Tom

Big reporting coup for Chris Cilizza yesterday as he secured the list of folks David Axelrod has to his apartment on alternate Wednesdays to talk political strategy. My favorite part of the post, however, has to be the update atop the post. Getting the partial list was probably rough going. But I wouldn’t be surprised […]

Conor Clarke talks to some Treasury officials who clarify that you can’t, in fact, bid on your own assets (except under specific circumstances where you’re a minority investor). That’s good. Though it doesn’t answer similar questions about hedging. That said, what worries me is that there seem to be a series of obvious ways to […]

James Kwak: Let’s say that I’m a fund manager, and without government money I’m willing to pay 30 cents for some asset. That means that when I run my valuation models, there is some chance I will be able to sell it for more than 30 cents, and some chance that I will have to […]

The CBO is expected to release new numbers today estimating the that the deficit will be as much as $2 trillion in the coming fiscal year. It’s a big number. Time‘s Karen Tumulty twitters,”Palpable anxiety over the CBO deficit forecast. $2 trillion? That’s twice what the whole budget was in the 1980s.” Comparisons of absolute […]

This, from Kevin Drum, seems fundamentally correct: As for the cost of all this, we might as well suck it up. We’re way beyond the point of thinking we’ll get out of this mess without spending a trainload of taxpayer dough one way or another. This debacle is going to cost us hundreds of billions […]

My first conversation with Megan McArdle was in Bryan Caplan’s kitchen. Within four minutes she was was calling card check a “moral atrocity” and speaking of the secret ballot like it had personally smuggled her grandparents out of Nazi Germany. This was years before she began dating Peter Suderman. So let me say this: Her […]

The worth of a public policy is not inversely proportional to how funny it sounds when you say it aloud. But McCain has built a career — and ensured countless press quotes — reading out superficially comical policy initiatives in a sardonic voice. I’ll bet you that Maureen Dowd’s column quoting his twitters will quickly […]

David Frum’s reply is actually more confusing than his original. He admits, first, that he’s describing Henry Waxman’s bill, not, as previously stated, Barack Obama’s. Which makes the original title of his post, “Tricky, trick, Mr. Obama,” a bit weird. But so be it. It is Waxman’s bill, David says, that he was describing when […]

obama and the consensus driven health care process.