Happy Hour Thread

Get happy!

Afternoon Thread

Damn, there have been over 55,000 posts to this shitty blog.

I Was Against The War In My Blogs

I'm just thinking about Bill Keller and the latest round of nobodycouldhavepredicted and Iwaswrongfortherightreasonswhiletheywererightforthewrongreasons.

So many years later, and all I can think is...face it, you got conned by really stupid people. What does that say about you?

Small Improvements

It isn't a revolution, but even small improvements are welcome to the area around 30th St. Station (the urban hellhole's Amtrak station), which is currently completely unfriendly to pedestrians and to people who naively think that there might be an obvious way - or even a direct connection! - to travel from the 30th st. train station to the 30th st. subway/trolley station.

Wanker of the Day

Tom Friedman.

Just Imagine If He'd Auctioned Off The Right To Push The Button

Or stabbed someone to death on stage live?

We shouldn't be surprised by wingnuts who love it when "bad guys" get killed. This is nothing new!

Double Dippery

There's a weird debate floating around out there between the double dip bears and the no double dip bulls. It doesn't matter. +.2% GDP versus -.2% GDP growth is mostly (though not entirely) meaningless. Unemployment that isn't dropping it a reasonable clip is a problem either way. Not entering into another recession as measured by GDP is not actually a success.

Also, too, maybe somebody should do something.

8/09/2011 - Economic recovery appears to have come close to a halt in the major industrialised economies, with falling household and business confidence affecting both world trade and employment, according to new analysis from the OECD. Growth remains strong in most emerging economies, albeit at a more moderate pace.

“Growth is turning out to be much slower than we thought three months ago, and the risk of hitting patches of negative growth going forward has gone up,” OECD Chief Economist Pier Carlo Padoan said during a presentation of the OECD’s latest Interim Economic Assessment.

Economic growth in the G7 economies excluding Japan will remain at an annualised rate of less than 1% in the second half of 2011.

Thursday Is New Jobless Day

414K new lucky duckies.

So, uh, not good news.

Reality Show Run

I'm not sure about the independent part, but I've long assumed that's what Palin will do. She will pretend to run, or pretend to be going to run, for as long as possible, as the teevee shows dutifully follow her around.

Grifters gotta grift.

Late of Night

My friend Ian suggests some Golden Laws of Prosperity.

Works for me.

Midnight snack thread

Just to tide you over....

Signed,
Not Atrios

GOP Debate Coverage

According to the GOP contenders:

TSA agents maul people.
We need a fence!
FEMA sucks.

Watch it live

*UPDATE

Science destroys the economy.

Three cheers for the death penalty!!!

WTC

Cliff captures it.

He doesn't write about what happened here, afterwards. New Yorkers came together. And, of course, leaving the City, fleeing in fear, was not an option. Supporting our neighbors was our response.

He does write about the threat to the Republic that bin Laden sought, and so far, attained.

Happy Hour Thread

Get happy.

Deep Thought

The most reasonable guy in the room would probably do something about 9.1% unemployment.

Afternoon Thread

Having a crappy everything going wrong and being too hard to fix day. Not in a bloggy mood.

The Pointlessness Of Presidential Discourse

Floating around out there are the ideas that presidential speechifying can't get stuff through Congress and that no amount of speechifying can impact the election which is going to be driven almost entirely by the economy.

Well, ok.

Doctor Doctor

Right wingers are still capable of creating reality.

A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

Anecdotal, but it's this kind of thing which has long worried me. People who bite the bullet and spend a bit of time actually watching Charlie Rose and reading the New York Times op-ed pages, before they've come to understand that Tom Friedman is a buffoon and the things Maureen Dowd thinks are important actually aren't, end up stupid.

You See, It's All Just A Liquidity Problem

The ATM at the Great Casino broke, that's all.

But questions continue to mount about the ability of Europe’s banks to ride out the crisis, as some are having a harder time securing loans needed for daily operations.

Just need a bit of extra cash for the daily operations...