, Pete Davis et al. over at Capital Gains and Games. His first post, “Hopes of a Chastened Capitalist” is here.

Hoisted from Comments (thought not here)

UPDATE: D-Squared chimes in, saying in less than 100 words what took me a couple of thousand (though with no quotes): After the “first hundred days” in the term of a new Democratic President comes the next stage; the almost impreceptible transition among his supporters from saying “of course, he’s been hampered by all sorts […]