Less than 24 hours after promising to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” and “do our work openly,” Barack Obama’s White House began quietly inviting lobbyists to join in “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”
The Hill, which publishes from offices [...]

Stuff worth reading:
The Columbia Journalism Review’s story on the Russian press and Russian journalists. The story cites the Committee to Protect Journalists ranking of Russia as the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind second-place Algeria and the US-created democratic capitalist paradise of Iraq, and describes the gyrations that reporters and writers for independent newspapers [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has a story up in his magazine—and simultaneously in Newsweek, as if what he has to say is so important that it had to be said twice—identifying Barack Obama’s “cool, detached temperament” as a drag on his own popularity and that of his party. Weisberg allows as how Scott Brown’s Massachusetts [...]

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some [...]

Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan
The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli
This month takes us to a couple of tell-it-like it is versions of socio-economics, from Machiavelli’s stark discussion of what no one wanted to say about politics in 1512, to Wheelan’s comforting discussion of what everyone wanted to say about Capitalism in 2002. The Prince is [...]

The way I understand it, mostly from listening to Bob Dylan songs of a certain vintage (“Already confessed/Don’t need to confess again”), once you’ve been washed in the flavorful blood of the Lamb you’re guaranteed passage to Heaven barring a renunciation of it all. Doesn’t matter what you do or say so long as you [...]

I write something pretty good on Monday, drew quite a bit of traffic albeit none generous enough to comment on it, but I remember very little of the piece or the process. Since then my condition has lost more luster and I’m starting to look, rhetorically speaking, like liver left on the counter so long [...]

Someone somewhere asked if the wrecked economy would be George W. Bush’s last gasp as president. The answer is, naturally, no: the one rule that best describes the Bush administration, one that we’ve articulated often, is that no matter how bad what we know they’ve done may be, there’s worse to come. Bush and Dick [...]

Excuse us if we doubt that the housing bubble is solely responsible for Armageddon. And indulge us as we point out that a few weeks ago, when the Dow was sitting above 11,000, we bet that it would soon see the wrong side of 8000, a benchmark toward which it has obligingly slid. (Full disclosure: [...]

I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get most [...]

There are, to be sure, stark differences between Barack Obama and George Bush. Obama has a pretty good jump shot, for one. And he’s never formally been a cheerleader. It turns out they they have more in common than one might think, and in the unlikely territory of social philosophy.
Back in February of 2005, Bush [...]

As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.
It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage [...]

The press are beginning to notice that they didn’t notice the flames lapping at the financial nation’s ankles these past several years. This is something of a ritual; and a bit of a peculiar one at that, since newspapers have always been much better at reporting what has already happened than what is about to, [...]

Speaking of the Junior League … it may well be the downturn in shopping by consumers whose ears are bleeding from the din of credit card creditors calling night and day that turns what is now termed a “steep recession” into something that everyone can recognize for what it is, which would be a great [...]

The administration has a habit of paying lip service to the poor and then cutting or gutting programs aimed directly at helping them. Before last November’s election, there was a joke making the rounds to the effect that if the President asked to speak alongside and praised someone involved in providing services to the poor, that person’s program was doomed. And as the mounting deficit and the increase in military spending stresses the budget, discretionary spending programs designed to help low income citizens make ever more tempting targets.