What the Hell Friday - Wham-O, Come Home

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L.A. Times Crossword Puzzle Blogging

Friday, April  30, 2010  Gareth Bain

Theme NEWBIE, or New B-ginnings.  Familiar phrases are prefixed with the letter "B" to give a whole new, rather humerous meaning.

17 A . Daring track official? BOLD TIMER. "Old timer." No comment.

63 A . Online journalist's retreat?: BLOG CABIN. "Log Cabin." But as a blogger, I love this one.

10 D . Clinton enjoying some R and R?:  BILL AT EASE.  "Ill at ease" - uncomfortable.  I seem to recall Bill having some uncomfortable moments.  Might have been that Tiger in his tank.

31. Immortal comedian's donkey imitation?:  BRAY OF HOPE.  "Ray of Hope."  The light at the end of the tunnel.  Also, the second play on Bob Hope's name this week.

49. Tyro, and a hint to this puzzle's theme:  NEWBIE, or a new "B," if you will.

Hi gang, it's JazzBumpa, reporting from the quiet security of my BLOG CABIN.  This is a top-notch puzzle with a clever theme, and lots of wit.  Let's explore it together.

Thought for the Day

Duncan Hunter has no soul.

E-I-E-I-O.

H/T to Adam Ozimek at M.B.

Thought on playing the Third Trombone Part to Pictures at an Exhibition

One can hardly get any closer to heaven while keeping body and soul intact.

Update: This, of course, refers to Ravel's brilliant orchestration.
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A Goldman-Sachs Analogy

GS bottled toxic waste, labeled as VSOP Cognac. Due to underlying business relationships, and veiled conflict of interest the Appellation d'origine contrôlée certified the labeling. GS then took out life insurance policies on the buyers, and cashed in when they died.

Analogies are always imperect approximations, but this strikes me as being a direct hit on the nail head.

Haiku Wednesday

Connection

I see in the crowd

A woman now who once was

The girl that I loved

At our concert Monday evening I looked into the audience and spotted my lovely wife.

For an instant I saw, not a woman on the cusp of collecting Social Security, but the 15-year-old girl I fell in love with so many years ago.

JazzBumpa Salt and Smoke Smackdown

Adam Ozemek is annoyed by what he calls my sophomoric and poorly thought out arguments.

More likely, he is annoyed because I am a smarmy smart ass.

At any rate, IMHO, his attempt to refute my comment is even more lame than his original post.

But maybe I have it all wrong.

Which of us is on solid ground, and who has the friable slope crumbling beneath his feet?

Or are we both all wet?

This is a serious inquiry.  If I'm wrong, I want to know it.

Update:

Sophomoric humor refers to juvenile, puerile, and base comedy that would normally be expected from an adolescent.  It is used to refer to a type of comedy that often includes bathroom humor and gags that are based on and appeal to a silly sense of immaturity. ...

Ooohh . . . pwned!

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Shadow Shot Sunday / Mellow Yellow Monday

Em has her own style

Even when she is only

Puttering around.

Sunday Music Blogging - Some Time Ago

Bob Berg was an exciting, original jazz saxophonist, and a technical monster.  He played lots of notes, and every single one of them was right.  He died in a tragic traffic accident on Dec. 5, 2002.  Here he is playing SOME TIME AGO.  This song is in THE REAL BOOK, so we can all play along.

Deep Stupid #17 / Six Word Saturday - 4/24

Pay your medical bills with chickens.





The Stupid - it clucks!

Update:  For deeper thinking, one can, as always, count on Krugman

WTH?!? Friday, Pt 3 - In Which I Berate Adam Ozimek

Again.

Over at Modeled Behavior, he says this, regarding smoking, the use of salt and sugar, slippery slopes, and, by implication, serrano peppers and meat thermometers.

I left him this comment.

This is an epic – and you’ll have to convince me that it’s not willful, if you even care – failure to see the point.

1) Where does this slippery slope lead? To fewer instances of high blood pressure, ergo fewer heart attacks and strokes. Wow – that’s tragic!

2) Nobody is impinging on your freedom to use salt. Have they come for your salt shaker? Controlling the Na content of packaged products, in fact gives you MORE freedom to make your own sodium decisions, since the food stuff OVER THE CONTENT OF WHICH YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL will have a LOWER sodium content. Do the math, and add salt to taste.

3) Re smoking: Nobody has ever said you can’t smoke in the privacy of your own home, or in a variety of open air venues. Smoking bans give non-smokers the freedom to not be exposed to smokers’ effluents.

Remember the old argument that your freedom to swing your arms ends at some distance from my nose?

If that makes no sense to you, then consider that I move my bowels regularly, but I almost never do it in your office.

4) Slippery Slope arguments are inherently fallacious.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html

For shame.

Really.

Tsk, tsk.

Cheers!
JzB

What the Hell? Friday -- Part 2: Palin by Comparison

Truth and Light from Sarah Hickman.



H/T to Southern Beale.

What the Hell? Friday -- Jon Stewart Gets Foxxy

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Bernie Goldberg Fires Back
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Post Correction

I made a mistake (gasp) when putting this post together.

A chart and graph were put together listing year over year % change in GDP 1912 to 1928, using current dollar and three different constant dollar bases.  The column farthest to the right (2005 prices) and the corresponding blue line on the graph is in error.  The data are displaced by one year.  Assembling the data table was too painful a process to go through again.  Mentally slide each value in the right hand column up a notch, if you care to. 

Here is a correction of the graph, which now shows all the data sets moving pretty much in lock-step, though by different step-sizes.

Yet Another Look at the 20's - Wealth Disparity

In this now infamous article, Thomas E Woods says:

One of the most perverse treatments of the subject comes at the hands of two historians of the Harding presidency, who urge that without government confiscation of much of the income of the wealthiest Americans, the American economy will never be stable:

The tax cuts, along with the emphasis on repayment of the national debt and reduced federal expenditures, combined to favor the rich. Many economists came to agree that one of the chief causes of the Great Depression of 1929 was the unequal distribution of wealth, which appeared to accelerate during the 1920s, and which was a result of the return to normalcy. Five percent of the population had more than 33 percent of the nation’s wealth by 1929. This group failed to use its wealth responsibly. . . . Instead, they fueled unhealthy speculation on the stock market as well as uneven economic growth.8

If this absurd attempt at a theory were correct, the world would be in a constant state of depression. There was nothing at all unusual about the pattern of American wealth in the 1920s. Far greater disparities have existed in countless times and places without any resulting disruption. In fact, the Great Depression actually came in the midst of a dramatic upward trend in the share of national income devoted to wages and salaries in the United States—and a downward trend in the share going to interest, dividends, and entrepreneurial income. 9 We do not in fact need the violent expropriation of any American in order to achieve prosperity, thank goodness.

8 and 9 are Woods' references.
8  Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1977), 72.
9 C. A. Phillips,  T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson, Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 76.

To get to the root of the perversity, lets focus on this statement by Woods.

There was nothing at all unusual about the pattern of American wealth in the 1920s. Far greater disparities have existed in countless times and places without any resulting disruption. In fact, the Great Depression actually came in the midst of a dramatic upward trend in the share of national income devoted to wages and salaries in the United States—and a downward trend in the share going to interest, dividends, and entrepreneurial income.

Setting aside the naked assertion, - and irrelevancy - about greater disparities and other times and places, let's look at what's relevant to the discussion: wealth disparity in the U.S. specifically in the 20's.  To do so, let's have another look at this graph, which I first posted here, in another context.

Unless Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal have done something very strange, Woods (or his source) either has it exactly backward, is viewing the information through a strange lens, or has cleverly found a way to tiptoe around reality without actually lying.  This seems unlikely, since increasing the wage and salary share is inconsistent with an increasing income share going to the top 1%.  Hmmm.

As I read the graph, income share going to the top 1% made a double bottom somewhere north of 14%  in 1920 and '22, then rose to its peak of slightly over 19% in 1928.  While it's true that this share decreased from '29 through 31, it then leveled out and reached  a secondary peak in 1936.  It then dropped for two years, rebounded for two more, all the while never approaching the previous low from 1920 (of all years) then, finally, in 1941 began a multi-decade decline. For this to be "in the midst of a dramatic upward trend in the share of national income devoted to wages and salaries,"  requires a tortured and indeed perverse reading of the data.

And the graph I presented is typical.  The first and 13th graphs here shows  different slices, but a similar picture.
Similar information, and a whole more can be found here. 

How can we conclude that Woods is anything other than a bare-faced liar?

Haiku Wednesday - Flames

Flames

A Calgary Team,

Source of heat and light, or a

Thing to go down in.

Flames II

Heat in the bedroom:

Burning pillow, comforter;

They're both DOWN in flames

A Close Look at GDP Change in the 1920-21 Depression

Mark Twain, for one, said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."   This is not quite right, for as we all know, figures don't lie.  But, my dad pointed out to me a long time age, "liars sure know how to figure."

Which brings us to Thomas E. Woods, Jr.  Over at Angry Bear, Cactus has put up a couple of posts revealing Woods' mendacity in this article.  He doesn't pull any punches.  But there is so much here that is just all kinds of wrong, that it's a fun game anyone can play.

Here is one shot at it.

In the fifth paragraph Woods says this:

The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent.

Cactus points out that there is no reliable data on employment from that time frame.  Where did Woods get his numbers?  He offers a lot of footnotes.  Maybe they're buried in one of his sources.  Maybe he made them up.

My focus will be on GDP.  I cannot find a data set that is consistent with his 17% decline in GDP.

In fact, getting a value for GDP change during the period turned out to be quite an adventure.  Here is the data that I was able to find.  Raw data is in the sources cited.  YoY change is by my calculation. (Click on the chart to get a full page view.)  No -17% to be seen anywhere.  According to Cactus, Woods apparently indirectly uses the Historical Statistics data, 1958 price basis.

Here is a graph of the same data.

Update (4/22) : Corrected version of the graph, and text in the following paragraph.

The other data sets argue a bit, but  move almost in lockstep, and seem to converge at the edges of the picture.  But in the middle there is quite a difference, as compared to the current dollar data.  Well, as Austrian Economist Robert Murphy shows us, (see CPI chart at the link)* There was an inflationary bubble from about 1915 on, that burst dramatically in 1920. The price collapse - due to oversupplies of labor, commodities, and all sorts of goods, was impressively depressing.

 My conclusion:  The value of the collapse in GDP in 1920 and '21 can be whatever you want it to be, with as much validity as you want to claim.  Just cherry pick your data set.  The obvious take-away is that the current value numbers are grossly distorted by the late teens inflation, which hovered in the 15 to 20% range, and the ensuing sharp deflation of '20-'21, in the range of -15% as that bubble burst.

Make of it what you will.  What I make of it is that the sharp drop in GDP that Woods and other Libertarians and Austrians claim for 1290-21 is a data artifact caused by measuring GDP in deeply deflated current dollars. 

YMMV, of course.  Add salt to taste.  The thing I can't understand is why the data set based on 1958 prices would show negative numbers larger than those based on either 1929 or 2005 prices.   Sometimes life aint easy.
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* To my blog post, alas.  Murphy's web site is being reconstructed, and I can't link to his original post.  Lo siento.
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Republicans: All Wrong, All the Time, Pt.. 15 - Bailouts

In the previous post I said this, in the context of Repugnicant mendacity on health care:

 . . .are Repugnicants so stupid, ignorant and lazy that can't look at public records and/or do simple math, or are they so cynical, callous, and dishonest that facts and truth mean nothing to them?

Now, Republican apologist Mark Halperin is forced to say this about their mendacity on Financial Reform:

"I cannot defend what they're doing," Halperin said. "They are willfully misreading the bill or they are engaged in a cynical attempt to keep the president from achieving something."

Same idea, different words.  Watch it here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Steve Benin at Washington Monthy adds:

Note to Republicans: when even Mark Halperin is calling you out for lying, the conventional wisdom is turning against you.

H/T to Delong, who puts it more bluntly.

When even Mark Halperin is calling Republicans out for lying, it is long past time to shut the Republican Party down.

Couldn't have said it better, myself.

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Republicans: All Wrong, All the Time, Pt. 14 - Medicaid Costs

The Daily Caller reports on Obama's latest attempt at that hopey-changey thingy.

One week from Tuesday, 18 men and women will begin an attempt to fix, in eight months, what is possibly the country’s greatest problem: the federal budget deficit, national debt and runaway entitlement spending.
Many think they’re doomed to failure.

.  .  .
 Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he is going to make “waste, abuse, fraud and inefficiencies” in Medicaid a priority issue and will make sure it gets attention in commission meetings.
“Nobody else is going to focus on that,” Coburn said. “Nobody else thinks the $300 billion that we waste every year is important. Over 10 years that’s $3 trillion. So we’re going to look at that aspect of it.”

Delong retorts:

Total Medicaid spending this year is currently pegged at $280 billion. How Coburn can think that all $280 billion that will be spent this year on Medicaid is waste--plus an extra $20 billion in waste even though we do not spend it--is beyond me.

I don't have a good feeling about this fiscal commission--not at all.

The puzzling question remains unanswered:  are Repugnicants so stupid, ignorant and lazy that can't look at public records and/or do simple math, or are they so cynical, callous, and dishonest that facts and truth mean nothing to them?

Either way, we are so screwed.

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Mellow Yellow Monday

A Pot of flowers

With others in the background:

I'm sure they're daffy.

I love It When Christina Romer Agrees With Me

The current problems with our economy are demand based.  In this respect, they are similar to the problems of the Great Depression of the 30's.  An article in the Wall Street Journal Blog "Real Time Economics" - a surprisingly straight-forward presentation of excerpts from Christina Romer's prepared remarks for a presentation at Princeton - includes the following quote.

The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that the current very high—and very disturbing—levels of overall and long-term unemployment are not a separate, structural problem, but largely a cyclical one. It reflects the fact that we are still feeling the effects of the collapse of demand caused by the crisis.

This is pretty straight forward.  But if you click the comments tab at the SWJ link you'll get another glimpse in the into the surreal world of  ugly, nasty, and thoroughly wrong headed right-wing thinking.

I recommend staying away.  But if you go, be prepared to be disgusted.

H/T to Delong.

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Shadow Shot Sunday

An aerated pond

No good for swimming, ahh - but

Great for a picnic.

Here are the kids having fun before dinner.

And here is the view in the other direction -

Disney's Vero Beach Resort

Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit

Just a couple days ago I took another swipe at Mish for his total inability to see that inept regulation resembles lack of regulation.

Of course, Krugman gets it, and he's not alone.

Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society's expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.

It's not the technical difficulty - I mean this really aint rocket science - that keeps Austrians and Libertarians from realizing that robust regulation is absolutely necessary to keep capitalism functioning.  It is their wilfull inability to recognize reality.
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Sunday Music Blogging

In honor of the recently passed tax day, here is MONEY from Cabaret.  I heard this a couple of times yesterday at dance competition.  Here is that version, for reasons that are not likely to become obvious any time soon, joined with video clips from the Willie Wonka do-over movie. (?!?!?)




For a little more authenticity, here are Liza (with a "Z") and Joel. For reasons that are not likely to become obvious any time soon, embedding has been disabled.  I can link to it, but not embed it.  What the hell kind of sense does that make?

Six Word Saturday

Dance competition: three granddaughters, eight events.

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What the Hell?!? Friday

Johnny Cash, on legless reptile husbandry.

Mish Almost Gets It Right

I'm hard on Mish from time to time because - well, he deserves it.  But I have to give him credit where it is due, and this article, Rant of the Day: No Ethics, No Fiduciary Responsibility, No Separation of Duty; Complete Ethics Overhaul Needed, is 100% on target for over 90% of its content. He blasts Goldman Sachs for fraud, and calls out a sad litany of prominant financial gurus (sadly, many of whom are in direct control of the economy.)

Alas, though, unfortunately, and characteristically, he blows it at the end, with this asinine comment.

Some misguided souls will blame the free market for this.

Nothing could be further from the truth. One of the legitimate roles of government is to protect property rights, prevent fraud, and level the playing field so that everyone has an equal chance and equal protection under the law.

Instead, we have rules, procedures, and taxpayer bailouts specifically designed to make sure the playing field is not level. This is not a free-market concept and desperately needs to change.

While the last paragraph has a lot of credence, Mish ignores the simple fact that this failure of regulation has allowed what "free markets" will always accomplish: property rights protected only for those with the most property, fraud of every stripe and color, unequal playing fields, chances favoring the privileged, and legal protection skewed toward the rich.

As always, when ideology collides with reality, it is reality that must become the movable object.

(Sigh.)
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You Can't Fool All Of Kentucky All Of The Time

Here's part of what the Lexington Herald-Leader says about that lying bastard Mitch McConnell.

McConnell's statements are perfectly calibrated to inflame the public. He insists the bill would "allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks."

Their resemblance to the truth is another matter.

The provision that McConnell claims would allow endless bailouts emerged from a bipartisan collaboration by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

Warner, who learned a thing or two about capitalism as a successful dot.com entrepreneur before becoming Virginia's governor, told The Washington Post: "It appears that the Republican leader either doesn't understand or chooses not to understand the basic underlying premise of what this bill puts in place."

The provision to which McConnell particularly objects creates an orderly process for letting "too big to fail" banks fail, at the industry's expense, without taking down the entire economy.

Called out by his own home-town paper.  Good for them!  Read it all here.

It's about time somebody in main stream media started reporting real news about what the Repugnicants are attempting to do.

H/T to Rachel Maddow.

Update: Of course, McConnell, like the typical tea bagger, isn't bright enough to generate his own brand of bull shit.  He can only regurgitate somebody else's talking points.

Update 2:  Krugman weighs in.

. . . has there ever been a time in US political history when one of the two major political parties was so addicted to doublethink, so committed to pretending that it’s advocating the opposite of its actual agenda?

Actually, this pretty much characterizes the Repugnicant party since at least the Reagan Administration.  I have been calling for its demise for a long time.  I thought that under Bush, it got about as bad as it could get.  Now, with Repugs desperately out of power and the tea party mentality in control, it's gotten out of control.

We are so screwed!

SPAM, only Better

Remember Spam?  No, not unwanted e-mail and Chinese porn in your blog comments, but the real thing - that gelatinous, greasy concoction of alleged meat by-products jammed into a tin can, suitable for poisoning boy scouts, driving away unpleasant relatives or committing slow suicide via arterial blockage.

There is now a new improved version, for the gustatory delight of Libertarians, Austrian Economists, and people who think conservatism has any intellectual or ethical credence.

It's poifect!

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Open Thread

Political - or any other opinions and innuendo - are welcome in the comment section.


Try not to be too gratuitously offensive, and please - whatever your point of view - make some kind of sense.

I'll start with some random thoughts about Tea Baggers.

The first obvious fact is they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

The Obama hatred has no basis in reality.

Hatred is their source of energy.  Hatred of the "other:" Obama, immigrants, gays.  This is the human manifestation of the vestigial reptile brain.

Rush Limbaugh is in large measure responsible.  He has been fomenting and channeling otherwise amorphous right-wing populist anger for 20 years with his lies, misrepresentations and distortions.  It is hard to imagine a more loathsome person, other than Dick Cheney.

The antidote is knowledge.  But there is so much disinformation clogging the airwaves and print media that truth and knowledge are swamped.

Understanding - by which I mean comprehension - is difficult.  It takes real mental effort.  It's far easier to simply wallow in spoon-fed, industrial strength, pre-fabricated right-wing talking points.

Baggers carp about taxation - which is at a historical low.  Just yesterday Sarah Palin told the Boston crowd at the Tea Party express that 100 days of earnings go to the government.  What she didn't say is that it's down under Obama, from 105.

Birthers, 12thers, and their ilk must be motivated by racial disgust at that darkie in the white house. If I'm wrong, please provide an alternate explanation.

Cheers!
JzB

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In Which I Berate An Old Friend

The old friend in question is a work colleague who did more to advance my career than I ever did.  I (and many others) owe him a lot.  I think of him as my professional "Dad."

This morning I found the following many-times forwarded e-mail from him in my in-box.   It's actually rather innocuous as political humor goes.  But, by some odd coincidence I had just read this post by Southern Beale, and was in no mood for anything that even remotely suggested that Republicans have any moral, or logical basis for anything they say or do.

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do? '

She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.'

Her parents beamed with pride.

'Wow...what a worthy goal.' I told her, 'But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house. '

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ' Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50? '

I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party.'

Her parents still aren't speaking to me. =============

So, I wrote him this response.

Dear Old Friend -

You know, there has always been a lot of idiocy in American politics. Usually, though, it hovers out at the fringes.  Now is a special and unique time, since the Republican party has made a distressingly successful attempt to mainstream the particular brand of ignorant racist foolishness embodied by the tea party movement.  Everything from "Obama is a Nazi Socialist foreign-born Arab Muslim" to death panels, to "they're going to take away our guns" to Health care reform - which involves access to insurance via private carriers - is socialism.

There was a time when Republicans were responsible politicians, even though they always had their hands deeper into the corporate purse than the Democrats.  But that time is long gone.  The last decent Republicans were Ike and Barry Goldwater, and he (though he recanted later in life) was a god damned loon.

You can joke all you like, but the Republican party is now in thrall to Rush Limbaugh, who is as dishonest a lying bastard as you will find on this planet, and has it's views accurately represented by that flaming moron Glenn Beck.

Are you aware that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew in 2002 that the vast majority of detainees at Gitmo were totally innocent people rounded up for bounty by Afghan warlords? They kept this under wraps because the truth was incompatible with their push toward an unjust and unjustifiable war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. You have to read the Times of London to get real news about the United States.

I am no fan of Democrats, but, for the most part, they have one thing going for them -- they aren't Republicans.

I love you, man, but in the future, please spare me the right wing bull shit.

Best,

JzB

Since writing that, I've run across this exposé of Mitch McConnell's idiotic and hypocritical statement on the Senate Floor yesterday.

”The way to solve this problem is to let the people who make the mistakes pay for them. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”

Unless McConnell is even more ignorant and stupid than he appears, he knows that countries NEVER let their big financial institutions fail and wreak havoc on their economies.  Besides, he voted for the previous bailouts.

There can be a serious debate about the appropriate size and scope of financial institutions, but there cannot be a serious debate on any subject with a person who represents a political party that has devolved into such deep cynicism that it has nothing but contempt for this county, its Constitution, and its political processes.  Which, come to think of it, explains Sarah Palin.

God help us all.

Update:
Just a little more on the abject stupidity and grotesque irresponsibility of Repugnicants.

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Haiku Wednesday Redux

I don't need to take down the idiot Glenn Beck when so many others have done it - in Haiku form.

This brightened my day.

Haiku Wednesday - Dance

Dance

From ballet to jazz,
And Irish dance; granddaughters
Lifting up their heels.

Sunday Music Blogging - 4/11

More Kapustin.  All performances by the composer.  Great stuff.  Enjoy!







And now for something completely different.

Easter Sunday Music Blogging

Six Word Saturday 4-03

Having eleven 

Grandchildren is 

Great FUN!

What the Hell? Friday

What the hell is up with Fibonacci?

Still,  you can always count on him.

So to speak.

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April Fool

No, not a joke.  Instead, the moron Tom Friedman.

H/T to Delong




Update:  But wait!   Southern Beale has more on Morons.

One of the most disturbing things about the right wing is their willful ignorance.

Update 2:    And still more from Delong.  Wow!   It just keeps getting better

Update 2.5:  And even still more betterer.

Update 3:  But, on a lighter note, we also have Topeka!

Update 4:  At no extra charge, an April Fool's potpourri.

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