My New Year’s resolution was to stay calm and just ignore the idiocy about economics that appears on the Washington Post’s editorial page, but I just can’t do it. The problem is that there are people who do take this stuff seriously. As a result, even if they began spouting creationism, it is still necessary to respond.

The immediate cause for breaking my resolution is the Post’s cautious acknowledgement that stimulus might be necessary to counteract the recession that it says may be coming. The piece is painful on several levels. First, they seem very proud to be citing three prominent economists who completely missed the housing bubble as their authorities on this topic (Ben Bernanke, Martin Feldstein, and Larry Summers). All three are very good economists, but this is sort of like rounding up the top advisors to Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden as your key experts for analyzing the Democratic primaries.

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People turn to any number of sources for loans or financing to cover their needs in tough times. Maybe they can borrow from a family member or a friend. Maybe they use services like mail-order catalogs that sell on credit (for a description of that system, see here, page 43).

But what about from a stranger over the Internet? Michelle Singletary, a financial columnist for the Washington Post, describes this sort of "social lending" here. Have any WarrenReports readers used such a service? What led you to use the service? What were your experiences? As the economy faces potentially serious trouble, I suspect many of these nontraditional lending networks will be popping up.

This Supreme Court is quite clearly the enemy of progressivism. Soon it will move again (you would think Bush vs. Gore was enough) to frustrate fair and widespread voting in the United States. It will not only legitimize Indiana's blatant effort to minimize voting by the poor and minorities, but also it will bar challenges to other such red state initiatives.

What is to be done? Congress can launch legislative remedies against much, although not all, of what this Court does. It also can expand access to courts, use the Senate confirmation process to challenge anti-progressive nominations, couple judicial salaries with retirement so as to encourage a new and young generation of law professors to go to the bench.

Mostly, Congress can rise to the challenge posed by this Supreme Court to the American Dream. In an age of rising inequality and irresponsible governance, it is critical that Congress not tolerate the Court's roadblocks to progress.

Andrew Oros of Washington College has an interesting piece on Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary site on what impact 2008 elections both in the U.S. and Japan might have on the bilateral relationship.

I particularly enjoyed this part reflecting on how things have changed since former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's and Bush's memorable Camp David baseball toss:

Casual observers might have been jarred to see Prime Minister Fukuda, during his late December visit to China, tossing a baseball with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

These visuals naturally invoke earlier images of President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s similar play during Koizumi’s visit to the United States in 2006. But does this mean Japan is now playing with China, not the United States? After all, no one reported President Bush and Prime Minister Fukuda playing ball during Fukuda’s November visit to the United States.

During the four-day trip, Fukuda's first to China since he became prime minister, the two countries signed agreements to cooperate to fight climate change and to increase youth and professional exchanges, and concluded arrangements for China’s president Hu Jintao to travel to Japan in April 2008 (which will be the first such trip by a Chinese head of state in a decade).

Rather than seeing this as a zero-sum competition, the United States should be pleased to see its game (baseball) and its principal ally (Japan) embraced in China. Difficult Japan-China ties serve no one’s interests.

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This article discusses Sallie Mae's recent erratic stock-market performance, which brings to light a central question: does Sallie Mae's profit motive as a publicly traded company irreparably undermine its ability to help create the most affordable and safe market possible for student loans?

Specifically, the article is alarming in its overview of "opportunity loans," through which Sallie Mae hands over a chunk of money to schools, which they can use to provide loans to students who would not otherwise qualify, in exchange for becoming that school's preferred lender. With a 70 percent default rate at least one school, Sallie Mae has acknowledged these loans are loss leaders but argues they can still grow business.

However, one has to wonder how Sallie Mae will recover such losses if such extraordinary default rates are prevalent. Like with the sub-prime crisis generally, we should be concerned that Sallie Mae's goal of achieving loan volume at any cost will ultimately result in making private loans less affordable in the long-term. 

Andrew Cuomo, attorney general of New York and Clinton supporter, used the phrase "shuck and jive" when referring to Obama.

If Cuomo were a talk show host or a commentator on the Golf Channel, he would be fired.

Is it possible that people like Cuomo wrongly think they are authorized to make these comments because they are only building on the Clintons' own claims that Obama is not experienced, is a "fairy tale," and is a mere "symbol"? If that is not what lures Cuomo, or Billy Shaheen, into the pernicious land of stereotypes, then what is going on here?

I’m sorry to be a dismal scientist, but the US economy appears to me and some other economists, including some big shots, to be entering a recession. Most people think we’re already there. (Given lags in data, recessions don’t get officially identified until after the fact.)

But what does recession mean to folks on the ground? How bad is it, really?

Pretty damn bad. Given recent historical patterns, three million more people could join the unemployment rolls, and middle-income families, already squeezed, and with income levels still recovering from the last recession, could lose another $2,500.

Here’s a quick summary of how things tend to go bad in a downturn.

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Yesterday when I read that a pregnant Marine was missing from Camp Lejeune, and was supposed to testify in a case against a fellow Marine, I had a sick feeling. I worried that she was testifying in a sexual harassment/assault case.

A few years ago, when looking into military sexual harassment for TAP, I was told that the Marines had a serious sexual harassment/assault problem and were the only branch of the service that had not yet dealt with it properly. My source was outraged that they were ignoring a confidential report, which was leaked to me, outlining this as a serious problem. I tried to find a woman or sexual assault counselor who would go on the record with me. But the counselors had to keep confidentiality. And the female Marines were afraid to go public.

Now we know why they were afraid.

Will this be the scandal that forces the Corps to look at how it treats women?

Not only is today the 6th Anniversary of the start of the travesties at Guantanamo, it is the 250th birthday of the person I feel was the greatest and most historically neglected founding father, Alexander Hamilton.

For those who want to read one of the finest treatments ever of Hamilton's life and contributions, read Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. I'm pleased to remind that the book won the George Washington Book Prize, the largest cash award for a book on America's founding era from the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

I also recommend my colleague Michael Lind's Hamilton's Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition.

One of the filters through which I think about modern politics is the missive: "Washington reigned, Hamilton ruled, and Jefferson complained. . ."

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Endorse the Democratic candidate of his choice, and spend several hundred million dollars to elect Democrats at every level.

That would be serve to his country, and suit his principles.

Then he could tackle health care reform as the head of HHS, or otherwise serve in a complex, challenging job requiring his high competence.

If he ran for President himself, he would wrest away from Ralph Nader the title of Evilest Spoilsport Candidate ever in American history.

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If you are Jewish and a Democrat, you have probably already received one of the e-mails about the danger Barack Obama's election would pose to Jews and Israel.

Reporters who cover the Jewish world have also received calls -- some associated with other campaigns, some not -- asking them to investigate the Obama threat. One reporter told me that he has been called repeatedly by a figure in the American Jewish community who charges him with cowardice for not revealing the "truth" about Obama.

The "truth" of course is a lie, a lie so obvious that one would think no one would believe it. But apparently some people do (although campaign operatives who are pushing the story almost surely don't).

The big lie about Obama is that he is a practicing Muslim. He (and his wife, children, etc) only pretend to be church-going Christians in order to get into the White House.

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Speculation hasn’t exactly served political observers well this primary. But does anyone care to speculate on why the candidates aren’t getting any real questions about how they will work to protect our legal rights (former candidate Senator Dodd’s stand on the FISA bill notwithstanding)?

I wonder about this specifically in light of the nasty little beating our legal rights have been getting lately. As citizens, we are told that our country has a court system that administers justice, and that we have a constitutional right to a day in court. But a quick look back at 2007 illustrates this administration’s unabashed preference for corporate interests over the legal rights of regular Americans.

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AT&T wants to filter the Internet on behalf of NBC and movie companies. Comcast is throttling the use of popular downloading technologies, as are other cable companies.

But the only telecommunications legislation that has a chance of passing the Congress controlled by Democrats this year is modeled on a group whose apparent accomplishments are open to question and whose origins are in Republican politics in Kentucky. That group is Connected Nation, which began life as Connect Kentucky.

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In the New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson reports on Countrywide's latest scam: fabricating three documents to a homeowner about a mortgage. "These letters are a smoking gun" said the bankruptcy judge in Pittsburgh.

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Now something for those who are weary of all the political back-and-forth. Rightwing bloggers and neocons are up in arms over a story first reported by Washington Times reporter, Bill Gertz:

Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, has been fired from his position on the military’s Joint Staff. . . . Mr. Coughlin was notified this week that his contract with the Joint Staff will end in March, effectively halting the career of one of the U.S. government’s most important figures in analyzing the nature of extremism and ultimately preparing to wage ideological war against it. . . .

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I thought it was significant that Hillary's message in her victory speech upon her comeback surge was decidely anti-corporate power, making the issue not just about "change" but about where the problem is coming from:

The oil companies, the drug companies, the health insurance companies, the predatory student loan companies have had seven years of a president who stands up for them. It’s time we had a president who stands up for all of you.

The reality is that when Democrats win when they actually appeal to working class voters. They are usually too enmeshed in the web of their corporate donors and consultants to make this winning appeal, but when they get desperate-- as Hillary now is -- they actually deliver that winning message.

It will be interesting to see how Obama responds if he ends up with Hillary and Edwards to his left on an anti-corporate power message?

The preacherly cadences in Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech last night in Nashua deepened his two greatest symbolic promises: Domestically, he makes being an American beautiful again because, in him, it makes achievable what is still incredible to many -- a 400-year-old hope that we can untangle the race knot we’ve tied ourselves in since 1607. “It’s not something he’s doing,” Dartmouth Professor Joseph Bafumi told the New York Times; “it’s something he’s being.”

Internationally, therefore, Obama reminds multitudes of what has fascinated them about America – not just its wealth and power, which can be trashy and brutal even when irresistible, but a folksy universalism that disposes Americans to say “Hi” to anyone rather than “Heil” to a leader, to give the other person a fair shot, and, out of that kind of strength, to take a shot at the moon.

Indispensable though they are, our wealth and power often subvert what’s best in us. But because Obama knows that human failings make it more complicated than either conservative moralism or leftist anti-capitalism alone explain, his promise runs deeper than the poetry of campaigning. But can that promise really become the prose of governing? Can we take his symbolism for substance?

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Damn. The media favored story line just blew up. The Obama romp over Hillary was wrong. It's still early and Obama may eke out a statistical win but he lost. Why? Because the media made the story all about his commanding double-digit lead. Senator Clinton's staff can make the valid claim that they "came back". Media loves the underdog story, normally.

I don't know about you, but I am thoroughly pissed off at the lame, unprofessional conduct of the various networks--MSNBC in particular. They knew that the polls had at least 17% undecided. Rather than simply report that there were a significant number of undecided voters and any projections were not reliable, they danced around like crack addicts celebrating the demise of the Clintons. Hillary is too wimpy. Hillary is too stern. Hillary is too manipulative. Hillary is not manipulative enough.

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With about 40% of precincts reporting, McCain has won and the Dems are too close to call.

As Josh

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We all get cheesy forwards from our mothers. My mother tends towards provocative youtube videos and "adorable" kittens. However, close to Christmas she forwarded me this. I finally got around to taking the quiz yesterday. Essentially, the project breaks down each candidate according to their stated positions on particular issues. Inevitably, this is an art and not a science, but the tool is blunt and so seems to generally articulate the positions correctly. I won't reveal my best candidate, but I will say that this was a refreshing change from everything I have been reading the last few days.In the midst of this war of personality (see, for example, NYT's Matt Bai blog post today criticizing the inevitable Kennedy comparisons that Democrats seem unable to escape), I hope the issues will stay front an center.

About Bill Kristol’s first Times column of yesterday, M.J. has said just about everything that needs to be said, and Greg Sargent has nailed it for inaccuracy. But I won’t resist telling a funny story it brings to mind about the father of Kristol’s Times editor, Andrew Rosenthal.

Back in the 1990s Abe Rosenthal, the much-dreaded, neo-connish executive editor of the Times, was retired and given his very own op-ed page column, “On My Mind.” It was so badly written that other journalists didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“I just can’t believe it,” I said to the late, great columnist Murray Kempton one day. “It’s full of elementary grammatical, syntactical errors, and Rosenthal even gets his facts wrong. Where are the copy editors?”

“You don’t understand!” said Murray, drawing himself up for a devastating judgment. “This is their revenge! They’re saying, ‘Take it away, Abe!’”

This isn’t Kristol’s only problem, though.

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In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Very Serious Person Michael O’Hanlon takes Barack Obama to task for his fundamental unseriousness on Iraq:

there are nonetheless two problems with Mr. Obama's Iraq views that call into doubt his ability to build a truly inclusive American political movement. First, he seems contemptuous of the motivations of those who supported the war. While showing proper respect for the heroic efforts of our troops, he displays little regard for the views of those many Americans who saw the case for war in the first place -- even as he has called for a more civil and respectful political debate.

O’Hanlon makes a good point. Truly, to bring America together, Obama will have to be more respectful of people who were wrong about war in Iraq, and who spent most of 2002-03 sneering derisively at people who turned out to be right about war in Iraq. If Obama can’t be nicer to all those people who dismissed war opponents as lunatics and Saddam-enablers, we will never have Unity in 2008.

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So Hillary teared up. If you watch the video, you can see, sort of, the tears welling up. Call it the honey shot.

Whereupon, if an ABC blog is to be believed, John Edwards shot himself in a nether region this way:

Edwards, speaking at a press availability in Laconia, New Hampshire, offered little sympathy and pounced on the opportunity to bring into question Clinton’s ability to endure the stresses of the presidency. Edwards responded, “I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business.”

Now, this is the kind of response that gives my entire sex a bad name--the "resolve" to rough up the opposition any old way. Where is Edwards' regional charm all of a sudden? I do wonder what it is the reporters heard that led them to paraphrase his first response as "offering little sympathy"--and would be interested to know if any readers see a fuller quote--but in any event, I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is a wise human being, and yes, wise human beings have been known to tear up.

P. S. Tuesday AM: I'm just getting to yesterday's comments. What exactly did Edwards say? CNN has a slightly fuller version:

John Edwards told reporters he was unaware of Clinton's emotional reaction and would not respond to it, but added, according to CNN's Dugald McDonnell: "I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are a tough business, but being President of the United States is also a very tough business. And the President of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day, difficult judgments every single day."

Yeah, and one of those "difficult judgments" is whether to vent a stupid, sexist insult and imply that an emotional loss of composure is at odds with "strength and resolve." Edwards flunked. I stand by my aspersion.

And don't miss Katha Pollitt's interview with Pat Schroeder on the flagrant double standard re tears.

It is easy to ignore the uninsured if you have insurance. But Donna Smith, who appeared in Michael Moore's SICKO, makes it a lot harder to turn away. She gives an eloquent personal statement about what it means to face the world without any back up. Her essay begins:

I am the one. 47,000,000 and one. As 2008 dawned, I joined the ranks of those people in our nation who have no health insurance coverage. For the first time in my life, I have no way to seek medical care in this nation. No government program will cover me, and there is no private insurance available to me that I could afford.

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My colleague Dean Baker has a fine post up today on one good way to stimulate the economy out of its current doldrums, but I wanted to step back a pace and discuss some basic principles of economic stimulus. I provide this public service because a) there’s a lot of misunderstanding of the basic principles regarding economic stimulus, and b) it’s a good way to avoid doing stuff I should be doing.

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Now that the dominant school of economics (that would be the “who could have known?” school) has come to recognize that the bursting of the housing bubble will lead to a recession, talk of stimulus is in the air. It is too late at this point to prevent a recession, but an effective stimulus package can help to lessen its impact, so we need quick action. We can also look to use this stimulus package to jump start efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The basic story here is simple: economic stimulus is the fine art of throwing money at people, whether through tax cuts or spending. There is no reason that we can’t throw money at people in exchange for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Here it is. Hot off the press. The first op-ed column by the esteemed neoconservative, Bill Kristol.

A typical paragraph. After thanking Iowa for preventing a "Clinton restoration," he turns to Obama.

"Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq."

"Nanny state" "Snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.""Undo the good done by Roberts and Alito."

It's not a column. It a series of GOP talking points.

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It has to be drugs. How else do we explain Senator Obama decrying the influence of lobbyists–health care lobbyists in particular–and then putting one of those very lobbyists in as his New Hampshire campaign chair? Are all Obama supporters just a bunch of Jim Jones kool aid drinkers or does this blatant hypocrisy cause you to question the commitment of Senator Obama to produce real change in Washington?

There is no way to spin this. The facts are simple. Here’s what the good Senator said in August about those dastardly pharmaceutical and healthcare lobbyists:

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A friend who has toiled for one of the now defeated Democratic presidential candidates called me as I was walking out of Hillary Clinton’s spirited campaign event at Nashua North High School this afternoon. I gave him my thoughts on the event (which are below) and the race; we started to game out where this nomination fight may lead; and as then he said, “You know what? Mike Henry was right.”

If you’re a political junkie you may remember last May when a memo by Henry, HRC’s deputy campaign manager, that argued that she should skip Iowa and focus on the national primary on February 5th was leaked to the press. Quickly, the HRC campaign disavowed the memo and proceeded to double-down on Iowa. Then, I thought Mike was right, and with the benefit of hindsight, it appears that’s still the case.

Henry argued that Iowa would be less significant as a generator of momentum since there was a de facto national primary on Titanic Tuesday and with early voting in some key states that would mean that anywhere between one-third to one-half of votes in delegate-rich states like California, Texas, and Florida could be cast days before Iowa holds its caucuses.

From a budgetary perspective, it would make sense for HRC to forgo the intense campaigning of Iowa, and focus on New Hampshire where she had a base and then entering the 5th, she’d be well-positioned to put the nomination away. Henry wrote: “A failure to do so [investing in these states] will hurt her chances of winning and will increase our vulnerability to a movement candidate.”

And that has come to pass.

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"McCain tried to position himself as ...best able to face what he called "the transcendent challenge of the 21st Century, and that is radical Islamic extremists."

While 92 years is a long way to look into the future with any degree of clarity, there is no basis that to think that the well-being of Americans over the next four years, much less the next nine decades, is threatened primarily by "radical Islamic extremists."

My top list of "transcendent" challenges to the American standard of living and culture over the next two decades (nine is too hard to guess):

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“The liberal blogosphere goes wild!” whooped conservatives, wildly, at widespread outrage over Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s desperate gift of a weekly Times op-ed page column to neo-conservative field marshal Bill Kristol. Surprisingly, Kristol will continue to edit Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard and to grace Fox News even while joining his former Standard soulmate David Brooks and conservative Book Review and Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus tomorrow, January 7, at the Times.

Sulzberger’s family-owned news corporation is bracing for assault by Murdoch’s family-owned News Corporation, and, like a general fighting the last war (Vienna’s Hapsburgs, 1914?), Arthur is feinting rightward to save his newspaper from being Dan Rathered or Howell Rainsed off the field by Murdoch’s soon-to-be pumped-up Wall Street Journal.

But trying to beat journalism’s Lord Voldemort at his own game lets down Times readers and dooms the Sulzbergers to follow the Bancrofts, who lost the Journal to Murdoch because they’d lost not only their sharp entrepreneurial elbows but their civic-republican souls.

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