Felix Salmon, back in my good graces, has a nice August wrap-up, leading off with Larry Summers’ persuasive take on the debt ceiling disaster—worst deal evah!—and segueing naturally to the price of Bordeaux. Are those crafty chateaux manipulating prices? How French of them! The kicker, according to Felix, is that you can’t short Bordeaux. Better…

Michael Lind has a nice piece over at Salon, pointing out that the Tea Party nation has a distinctly southern tinge. Yet it was the Tea Party in Massachusetts—Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to replace massively flawed liberal icon Teddy Kennedy—not the Tea Party in Texas, that has the Obama Administration dazed and confused….

I’ve been bitching about Tim Geithner more or less for the life of this blog.* Somehow, the guy always rubs me the wrong way. Well, he’s at it again, as described in this post by Politico’s Anna Palmer: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called together top officials from U.S. business groups Monday for a last minute…

The budget deal, whatever it is, has four legs, a collar, and lots of fleas. How did we fall so far so fast? Democrats have to be asking ourselves why each of the last three Democratic presidencies have followed such a similar pattern—high expectations, followed by a severe drop-off in public support. Jimmy Carter infuriated…

The current dead tree issue of Popular Science tells us 1) how to live to 150 and 2) how to brew beer in a week! The PopSci website is here, and the beer article is here, but the live to be 150 piece doesn’t seem to be online, so if you want to spend the…

One of the things that I haven’t been worrying about too much is why employment has been increasing among men since the recession ended but still decreasing among women. Andy Sullivan, whose sympathies, and resources, are wider than mine, has been worrying about it, and posts this item. So why is it happening? Andy refers…

In this morning’s column, Paul Krugman takes dead aim at the unnamed idiots who believe that Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame for the slow, or not so slow, moving economic disaster rumbling towards us. He is, most obviously, attacking two dudes with whom he shares space on the New York Times editorial page,…

Tough-talking New Jersey lardbutt Chris Christie just lost a step in the 2012 presidential race, in which he wasn’t running any way, after checking into a hospital as a result of an asthma attack. Get better soon, Chris!

Was there ever a crisis so tedious and unnecessary as the current debt crisis—a monument to the hypocrisy of the American people, who want the world, but don’t want to have to pay for it? I’ve written before of the “tear it down, tear it all down” fervor of the Tea Party crew, but what…