I agree with UCal Berkeley econ dude Brad DeLong maybe 75% of the time, though I almost always confine my comments about him to the 25%. Well, this is one of those times. Like so many of the cool kids, Brad has a substack blog, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality and recently he took what struck…
Tag: jonathan chait
Political Notes from All Over
“Anyone but Joe,” anyone? Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? Spending the last few weeks laughing at the Republicans over their self-inflicted imbroglio/embroilment trying to elect a speaker for the House of Representatives was a treat. Well, now it’s our turn to suffer, as Uncle Joe’s Corvette winter plus the upcoming Hunter Biden follies, which…
Socio-political notes from all over
God Bless Niall Ferguson! (Pretty much) It’s hard to think of anyone I have trashed so consistently and so contemptuously as Niall Ferguson, whom I once grudgingly praised with a thoroughly uncivil leer as a Thelonious Monk-loving slimeball, while also urging readers not to read his then most recent book, whose title will go unmentioned…
Bernie Sanders is going to be a very sore loser
A lot of “concerned” people, like New York’s Jonathan Chait and the Bulwark’s Jonathan Last—Jonathan V. Last, as he likes to call himself1—are telling Bernie Sanders to get the hell out of the Democratic presidential race—Johnnie V, who once studied molecular biology, making the impeccable point that Bernie’s continued campaign is a danger to public…
Ilhan Omar: The strange case of the little girl in the headscarf who noticed that the emperor has no clothes
Oh, Ilhan Omar, what have you done? Yes, speaking the truth in the halls of Congress has always been hazardous to your health, but when little Ilhan, newly elected representative for the fifth district of Minnesota (basically Minneapolis and environs), remarked that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says…
Daniel Drezner is shocked, shocked to discover that Paul Ryan is Paul Ryan
More in sorrow than in anger, it would seem, the WashPost’s Dan Drezner struggles with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s puzzling tendency to say, well, to say one thing (usually decent by what one might call “Mainstream Acela” standards) and then do another (almost invariably pusillanimous1). Reviewing Paulie’s record, Dan can wonder why, since “Ryan is…
Stakhanovite liberalism—It’s still a thing!
“Stakhanovite1 liberalism” was a labored term of abuse worked up by the late William F. Buckley to ridicule overproducing liberals. Coal miner Alexsei Grigoryevich Stakhanov was made a “Hero of the Soviet Union” by Joseph Stalin in recognition of his exploits with a jack hammer and his example was used to encourage others to overfulfill…
Communism still sucks, Chait explains
Well, it does, and it always did. Not only Stalin but Lenin and Trotsky were hungry for absolute power from the get-go. Trotsky bragged about the murder of the Romanov family, when the Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and five children and a handful of servants were shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by a…
Avik Roy, silently blowing both his own horn and the Republican Party
There was a time, not so long ago, when I praised Republican health care “expert” Avik Roy for his outspokenness on House Speaker Paul Ryan’s atrocious health care “plan” to repeal and replace Obamacare: “it’s curious”, Avik observed, “that extending tax cuts [to the rich] was a higher priority for the House than addressing the…
Avik Roy Couldn’t Like the Senate Republicans’ Health Care Bill More if He Had Written It Himself!
Back in the day, conservative health care maven Avik Roy put the wood to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement legislation, remarking after Paulie “improved” the bill to meet Republican criticism, “it’s curious that extending tax cuts was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable…