Worth Reading:
John Holbo: Political Dog-whistles Don’t Have An Off-Switch For The Dog-whistle Part: "[I]t’s striking the degree to which Atwater clearly thinks he is showing how the race problem is going, going, gone. He thinks the fact that ‘we want to cut this’ is highly abstract, and ‘blacks get hurt more than whites’ is only a by-product, is enough to establish that the race stuff has really been left behind…. The idea seems to be that you can scrub racism with a compound of plausible deniability and the doctrine of double-effect…. But even if whites at some point, in their sincerest hearts of hearts, want ‘we want to cut this’ to not serve any longer as an in-group/out-group marker… it’s totally unreasonable to expect that out-group members will stop hearing this as dog-whistle ethnocentric signaling at precisely the convenient moment when it no longer serves the interests of white folks to have it be heard that way…"
Mark Thoma: Why the GOP Won't Admit Supply-Side Econ Has Failed
Mark Thoma: This Heritage Has No Foundation: "pgl highlights the Heritage Foundation's response to the Republican budget proposal (though I fear calling it a proposal gives it more credit than it deserves)"
Ken Rogoff: Innovation Crisis or Financial Crisis?
Economist review of Gary Gorton, Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why We Don’t See Them Coming
Mankiw and Weinzerl: An Exploration of Optimal Stabilization Policy
Aimai: Ta Nehisi's comments and blog posts… always something in there that rocks me back on my heels… this is one of the greats. This is not just something that has happened recently…. White women who slept with black men? Moved over permanently into the underclass, their children reclassified with them. White men who slept with black women? Retained their social status as long as they didn't demand a better status for their women and children. Northern whites who sided with the civil rights movement? Driven out, shot, murdered. To keep the priviliges of whiteness, whatever they were, you had to declare your fealty in the war and if you didn't you couldn't be part of what was to be the winning side. What's happened is that the side of racism mixed with corporatism has not been able to produce all the goodies… has been reduced to fighting a rearguard action with cultural attributes and repeated cries of victimization… lost the more rational and civic-minded… excoriate[s] those who vote for "the other side" as, in some sense… race traitors, with "Americanness" (according to Jonah Goldberg) as the race they are betraying…"
Gabriel Sherman: Fox News Puts Karl Rove on the Bench: "Ailes has issued a new directive to [Fox] staff…. Bill Shine has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking Rove or Morris…. Inside Fox News, Morris’s Romney boosterism and reality-denying predictions became a punch line. At a rehearsal on the Saturday before the election, according to a source, anchor Megyn Kelly chuckled when she relayed to colleagues what someone had told her: 'I really like Dick Morris. He’s always wrong but he makes me feel good'…"
Rand Ghayad and William Dickens: What Can We Learn by Disaggregating the Unemployment-Vacancy Relationship?
Roger Ailes: Extremist Makeover: House Edition: "Did you know Catfood Commissioner-For-Life Paul Ryan is a compassionate conservative? According to a trial balloon floated in the Republican organ PoliticHo, he is indeed!… You'll recall that Sarah Palin-with-a-heart was so dedicated to the poor that he even offered to re-wash their dishes in the presence of the media. Even PoliticHo (in the personages of stenographers Slappy Ho and VandeHo) has trouble keeping an older straight, white face telling this tale: 'Ryan held his tongue as long as he was on the ticket but on Tuesday night will say what he has been wanting to say for months — but which, to be fair, he has seldom said during the course of his political career'…. Missing from this fantasy on ice is a response from Romney, his advisers, or his Nellies. But dead men tell contradict no narratives. Meanwhile Marco Rubio's setting in motion a plan that's sure to please: 'Rubio’s Senate chief of staff is Cesar Conda, an expert policy mechanic who worked in the George W. Bush White House as an economic adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.' A no-bid defense contract in every pot is the new trickle-down Laffer curve."
Zack Beauchamp: Britain Doubles Down On Failed Austerity Policies: "Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne informed Parliament that the government planned to end austerity in 2018 rather than 2017, claiming that 'it’s taking time but the economy is heading in the right direction amidst what the New York Times described as 'heckling and laughter'… [the] derision might be because austerity has failed the United Kingdom, much as it has failed the broader Eurozone and, on the state level, severely held back the American recovery…. Moreover, austerity doesn’t even accomplish its stated goal of reducing a government’s debt…"
John Paczkowski: Lack of Distribution Is "Killing" Surface
Erik Loomis: Today in the Coming Republican Coalition: "1. John Sununu dismissing Obama’s victory as a group of people dependent on the government. 2. A Subway owned by Republican Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana refused to serve a Muslim couple and told them that was the reason. 3. The rejection of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Disabled treaty. If there’s three things that appeal to young voters, it’s denigrating why they voted for Obama, Jim Crow-style treatment of brown people, and hating on the disabled because of anti-world government nonsense. I can’t wait for the coming immigration debate."
Alert for Amazon Prime folk: Renoir's DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID for free! Watching it tonight.
— Daniel Lunsford (@peachfish42) December 5, 2012
Worth Looking at:
