Category: New York Times

In late March, I unloaded on New York Times editor Bill Keller, who has presided over the disastrous decline of his newspaper, but who fails to acknowledge any responsibility for the catastrophe he has done so much to bring about.

Today, Keller’s column and a column by NYT ombudsman Arthur Brisbane get picked apart by Felix Salmon:

Just like Brisbane, Keller makes sure that every single link in his column is an internal one, to some other NYT web page — I count 26 different links between the two columns, which implies that in the eyes of the New York Times, the 26 most important online resources to link to when writing those columns are all NYT stories or pages. It’s as arrogant as it is hermetic.

Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who has more. In an information environment characterized by connectivity and collaboration, those who pretend that they owe no obligation to others — who refuse to give credit where credit is due — will inevitably suffer for that pretense when the truth becomes known.

by Smitty (via PuffHo)

Krugman begins his NYT editorial recounting that the whole Wall Street crisis occurred on Bush’s watch. *Yawn*

So what’s the solution? The answer is regulation that limits the frequency and size of financial crises, combined with rules that let the government strike a good deal when bailouts become necessary.

I guess in the twisted mind of Krugman, regulation is like free speech; the answer to bad regulation is. . .yes, more regulation! In my ideal world, Krugman and his ilk would be forced to study control theory, where they may learn that the wages of more regulation is an overdamped system. In an ideal world, it may be OK, because almost nothing happens. In reality, you get the USSR.
Less regulation. Smaller markets, where the risks are more transparent, and the government isn’t finger-faddling everything. Crashes are like winter, a natural part of the system, chum.

To see what’s really going on, follow the money. Wall Street used to favor Democrats, perhaps because financiers tend to be liberal on social issues. But greed trumps gay rights, and financial industry contributions swung sharply toward the Republicans in the 2010 elections. Apparently Wall Street, unlike the voters, had no trouble divining the party’s real intentions.

In my mind, Federalism looks very libertarian. The Federal government shouldn’t be interested in individuals, period. Interest in making a buck is a reasonable corporate goal. Caring about private behavior of people is not. What a decadent conflation you have there, Krugman
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And one more thing: by standing in the way of regulations that would limit future financial crises, Republicans are giving further evidence that they don’t really care about budget deficits.

Krugman, your faith in regulation is truly religious, is it not? What sort of teleological point does regulation offer you, sir? What kind of afterlife does it promise, this regulation which you think can save you?
No, fixing budget deficits is going to be a result of trimming the Federal government back to its Constitutional bounds, twerp. Then an only then can the American people pursue salvation where they find it in an economic context that is as safe as anything born manually, invisible pimp hand or otherwise.

Paul Krugman lives in a universe where reality is whatever liberals say it is. And he is now concerned that Democrats are being too civil. Without seeming to grasp the irony, Krugman writes:

Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy.
Now, Republicans claim that last year’s midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the “massive Medicare cuts” contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?
For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But that’s all the more reason to make the 2012 election a clear choice between visions.

In other words, last year’s mid-term elections — in which Republicans scored their biggest net gain of House seats since 1938 — were a “mandate” only insofar as it means what Paul Krugman says it means. (He is recycling an Associated Press story from April 13.) If nothing else, the election was a negative referendum on ObamaCare, but Krugman won’t accept that.

As for Krugman’s assertion that the Ryan budget would “dismantle Medicare completely,” Krugman’s just playing the old “Medi-scare” game as a way to demand a do-over on last year’s election. Instead of 2010 having been “a clear choice,” the professor says, let’s make that choice in 2012.

But if last year’s election was not “a clear choice,” we have only Democrats to blame. In district after district, Democrats ran ads accusing Republicans of advocating “tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas.” And then there was the Democrats’ assertion that the GOP was funded by “secret foreign donors.” So Krugman evidently fears that Democrats who spent millions of dollars promoting dishonest smears in 2010 are now in danger of becoming too “civil.”

Professor Krugman evidently wants Democrats in Washington to mimic the tactics of Wisconsin Democrats, who resort to burglary to prevent a “clear choice” and also attempt to shut down Republicans with incoherent shouting.