Compare and contrast (attn: @edroso)

Megan McArdle:

Nike bet that politics would sell. Looks like it was wrong.

Everyone else.

Michael Bloomberg: Ultimately, a legacy of utter failure

I haven't been paying much attention to his stint as mayor -- he was marginally less creepy than Rudy Giuliani, wasn't he? -- but there is no walking this back:

(h/t: I blame)

[Added] And don't fail to follow this link from the preceding. Not for the first time do I marvel at Roy Edroso's scalpel and how gracefully he wields it.

Smell that? Mmm. Ahhh. Yes, the blogosphere just got measurably smarter.

Guess who just went Galt.

And M.B. is right about this, too, x2: don't miss Susan of Texas in comments over at Inside the Beltway.

Parting song.

Foster Kamer accomplishes the impossible

Hard to believe, but it's true: he's managed to come up with a compelling reason to keep MoDo on at the NY Times.

Accusations hurled

Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman, and to a slightly lesser degree, David Weigel, are accused of being water-carriers and worse for the Koch brothers. Ezra Klein gets a few finger wags, too.

Mark Ames's piece in Exiled Online, "The Koch-Whore Archipelago: How The Billionaire Kochs Screwed My Scoop While Screwing America," begins with a claim that an investigative piece done by him and Yasha Levine in 2009, that broke the news that the Kochs were behind the astroturfing of the so-called Tea Party movement, was removed from its site by its original publisher, Playboy, in large part due to a disinformation campaign led by Megan. He says that what he and Levine reported has all since come out and become accepted as the truth.

It's over the top, but worth a look.

(h/t: M. Bouffant, who's got a related video | x-posted)

Speaking of American Exceptionamalism ...

... which we were, stumbling across this should not have surprised me.

Snarkers Are Go!

Title of McMegan's latest post: "The Central Importance of Statistics."

Actually, I LIKE that he has made this "Megan McArdle Week"

Roy Edroso: "The Barrel Has No Bottom, Part 1,543,929."

Mm-hmm.

The omission he notes goes a long way to explaining why she keeps her job.

Monday Morning McMegan

From the past few days, actually. First, yesterday, from mistermix at Balloon Juice:

How Wrong is She?

McMegan is so wrong, that she’s even wrong when she links to her husband.

(That link is to a long Ezra Klein piece, ripping apart McSuderman point by point.)

And a couple of days before that, the Juicers and TBogg observed that Profs. Krugman and DeLong raised a couple of eyebrows in response to something else she babbled.

For true connoisseurs: McMegan jumped into the comment thread at DeLong's place a few times, as did a couple of her glibertarian fanboys, which means it just keeps getting bloodier funnier and bloodier funnier.

Saturday Morning Schadenfreude: "Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn"

Oh, this response to McMegan "Such Is Blogging" McArdle from the authors of a book she reviewed before she'd read is just priceless.

Via TBogg, whose post is also delicious.

McMore McMegan

TBogg post title, FTW:

Megan McArdle is just Andrew Breitbart with a broken calculator

See also the follow-up.

And if you're up for a longer critique, he recommends this from Thomas Levenson, as do I.

(previously)

Eh, more tax cuts for the rich will fix everything, Part II

Did you scrutinize those numbers? Too many numbers, maybe? Sorry about that, if so. So let's tell it with pictures!

Here is the gist ...

Inflation adjusted percentage increase in after-tax household income for the top 1% and the four quintiles, between 1979 and 2005 (gains by top 1% are reflected by bottom bar; bottom quintile by top bar).^[21]

... and here is what we're up against:

We have stolen these from Susan of Texas (via TBogg), whose post you should read, because she is looking at McMegan McArdle, who (1) has an inexplicably prominent platform and hence large amount of Authoriteh, and (2) is a big fan of tax cuts, including keeping Bush's tax cuts, because they help her stay rich and innumerate. Or something!

(pic. sources: graph (and caption) | cartoon: somewhere here, via)

Blog Post Title of the Week

John Holbo, Crooked Timber:

Rationing again: For all ponies, there is some pony, such that you won’t get that pony

If you're at all interested in this "issue" as it pertains to health care reform, have a look -- it's a good article, both sarcastic …

Let’s look at this article from “First Things” that has impressed McArdle with its bold willingness to speak truth (in contrast to the shameful reticence of reformers, re: rationing): “Come, let us speak of unpleasant things. How is health care to be rationed? Who gets the short end of the stick?”

The idea, basically, is that the invisible hand of the market is better than the visible hand of government. Because you can always see what the invisible hand is doing, because it’s visible. And you can’t see what the visible hand of government is doing, because it’s invisible.

No, seriously.

… and serious. (And it will make clear why I used scare quotes around "issue.")

Also, as you may have observed, the piece takes some swipes at Megan McArdle, which is always worth clicking a link for in my book.

And speaking of which, here is Thomas Levenson on an even worse assemblage of McMeganry -- her "thoughts" on wingnuts bringing guns to protests at town-hall meetings:

Another Reason Why My Doctor Tells Me The Nation Shouldn’t Read Megan McArdle…

…the necessary blood pressure medication on its own would bankrupt our soon-to-be-reformed health care system.

Though perhaps, pieces like this actually evoke more of a sense of wonder than anything else — not merely at the banality and evil so neatly conjoined in its content, but at the astonishing reality that anyone who routinely writes such…how to put this…bonecrushingly stupid; water-her-twice-a day dumb;* the wheel is spinning but the hamster’s dead** material, still has a job, much less an apparently appreciative audience.***

Actually, I think I have to credit McArdle with some cleverness here. Her post is so full of different instances of nonsense, bad faith argument, sheer failure to understand what she seems to think she is talking about that she achieves a certain effect: by seeding her post with so much to be debunked, she increases the odds that one whack-a-mole notion or another will slip past the defenses of rationality and real-world experience.

Life is, of course, too short to club every mechanical rodent that pops its head above the blissfully sunlit interior of McArdle’s mind, so what follows is an attempt at bullet-point fisking, a move towards a kind of blog-brevity that I have never executed successfully. So let’s see, why don’t we:****

I'd've copied over the footnotes, too, because that is what a nice guy I (usually) am, but you really should go read the whole thing.

P.S. I think "water-her-twice-a day dumb" is as fine a thing as I've read since someone posed online as Lemuel Pitkin.

Some Perspective

While I am disinclined to make a little uneasy about making too much political hay out of the act of one deranged individual, tempting though it is to use it to, say, shame Bill O'Reilly (and see also), these rhetorical questions from Thoreau are worth stealing in their entirety:

One more legal question

I have no idea if the suspect in custody for the murder of Dr. Tiller is in fact the guy who did it. We’ll need to see more evidence before we can draw any conclusions on that. However, let’s suppose that the cops are at least quite confident that he is the shooter, and that they also believe he has info on other people planning similar crimes. They question him, and he either refuses to talk or denies any knowledge of other planned attacks.

If the cops don’t believe him, and decide to subject him to sleep deprivation and beatings in order to extract information, should they be charged with crimes? Should superiors who signed off on these acts also be charged with crimes?

Extra credit: Would the answer to this question be any different if the witnesses said that the shooter yelled “Allahu Akbar!”?

[Added] Oh, and "About That DHS Report" ...

[Added] And you just knew Hilzoy would have some really smart things to say. It is perhaps unfair, or perhaps useful in contrast, that her words are in response to blatherings from Megan McArdle.

Not All My Vexes Live In Texas

Just because George W. Bush was safely bundled out of town doesn't mean there aren't still people inexplicably being given money to share what passes for their thoughts. Case in point: Megan McArdle, paid (!) by The Atlantic (!!) to blog.

Someone who may or may not* be named Lemuel Pitkin once called McMegan "weapons-grade stupid."

Lemuel was being polite.

Fortunately, we have Glenzilla:

Not letting abject ignorance interfere with opining

There are times when the glaring ignorance one encounters from people who are paid to write about political issues is so severe -- so illustrative of how distorted and misleading our political discourse is -- that it's impossible to ignore even though one would really like to.  Let's just spend a moment marveling at this paragraph written yesterday by The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, the sum total of her commentary on Obama's suspension of military commissions at Guantanamo:

Yes you should read the whole thing. And pay attention to what he has to say about Glenn Reynolds, too.

(h/t: Instaputz)

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* Why we're suspicious. Good online handle, though.

[Added] And dammit. I should have take a screenshot of that classic comment. It lived on for a while after Yglesias moved on from the Atlantic to Think Progress, but more recently, it looks like the Atlantic changed over to the Disqus commenting system, and managed to lose all of the earlier comments in the process. One wonders which Galtian was the sysadmin for that "upgrade."

Backfire!

Running a campaign based on fear has another downside exposed: just an anecdote, to be sure, but it's a good one. From Susan of Texas:

In "Why McCain Lost " by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, there is a quote from a friend of the authors that cracked me up.

He added that all the talk about Obama’s links to terror, to Islam, to bombers has also had the effect of intimidating elderly Republicans from even putting McCain/Palin signs in their yards.

Sweet.

(NB: Link modified in blockquote, for specificity)

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P.S. Just recently happened across Susan of Texas's blog, The Hunting of the Snark. Among other things, it appears that she reads McMegan, and Doughy and friends, so we don't have to. Good stuff. A recent favorite here.