What All the Fashionable Bloggers Are Wearing This Year

This, according to Jonathan Klein, a former "60 Minutes" executive who last week told Fox News that "Bloggers have no checks and balances. ...(It's) a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas." Well, that's not exactly right. And leave it to one of those barely-dressed "bloggers" to fact-check his ass and find out what all the major bloggers are really wearing...

• Millionaire socialist Katrina vanden Heuvel: Tin foil hat; pannier hoops, skirt and bodice of vintage peach jacquard silk with scatter beads & ribbon roses
• Donald Luskin: Krugman Truth Squad union suit, Anti-stalker GPS monitoring anklet
• Andrew Sullivan: White leather beaded wedding dress with matching jacket & Morticia train
• Josh Marshall: Milla Jovanovich unisex Joan of Arc mail suit with flattering shoulder pads & Teflon jodhpurs

The bitter truth is that there are very, very few men practicing the art of politics on a national level who cause women to fantasize about heavy petting.

The more I think about it, the more I think men may be biologically unsuited to hold high public office.

Honorable John F. Kerry
US Senator
Boston, MA

Dear Senator Kerry:

I read with interest in the Wall Street Journal today, your appeal to the American people to name you to the most important CEO job in the US. There was one glaring omission; credentials that would qualify you for the job. Since you didn’t include them in your application letter, I have searched your web site, the internet including Boston newspaper archives and the Congressional record. I found no evidence of prior CEO experience. It was hard to find even a record of a minor supervisory role other than commanding a few sailors on a Swift Boat, an executive position with an anti-military group, a practicing attorney supervising paralegals and a secretary, Lt. Governor of Massachusetts under Governor Dukakis and a US Senator with a small staff. I’m curious to know how any or all of this experience would equip you for a CEO position.

In my experience as a former CEO and recruiter of several CEOs for various companies, the most important qualifying factor was prior CEO experience . Direct hands on management of large programs and large numbers of people is an important prerequisite. Beyond these requirements are integrity, clear thinking and decisiveness and a sense of fairness. From what I have learned about you from published reports and observation from afar, no evidence has surfaced that you possess any of these qualities. It is one thing to provide advice or to act as an advisor but it is quite another to have the fortitude to make difficult decisions particularly when they might be initially deemed unpopular. This is the true essence of leadership. I’m afraid our shareholders would revolt against the Board if we announced you were under consideration.

My suggestion is that you first gain the requisite CEO experience with a Boston based startup or even as Governor of a small state and work your way up. I will keep your resume on file in case you care to update it some years in the future with additional appropriate experience.

Kerry says he should be hired as CEO of the USA. I understand that he has never released a transcript of his undergraduate performance at Yale. George W. Bush did release his transcript. Few companies would consider hiring Kerry for an entry-level position unless he provided a transcript.

In a post Tuesday, you asked, "Hey, why not suggest that Kerry claim he would have arrested Mohammed Atta on September 10, 2001?"

He certainly had the opportunity to do so. His office was given specific warning four moths ahead of time of the security problem at Boston's Logan airport, but his staff blew off the experts who tried (several times) to see him, saying "you are not a constituent." This is all detailed in the last chapter of Who Is John Kerry? available at www.conservative.org as a download or for $3.95 at 800-426-1357 (the American Conservative Union, on whose board I serve).

I am not an economist but here is my short essay on Kerry's Wall Street Journal piece summarizing his Economic Plan.

He will be "better for business" by rolling back the tax cuts given by Bush to $200,000 or more income earners. These are the entrepreneurs who start small businesses and employ most American workers. These increased taxes will somehow cut the deficit.

He offers no spending cuts though he wants the line item veto to stop any spending that exceeds the rate of inflation. How about just vetoing the bill even if it falls below that cost of living increase?

He will take care of the "troublesome and unsustainable development" of the trade deficit. But he does not explain why it is so and why it is so bad.

He will seek a "level playing field" and will increase the lawsuits filed in the WTO filed against those foreigners who breach the rules of this level playing field. Sounds like major protectionism. Will that increase jobs? Really? It will increase lawyers jobs. Kerry criticizes Bush for only bringing one WTO action to every 3 brought by Clinton. I would prefer none.

He offers permanent tax cuts for 98% of all Americans. Who are the 2% who will pay? Oh yeah, the small business owners.

Then there are the many tax credit gimmicks much like Bush proposed in his Convention speech. I expect Kerry will actually do these things. Bush just talks about them but then doesn't do it. I'll take Bush's approach.

He will incentive students to study math and science in college. I think they need to learn it in grade school and high school first.

He proposes a "three strikes and you are out" rule against plaintiff attorneys. I guess this is the same kind of wink-wink proposal as the Bush kinds mentioned above. How will the large punitive damage awards be cut when all of his judges will be ex-plaintiff attorneys? He will push for non-binding mediation in med mal cases. Non-binding sounds real tough.

But give Kerry credit. He brought it to the Wall Street Journal for our assessment.

Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says

Donald Luskin, chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC in Menlo Park, says he welcomes the chance to unload his shares.

"Craig Conway is not going to be able to hide behind the skirts of antitrust law," he said. "(Conway) is going to have to come to the negotiating table and make the best deal he can for shareholders."

I would promote private-sector innovation policies, including the elimination of capital gains for long-term investments in small business start-ups.

"But deep down, Krugman won't mind. It will give him four more years to do what he does best: spew hatred."

When a Times reporter asked Mr. Bush about North Korea's ongoing nuclear program, "he opened his palms and shrugged."

He said he would continue diplomatic pressure -- using China to pressure the North and Europe to pressure Iran -- and gave no hint that his patience was limited or that at some point he might consider pre-emptive military action.

"I'm confident that over time this will work -- I certainly hope it does," he said of the diplomatic approach.

Mr. Kerry can argue that he wouldn't have overruled the commanders who had wanted to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda, or dismissed warnings from former Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, that peacekeeping would require a large force. He wouldn't have ignored General Conway's warnings about the dangers of storming into Falluja, or overruled his protests about calling off that assault halfway through.

So how does the New York Times handle the release of the study? With a snide story by Eduardo Porter -- exactly one of the biased economics reporters the study is talking about (thanks to reader Jill Olson for the link). Less than half the story is given to explaining the study. The rest is dirt on the authors that Porter dug up, and a line-up of "experts" tearing the story down -- every single one of which is somehow Democratically biased, ranging from former Clinton appointees to leftist attack dog economist Brad DeLong. Porter ends the story with a comment from DeLong -- giving him the last word, as it were. And it's nothing but pure nastiness, devoid of any substantive economic thought. Here it is:

"To even base a story on Lott's work at this point in time is to demonstrate a pronounced bias toward right-wing hacks," said Brad DeLong, a liberal-leaning economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

I wonder exactly what Jabba The Economist objects to here? Is it that Lott is right-wing, or that he is a hack, or both? Would a "left-wing hack" be better person for the Times to base a story on? Well, that is exactly what they have done, by giving DeLong -- an academic competitor of the authors -- a soapbox from which to shout his character assassination? And remember, Hassett and Lott are no ordinary competitors of DeLong. DeLong has a strong revenge motive when it comes to Hassett -- something which  the Times reporter on this story was surely too ignorant to know, and DeLong was surely too much a hack to confess.

DeLong and Lawrence Summers co-authored "Equipment Spending and Economic Growth" in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1991, and "Equipment Spending and Economic Growth: How Strong is the Nexus?" in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity in 1992. The papers were presentations of an empirical study showing higher social returns to capital equipment investment than would be predicted by the classic Solow growth model. But only a year later, "Reassessing the Social Returns to Equipment Investment," an NBER Working Paper by Hassett, Alan J. Auerbach and Stephen D. Oliner, revealed that DeLong and Summers were just flat-out wrong, and for the most embarrassing of reasons: their results fell apart with the removal of Botswana from their data set:

"DeLong and Summers' own data fail to reject the Solow model for the OECD countries. The same is true even for their full sample of quite heterogeneous nations if we exclude just one country (Botswana). These results clearly refute DeLong and Summers' claim to have uncovered robust evidence of uniformly high social returns to equipment investment."

Update... Reader Rohit Dewan writes:

That the NYT would even print a story about a study like this might be an encouraging sign -- if the story were not so tragically flawed.

Chris Carroll -- the most heavily quoted economist in this story -- was my prof at JHU, he served on Clinton's CEA, which the NYT discloses, but they do not disclose that he also worked for the Gore campaign during the Florida recount and that his thesis advisor at MIT was none other than the NYT's own Paul Krugman! Lets just say that this guy assigned a lot of Krugman to read in class. And then we get this graf:

"While the researchers of the American Enterprise Institute claim to expose the political bias of the reporting, Mr. Carroll said, it was unlikely that they succeeded in stripping out other factors. He said the reporting of economic statistics depended on broad perceptions of the state of the economy, which are influenced by many variables. The fact that the economy did better under Mr. Clinton than either of the Bushes probably affected the coverage more than the researchers allowed for."

So, Prof. Chris thinks that the reporting of economic statistics is influenced by "broad perceptions of the state of the economy"- isn't that exactly what you would expect the reporting of economic statistics to influence (not the other way around)- otherwise, if the reporting is influenced by the reporters own perception of the state of the economy, isn't that, by definition, pre-judgement or prejudice (or bias)?

MSM = Main Stream Media plucked the following---

What word does the acronym, MSM, call to mind?

MUSEUM!

But of course! That's what the MSM has become, a storehouse for DEAD ideas!

The more MUSEUM, the more you don't!

From what The Times's news coverage told me, official records contradict the central charges leveled in the ads. However, it is not accurate to say, as Senator Kerry has, that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia.

If my summary is wrong, The Times erred. If it's accurate, the paper did a fine job. If my description offends you because you dislike Kerry, or because you think the extent of The Times's Swift Boat coverage lent credence to false charges, this tells me more about you than it does about The Times.