Morgan Meis has actually a touching memoir of Eric Hobsbawm, the late communist historian, up at The Smart Set. In particular, he quotes from Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, telling me something about Hobsbawm that I didn’t know, that he loved jazz: Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better…
Martha Nussbaum, not quite mastering the cause and effect thing
Martha Nussbaum, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, on the subject “How to write about poverty,” informs us that “During the Depression, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath had a comparable impact [to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle], educating the American public about the plight of migrant workers and producing support for New Deal legislation.” The…
George and Charles, high on pot
What else can explain it? Both George Will and Charles Krauthammer gave last night’s debate to Mr. Stupid, Barack Obama. George, who may have gone a round or two with Snow White earlier in the evening, said it was the best presidential debate he’d ever seen. Charles, who may have borrowed Marion Barry’s crack pipe,…
Bruce Bartlett, refuting vapor
Bruce Bartlett, everyone’s favorite truth-telling Reaganite, does the unnecessary, and does it well, here, explaining why, even if everything went “right” in Mitt Romney’s tax “plan”—which is to say, if one could divide by zero and count up to infinity in a couple of hours—it would have no more than a minimal impact on the…
The Sad Sam Blues Jam—“Bolivar Blues”
Café Django, May 26, 2011. Sadie, Sam, and Joe. Posted by cjand2manygals. Go to the website and hear Sadie imitate Robert Johnson.
Disproving Mitt: Why bother?
Josh Barro has a column explaining why none of the six “studies” cited by Mitt Romney as “proving” that his tax “plan” to cut rates by 20 percent is “feasible” actually do the job. The mountain that all six of the pro-Mitt studies have to digest is yet another study, this one from the Tax…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Hey, numbnuts. That thing don’t drive itself.” “That’s a ‘green machine’ how?” “You’re going to go to sleep and you’re going to wake up President? Walter, there’s a lot about you that I just don’t understand.” “Well, does your ‘big concept’ include getting off your big fat ass and driving that thing?”…
Yes, Brendan, there is a Santa Claus. You just have to know how to work the son of a bitch
Michael Lewis, just after redefining presidential suck-up with his breathless account of presidential b-ball, relapses from his DC sugar high into enjoyable Wall Street snark. In a recent Bloomberg post, spotted by Felix Salmon, Michael affects to relay advice from 12-year-old texter to fellow sons of former Wall Street geniuses a few ground rules for…
There is no question
I have resolved not to start off this post with a question, such as “Can Obama Come Back?” or “Is Romney For Real?”, with the post concluding “maybe so, maybe no.” At this point, in one night Mitt Romney has energized the Republicans in a way that he very notably hadn’t done in the past…
Jack Welch, double asshole
I just got finished telling you that Jack Welch is an asshole. Well, Jack’s back, on the attack. Margaret Hartman, at New York magazine, alerts us to Jack’s latest and greatest excrescence, in, of course, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, headlined “Jack Welch: I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report.” Shrewdly, Jack conflates and…