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Crooks and Liars:

I wondered whose deep pockets the trust fund baby was using to launch his new vanity project. Turns out, Tucker's sugar daddy is Foster Friess, a very vocal climate change denier.

The Daily Caller's main post at present is a large close-up of Nancy Pelosi and the following:

Nancy Pelosi and others flew for free to Copenhagen Climate Junket
By Sharyl Attkisson - CBS News 01/12/10 at 1:42 pm


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress took their families along on a first-class trip to Denmark. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)A delegation of congressional members attending the Copenhagen Climate Summit was so large–by some counts, 101 people–that it required two taxpayer-funded 737’s and a Gulfstream Five, to make the trip, reports CBS investigative correspondent Sharyl Atkisson. Members of congress, who refused to fly commercial, also brought along their families and support staff. All for a summit that failed to deliver a global climate deal.

One of the tags for the article is "environmental scepticism." It seems this post is just the first of many.

Less Tall Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle: Tax the banks to pay for bailouts? Why? That's what the taxpayer is for.

The Bad Date

While checking out Tucker Carlson's new website I accidentally stumbled upon a madwoman in a closet. No, really.

I don’t really care that polar bears may not live to see the birth of my great-grandkids, or that I just shot a deer with my 12-gauge, since it will make for really tasty jerky, and I probably just prevented 14 future car accidents. I would fish every trout out of the Housatonic River if they let me, and grill them up with some lemon and dill. Catch-and-release is for wimps, and nature’s bounty is mine for the taking.

The so-called “environment” doesn’t really tug at my heart-strings either. I will use as much water as comes out of my faucet, kill enough trees to TP the White House, and burn enough electricity to power the Magic Kingdom, simply because you insist doing so will make me a “bad person.” I recycle because, in Manhattan, I’m required to, and if I had a car, I’d get the one that left the biggest carbon footprint, because the flatulent cows in Australia and your pampered dog Fluffy are worse for the planet than my Hummer would be. The ice caps may be melting in the Arctic, but I’ve got more pressing concerns — like my letter campaign to bring back the British “Office,” and pretty much everything else.

I must confess I’m also a bit of a warmonger. Because unlike you I believe in good and evil and protecting my way of life sometimes requires inflicting blunt trauma. If you’re going to tell me that Islamo-fascist, communist and socialist dictatorships around the world aren’t worse than we are–they’re just “different”–I’m going to tell you that you’re a colossal idiot, and we should probably part company here. American exceptionalism isn’t a theory, it’s a fact. Sorry, France. (Your music sucks anyway.)

Let's just say that some of us are more "exceptional" than others.

The young lady informs us that she is a misanthrope because her parents are "compassionate, hard-working, down-to-earth, unpretentious, God-fearing common folk" and "most of the people I meet fall far short of the examples my mother and father set decades ago." Which is, no doubt, why she has copied Tina Fey's look and Ann Coulter's style. It's because of her lack of pretension and Christian love.

Missing Links

We are very behind in our coverage of Megan McArdle with no hope of catching up, but there are a few interesting things to observe in passing. We'll add the links throughout the day as we have time.

McArdle has several posts tittering at global warming, for she "would like to think that we have been overstating the degree to which anthropogenic factors have influenced global warming trends." That ends the issue for McArdle, for she simply believes whatever she wants to believe. It's easy when you have the conservative habit of going to "experts" to analyze data instead of looking at the data itself. McArdle talks to bankers, she does not read reports and statistics. She believes what they tell her, repeats what they said to her audience, and gets a paycheck in return. It's win-win.

McArdle notes that a pro-insurance reform economist did not disclose that he has been a consultant for the Obama administration. She does not note that he advised Mitt Romney but perhaps she simply did no research on the man at all, and did not act out of malice or profit motive. McArdle emails the source of her story but not the subject, oddly enough. Maybe it didn't occur to her to try to contact the subject of her story. Or maybe it was too hard.

'[I]t would be nice if we could figure out something to do," about failed mortgages, Miss McArdle sighs. Plus ca change, etc.

Conventional wisdom was wrong about the housing bubble, McArdle reports, not mentioning that "they" included "her." "Somehow, everyone got stupid all at once," McArdle said, mistaking personal experience for universal experience. She does not mention greed, that thing that makes people want more money, as a possible motivation for people stealing money. They were all just spontaneous stupid, despite the fact that they are also the elite who must be paid millions to do their risky, difficult jobs.

There are a few deeply dishonest posts in which McArdle tries to replace the word "regulation" with "patrimony." It's no wonder she's so fascinating. Orwell himself would be taking notes.

Busy

More posting later; work calls.

Deadwood

Let's clear out the deadwood. Megan McArdle tut-tuts Obama's budget director, who is going to marry for the second time and just had a baby with a past girlfriend. "Goodness," she says. " I never realized that Peter Orszag's personal life was so complicated."

We have always quite deliberately averted our eyes from the closeness of McArdle's little set of nascent bloggers and future tea-baggers. Some things just can't be unlearned, no matter how much you want them forgotten. McArdle should be aware that such cocktail party chatter is inappropriate in The Atlantic, but I guess Washington gossip is more amusing than economics and the subject in question works for the Democratic administration. Sally Quinn would be proud.

There's also a post about chocolate--she can only eat quality chocolate. Quelle surprise.

During the Depression, The Atlantic published an article by Bernhard Ostrolenk on the causes of the stock market crash. There is a retrospective of long-ago topics in the online magazine, and the authors say:

Investment banking had undergone significant changes as well during that same period. [During the restructuring of the banking system from independent banks to chain banking.] In the January 1930 Atlantic, Edgar Lawrence Smith described how Wall Street’s lending practices had come to violate the basic principles of sound banking. In a well-conducted bank, he wrote,

When a man wishes to borrow…his credit is appraised and a loan is made proportionate to his credit standing. Banks rarely, if ever, make loans to people with whose affairs they are not reasonably familiar.

But during the high-flying ’20s, when a customer borrowed from a stockbroker to invest in the market, Smith observed, such caution was abandoned. Eager to cash in, individuals assumed large amounts of debt in order to purchase stock they should not have been able to afford. And stockbrokers, in pursuit of commissions and with an eye towards driving prices ever higher, readily extended these unwise loans, which were referred to as “debit balances.”

Debit balances thus underwrote a financial system that was unsustainable. For Smith, the collapse of the stock market could be traced back to abuses of the simple principle of credit. Solid credit, he explained, is based either “(1) upon the competence, character, and earning power of the borrower, or (2) upon documents representing genuinely self-liquidating transactions.”

In the case of debit balances, however, stockbrokers extended credit on neither ground. Instead, the ability of the borrowers to pay back the loan depended on “the general level of stock prices.” But those prices, Smith pointed out, were “a function of the volume of credit so granted.” The flaws in this system soon became tragically apparent, ruining many unwitting investors.

Smith was quite clear on the question of who bore the responsibility:

The community depends upon the fraternity of bankers to see to it that the credit of the community is not squandered, that it is sound in character and can be depended upon…No Federal Reserve or other system can be devised to protect the quality of credit if bankers throughout the country do not apply sound judgment in the making of each loan.

Maybe the conservatives are right. Standards have been lowered to least common denominator.

Ann Althouse is Brilliant

Ann Althouse playfully asks for attention from the internet wag who created Analyze Glenn Reynold's Body Language.

That time Glenn Reynolds reacted to me with an "arrogant sneer and a coiled physicality."

And purportedly thought "Now get your fuckin' shinebox," according to this blog, which Glenn likes/pretends to like, but which fails to comply with Flickr terms of service — by not linking to the photo page — and my Creative Commons license — by not giving me credit for the photograph I took.

I think it's very funny blog too, actually. I'm not even sure what I want more, credit for the photograph of mine that it used or an Althouse-focused equivalent of Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language. I mean if Charles Johnson is going to say "Glenn Reynolds is ... engaging in political analysis via Flickr. And Ann Althouse, too!" and then direct readers to the Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language blog, where's the parity?

I thought that people pointed out Althouse's need for attention partly in jest, but evidently it's even worse than it appeared. Althouse wants people pouring over pictures of her and talking about her and doesn't care whether that attention is negative or positive. Mock her, insult her, call her a drunk--just don't ignore her.

Althouse should have looked more carefully.

Also, be careful what you wish for. McArdle thought it was cool to have such close attention, too.

Much, Much, Much Shorter

Do mortgage modifications help the homeowner or the economy? Megan McArdle has a post up that exhaustively studies the matter.

Is the mortgage modification program making things worse? An article in the New York Times gives voice to fears that by encouraging homeowners to stay in homes that they cannot really afford, Obama's Making Home Affordable program is actually increasing the agony of homeowners, who pour money down the rat hole of their mortgage rather than recognizing the loss and starting over.

1,500 words and 19 paragraphs later, McArdle comes up with an answer to her dilemma.

So to answer the question I posed at the beginning: there's not much evidence that the current scheme of mortgage modification is making things worse. But there's also not much evidence that any differently designed system would have made things any better. We may have to look for other ways to ease the pain of those whose houses are more than they can afford.

McArdle recommends faster short sales to deal with the bursting bubble economy. It is left to RW and JoshinHB in comments to explain conservative banking principles to the economic conservatives, to their blank disbelief. McArdle's post adds little except the knowledge that she very much wants the housing problems to go away so she can buy a house.

UPDATE: A commenter tells McArdle to do her research--new guidelines for short sales are already in place.

Helping Hands

Since Megan McArdle can't think of anything to post, here's a topic for her:

Regulatory failure, not low interest rates, was responsible for the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis of the last decade, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said in a speech on Sunday.

Discuss.

"I Woke Up Where?

`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'

Alice didn't want to go among mad people, and who could blame her? That's the appropriate reaction, and I wish more people would have it. By the way, do you think Ann Althouse is crazy? That might be the explanation for the strange expression she has in the following picture.



The gaping mouth. The round, slightly crossed and protuberant eyes--those unblinking eyes, that look as if they gazed into the abyss of madness and now madness gazes out of them. Madness wouldn't explain the slurred speech, however.

What is she thinking now? Oh my God, I married my stalker. He's going to gaslight me and steal my boxed wine and JFK memorabilia! Or perhaps: I was respected once. True, I only lasted two years in the real world before I ran into the waiting arms of academia, but people hired me and everything. Now I perform like a seal before an audience of racist, ignorant bottom dwellers. Wouldn't it be funny if I just quit? Closed up my blog, put down the glass of wine, and donate my time to a legal clinic instead?

But madness has its own method and Athouse has let loose the bonds of sanity, floating far, far above it all.

Crap

Due to an unfortunate conflaction of Cliff May and Andy McCarthy, we deleted the latest post. Not since the infamous conflating of Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher have we been this mistaken.

ADDED: Heh. Now I feel better--Think Progress calls him Chris May.

Drowning, Not Waving

Megan McArdle is doing what Megan McArdle loves best, arguing with another blogger. Nothing calls attention to one's self like playing the victim, and McArdle eagerly enters the fray.

Felix Salmon discusses the sad case of a man who clearly cannot pay his mortgage and demands:

So this is what I'd like to ask Megan McArdle, and others who like to extol the moral virtues of paying one's debts: just how much of your life's savings should you give these snakes before they take your house?

Oooh, he demands an answer! What is a po' little ole blogging gal to do when attacked in the national press? Provide evidence? Unleash Blogging Fists of Fury? Bury him in cogent, fact-based argument? Let's see:

I don't really understand the question.

Heh. We are not surprised.

I am in favor of people are financially able to keep the house without getting foreclosed on, keeping the house rather than getting foreclosed upon. The guy in question clearly cannot, given that he lost his job and has no tenant for the property in question. Obviously he should have walked away immediately.

Yes, if you lose your job, you and your family should immediately abandon your house.

Indeed, I don't understand why he didn't, since the article makes no mention of any suggestion or promise that accepting a modification that didn't reduce his payment, would later qualify him for one that did. And since it's pretty clear that Mr. Vellucci cannot afford much of any payment at all, it's not clear why he--or Felix--thinks he should have gotten one. Modifications are supposed to be a deal that makes both sides better off by avoiding the huge costs of foreclosure, not a vehicle for transferring wealth from bondholders or bank shareholders to people we like better. The latter is what the progressive income tax is for.

Kudos for the snappy little comeback, even if it is both wrong and unfair. Naturally McArdle fails to mention the gross manipulations perpetrated by the mortgage industry. They are irrelevant. Corporations must be let off the hook always, or the banks will suffer. The individual is always on his own. Also ignore the fact that mortgages were sliced, diced, slapped with a fake rating, sold, leveraged, failed, and were bailed out by taxpayers. Just because you can.

Felix Salmon is being a tiny bit unfair to McArdle, whose indignation was aimed at a wealthy woman who wanted to walk away from her contracts while continuing her upper-class lifestyle. McArdle is careful to attack those who merit it here, hoping that her eager readers will apply her disdain and scorn for people with mortgage troubles to everyone, deserving or not. In return, McArdle is unfair to Salmon, both taking the example of the other to extrapolate beyond the specifics. I do not condemn Salmon; I think we have more than enough evidence from the McArdle oeuvre to assume she operates in bad faith and with no sympathy for anyone not named McArdle. Or, perhaps, Suderman, although I wouldn't count on that and neither should Mr. Suderman.

Do I feel sorry for Mr. Vellucci? Very sorry.

She has historically had so much sympathy for the poor.

Illness is usually framed by complaints about large medical bills, but for most people income loss is at least as great a problem, and often a much bigger one.

"Illness is framed by"? You become ill, you lose your job, but you're just "framing" the situation, not stating it? And when you lose your job because you are ill and can't work, that has nothing to do with the cost of being ill? McArdle returns to the glory days of her inept, inaccurate, inane "take-down" of Elizabeth Warren's bankruptcy study, which McArdle amply demonstrated that she either would not or could not understand. But being wrong has never bothered our princess before, and McArdle is still against helping the consumer when she can help the banker.

And Mr. Vellucci seems to have been a financial naif who was given bad-to-fraudulent advice at every turn. What happened to him is tragic, and I wouldn't be sorry to see the folks who defrauded him spend some time in the pokey.

But the implied combination of tiny savings, minimal income, and inability to find a paying tenant in a real-estate market with a sub-2% vacancy rate, does not suggest that the solution to his problems is a mortgage modification. I'm not sure what the servicer could have done, other than foreclosed outright. Or what Felix thinks this has to do with people who decide to default on their mortgages so that they'll have more money to spend on cruises and new furniture.

I sure hope McArdle's landlord isn't underwater and planning to sell the house out from under her or hand it back to the bank, tossing her and her boyfriend, dog and kitchen gadgets out on the street. That would be just tragic. Funny, but tragic.

Jews For Jesus

Jonah Goldberg saw Avatar, but don't expect any run-of-the-mill ranting against its eco-friendly theme. Unfortunately for lazy, dilatory Jonah, everyone else already did that and he is forced to come up with something that hasn't already been regurgitated by all the other wingunt welfare recipients. But Jonah is nothing if not flexible, in thought if not in body. Even though he is stuck with Ross Douthat's sloppy seconds, he manfully ejects his latest intellectual exercise upon the world, making him less than a chunky Reese Witherspoon but greater than a walking man-carpet.

The film has been subjected to a sustained assault from many on the right, most notably by Ross Douthat in the New York Times, as an “apologia for pantheism.” Douthat’s criticisms hit the mark, but the most relevant point was raised by John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard. Cameron wrote Avatar, says Podhoretz, “not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.”

What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.

What the hell? Jonah is Jewish. Why on earth is he proselytizing for Christians? What does he think will happen to people of his religion if the right gets its way and makes Christianity a state religion? Would synagogues lose their tax exemption? Would Jewish holidays no longer be respected? Or would he simply have to suffer the public slights from a people who identify themselves through the exclusion and persecution of others?

Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.

I’m certainly one of those cranky right-wingers, though I probably enjoyed the movie as cinematic escapism as much as the next guy.

But what I find interesting about the film is how what is “pleasing to the most people” is so unapologetically religious.

I suppose he is trying to say that when the savage converts the Christian the left is happy, but when the Christian converts the savage, only a few noble, pure souls like Goldberg care. It's amazing that a Jewish guy ignores the forced conversions, outlawing of others' religions, and scapegoating those of minority religions but after all, this is the man who mitigated Hitler to try to make the left look worse.

Jonah's point, which he reaches eventually after digressions into philosophy, cartoons, Darwin, and, of course, Al Gore, seems to be that the right has moral unity but the left is in moral chaos. They need traditional religion to pass on morality and even to survive. Therefore Avatar is stupid and the left is immoral and the Right is right. And all this fake scholarship and pontificating is in the service of an essay on a movie.

The Corner mocks analysis of pop culture but also revels in it, eager to repackage everything in their own brand, an imaginary world of uniformity and conformity. They hate the real world because most of the people in it refuse to play along with their delusions.

A Dangerously Weak Mind

A Cornerite spends some time with the family:

"They Just Took My Money" [John J. Miller]

That's what my 8-year-old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift card from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it.

This is how conservatives are made.

That's also how bad, dim-witted citizens are made, who use city services but think they don't have to pay for them. No doubt Miller lectured his son that the government stole his holiday gift money; it seems to be a conservative trait to teach your children to grow up both full of entitlement and utterly unwilling to acknowledge that someone will have to pay for their clean water, roads, cops, teachers and everything else civilization provides for them.

Stop paying taxes, fire all the teachers, and use your Borders card to buy homeschooling materials. The child should be playing with string and buttons and building tree forts to shove girls out of anyway.

The Best Advice Always Comes From Interested Parties

Shall we fisk Megan McArdle? Let's!

James Altucher has a lengthy column on why you should rent rather than buy. Shorter version: there are a lot of hidden costs, and outside of the bubble, housing has not historically been a great investment. The phenomena that made it a great investment for some people (the emptying out and then filling up of cities, the introduction of self-amortizing mortgages, rising and then plummeting interest rates, and the special status of mortgage debt after 1986) will not indefinitely continue to push prices up; most of them have played out. Over the long run, housing prices cannot grow much faster than incomes.

Who is this Jame Altucher and why should we believe what he says? McArdle does not provide his bona fides, so we must do the job ourselves. What a surprise, Mr. Altucher is a hedge fund manager. In McArdle's mind, that makes him perfectly trustworthy because, as she says, such people never would operate out of self interest, for fear of losing money for their firms. The fat fees and bonuses such people derive from suckering the rubes is somehow overlooked. One can't think of everything, I suppose.

I agree with all of this. You should not buy a house because "renting is throwing your money away" or because you expect the house to become a cash cow. As an investment, housing is a good form of forced savings, but do not expect price appreciation to make you rich--nay, not even if it made your parents and all your neighbors rich.

Forsooth, 'twould be folly indeed to expect housing to make one rich in these parlous times. Verily and a hey-nonny-nonny!

But these articles, and the homeownership-skeptics (of which I am sort of one) often give short shrift to the benefits of owning.

McArdle is a professional skeptic, always questioning the status quo and conventional wisdom. Which makes me wonder why she has been so dead-set to buy a house of late, and would have bought one if her investments hadn't crashed with the stock market.

Renting has hidden costs, too. Outside of New York, with its massive stock of professional landlords hamstrung by restrictive rent rules, renting means you usually have to move every few years, because the landlord wants to live in the house again, or is selling it, or wants to raise the rent too much in the hope that you'll be too lazy to move. Moving costs a ton of money, between the movers (now that I'm getting old and creaky), the new furniture that is inevitably required, and the old furniture that cannot be fit into the new house and must be thrown away. Moving also soaks up a month or so of your time on each side of the move, which needs to be factored in for both lost income and sheer misery.

I remember her move. It took her weeks to pack, an incomprehensible situation, and she had to move twice because one apartment was unlivable. We won't wonder at her habit of throwing away furniture, since we know she believes wholeheartedly in cheap cardboard and plywood furnishings.

Then there is the inability to have your house the way you want it. Sure, it's not like we could afford high-end appliances. But if we owned our house, I might be able to hope that someday we would acquire a water heater bigger than a thimble, rather than hopelessly resigning myself to shallow, lukewarm baths. I might also be able to sink screws into the ceiling for a hanging potrack, install blackout curtains so that I could sleep later than 6 am in the summer, and otherwise make the house over more to my specifications. But the owners are fond of their home the way it is, so it stays.

In the South we call this "po' mouthing." If a lady complains about her poverty or sighs that she just can't afford what everyone else has, we assume she's putting on airs and is both greedy and without gratitude for God's blessings. Bad breeding, McArdle.

Furthermore, why doesn't she just buy a bigger water heater and arrange with the landlord to cut the rent in recompense? Or just throw caution to the wind and buy the damn thing on her own dime? Hot baths are obviously important to her, and someone who will spend $20 for a pound for salt will surely be willing to pay a few hundred dollars for something so essential to daily life. It certainly would be cheaper than buying a house.

For a long time, I didn't care so much about this. I liked the freedom renting gave me. But once you're committed to a city, and another person, that freedom starts looking overrated.

Oh, please. McArdle always wanted a house and any attempts to deny it are futile. Archives don't lie, unlike bloggers. However the point of our story is not McArdle's bad breeding or Galtian willingness to suffer cold baths rather than risk benefiting her landlord. The point is this:

Rather than spend $100,000-to-$200,000 on a home's initial cost -- and that has become completely illiquid as long as you own the house -- you can put that money in a portfolio of diversified real estate investment trusts, including residential investment trusts, if you truly believe in the housing market.

The hedge fund manager recommends renting so you will have more money to put into investments. Maybe into hedge funds! Do you believe in housing or don't you? If so, don't buy a house, invest in mortgages instead. That's worked out so very well so far.

Oh Conflict Of Interest, how elusive you are to those trained to avoid you. When you don't understand or acknowledge your own conflicts of interest, you studiously avoid recognizing others' as well.

It's All About Me

Shorter Scarlet O'McArdle: Sending poor men and women off to die in an illegal and immoral war to maintain one's illusion of safety is fine. Having to put up with annoying security measures when flying is outrageous.

Priorities

Our libertarian princess Megan McArdle is back at work, analyzing economic events so you don't have to. We are graced with another post on health care costs and how Medicare is doooooooomed!!, although it's a little difficult to determine her point since she tries to imply it, not say it. That's not exactly a winning strategy in journalism, which purports to find out what is happening and pass it on to the rest of the world, but when you say things like "Medicare will be bankrupt soon and health care reform will kill your granny," people respond with facts and statistics that make you look silly. Much better to link to someone who quotes someone who says something that you want to pour into your audience's ear like poison.

Yes, money is wasted in the current health care system, McArdle admits, but cuts will mean people will die due to rationing. Cutting unessential medical treatments will lead to millions of deaths. Finding cheaper ways to handle paperwork will kill your Granny. Using government power to lower prices will mean you'll spend your last year in agony and then die a hideous death. In the back of our minds, of course, we all realize that rising insurance rates will kill us, no insurance will kill us, rescission will kill us, pre-existing conditions will kill us, and not fighting for national health will kill us, but come on people, it's profit for corporations we're talking about here, not survival of the middle class.

Perhaps Medicare will go bankrupt if we don't do anything about it. Maybe we will have to end all public welfare because we are just treading water until the country realizes that all that money in the financial system went poof! and won't come back, and that the outsourced jobs aren't coming back either. But make no mistake, the end of "entitlements" is a goal, not an unfortunate side effect. If you can make millions off financial trickery, get the taxpayer to hand you billions more, and then tell them that you can't afford to pay for their health care any more, the end of social security and medicare is merely another step towards achieving your goal of amassing as much personal wealth as humanly possible.

Much like the intellectual right, the American consumer is no longer as important as he thinks he is. Corporate CEOs routinely go on CNBC and inform their acolytes that they expect more and more of their profits to come from abroad. When they can no longer wring any more money from us they'll have no use for us at all, except as cannon fodder to fight for their access to oil.

"Scoop" McArdle

Megan McArdle compares the CBO to ratings agencies like Moody's to prove that because bankers are crooked, the government is wrong about the cost of health care insurance reform. It's not worth going into, but her journalistic instincts are worth a mention.

It was totally legitimate for securities issuers to go to Moody's and say, "What kind of rating does this tranche get?" But at some point, the relationship got too close. Many allege that this is because of conflicts of interest, or financial malfeasance; I withhold judgment on these accusations. Whatever the cause, it has become clear that if raters and the rated work too closely together, the ratings begin to bear less and less resemblance to actual reality.

She does not find out the facts and draw a conclusion, she "withhold[s] judgement," a high-sounding way of avoiding research and unfortunate conclusions. If you don't know the facts you won't have to ever change your mind or feel uncomfortable about your decisions. "Whatever the cause"--what a convenient phrase. "New Orleans drowned--whatever the cause, it was a bad thing." "Wall Street gutted the financial system--whatever the cause, we must give them more money." "I drank underage, got a suspended license, couldn't register my car, couldn't repair my car, and therefore couldn't drive my new car---whatever the cause, Pennsylvania sure is stupid."

Season's Greetings

Before I get back to work, a little Megan McArdle:

Since cash-for-clunkers probably moved auto purchases forward, rather than generating actual new demand for autos, this considerably dampens hopes for a "V" shaped recovery.

Who was hoping for a V-shaped recovery? Larry Kudlow? Fox News? Everyone else seems to have realized this a very long time ago.

Another post trying to make money through Amazon. Isn't using one's work blog for personal gain a breach of journalism ethics? Not that it matters; no doubt the Atlantic thoroughly understands that hucksters must follow their heart, if they haven't already sold it off in the organ market.

There's a post on doctors as cartels that would take too much work to deal with. I need the brain space for more important work, like figuring out if I have enough tissue paper and ribbon.

Less Tall Megan

Less Self-Aware Megan McArdle: Tee hee, you have a mote in your eye.

(Honestly, is there anything more ridiculous than McArdle criticizing others' poor writing, while ignoring her own endless parade of errors?)

Mentally Absent McArdle: Isn't everything that women of my age, class and pretensions do just fascinating?

More Of A Twit McArdle: Much like my quote of the week and product of the week, I was too, uh, busy to keep up with Twitter. But now you can read my every thought.