EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

feel like ezra is a more likable and otm but matt is a deeper thinker so i dunno

yglesias has been annoying the fucc out of me

strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been a member of 'the best and brightest' or whatever

yeah thats his exact flaw, i mean he supported the iraq war via absurd over thinking, still i have to admit he has influenced my thinking on such topics as urban planning and destroying the senate

i dumped yg from my read a while ago. i guess that's sort of 'mcnabb off my madden team' but there u go. mainstream dem-liberal technocrats aren't thin on the ground and he's a shitty writer imo. i still 'like' him i guess but i stopped enjoying his writing like at all.

however i do get into quasi-arguments about urban planning fairly frequently (and no not just on ilx) and i find myself mimicking yglesian points

who has better trolls?

i feel like yglesias is still sort of confused by irl

"from my reader" i mean

i must admit the truly sad number of typos were a big part of me ignoring his blog.

plus i figure the shit he talks about is so everywhere that other ppl will link to him if it's really worth it (see also: andrew sullivan)

both of these guys are nearly worthless on culture

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

haa i find the typos charming because a. its p 'internet' b. i am myself as you all know a masterful typo maker

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

shouldnt this be in ILM

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:55 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that there is an offline culture of young dc bloggers and i know abt it is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, although i was unaware of this particular amazing roommates based nugget, would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ty 4 yr support

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

i dont really read attackerman, his shtick grates

he's done with FDL if that helps

i dunno if i've come clean about this but i have a war-nerd streak so

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 1:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too but on the other hand did u know that ezra klein became a health care reform expert to impress simon schamas daughter chloe

no i was unaware. she must be pretty fine.

i think i find the stuff he covers interesting, but i guess i dont really, i read him occasionally at wired xp re ackerman

lol max whatre u talkin abt

haha i have been under the impression that i knew a lot of gossip abt these ppl but now that i am thinking about it the thing about chloe schama is the only gossip-y nugget i know, kind of disappointed in myself

http://grab.by/8b5N

anyway when i saw ezra klein on tv i was surprised his persona seemed more journalistic glory days upstart young reporter than coddled nerdface technocratic blogger - i liked him

he has an early 80s newspaper look and feel to him

Yglesias has been wrong many times.

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

nah, that was what i liked abt greenwald its just that in the end i was like "wtf this is not my country i dont care"

haha

yeah but usa is in charge of the rest of the countries iirc

when krugman is updating regularly i don't have much of a reason to follow klein too closely - i don't hate him or anything though

[Yglesias is] a shitty writer imo

Actually, typos aside, he's not. He's remarkably concise and clear even if he liberally sprinkles his posts with "negative externalities" this and "regulatory capture" that jargon.

yglesias is embarrassed about having been a socialist and will occasionally mix in some right wing tinted bullshit to try and build a bit of center cred. i have grown to hate him. klein is kind of a young dinner party blogger but i keep the feed there to flick thru. i enjoy greenwald's secular fire and brimstone and i get angry about the same things as him. his biases are so transparent that is is v easy to think critically about what he writes.

maybe ill face the winner of this one off w/greenwald

can't wait

feel like klein is getting sold short here - he was hands down the best all around guy on health care reform

his coverage was comprehensive but his opinions were so milquetoast it was like reading a blog by that dude on gawker

feel like his opinions were pretty otm especially compared w/almost everyone elses which basically added up to OMG PUBLIC OPTION

they both kind of remind me of how a lot of people move to dc and get kind of absorbed into the weird political networky culture here at a pretty young age. dc is so conservative.

would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

since the democratic primaries, even when drunk i try to sidestep political arguments. i ran into weigel at a bar one time but did not pick a fight. he is a good dude imo. that's actually one of the few blogs i regularly read - don't have time/energy to slog through a lot of content anymore.

yeah ive had v little exposure to it but dc political culture seen close up seems v strange

seems so unbearable. lotta people wearing new balances on the weekend and shit.

they r not sexy rip

never trust a libertarian

or a journalist

lol i own 2 pair of new balances

just sayin if u cannot figure how to dress how are u gonna run the country

daria i seen the shoes youre buying, you know what youre doing

new balance are great sneakers, just dont wear them on the weekend or max will shun u

you pride yourself on living in the mouth of the dragon but being fireproof, and then one day you realize it is saturday and you are in whole foods buying ingredients for a cool mac n cheese with a twist recipe you found online, wearing new balance sneakers

^^ gets it

i mean tbh i would rather live in boston than dc, at least some people there have accents

where would ilx end up siding on a boston vs dc poll?

it would turn into an argument about pizza

harDCore

whole foods, new balance sneakers, check. i don't really care about recipes

boston sucks, accents there are horrible. i hate boston

in that case the poll would require a 'neither' option xp

i am in boston with an accent. thx daria.

except <3 the patriots but the rest of new england can have them. the rest of new england hates boston more than anyone

sorry roberto! team providence.

providence: boston
baltimore: dc

daria u from pvd? i didnt know

nope not at all just spent some time there. i like it. it's like baltimore kinda. lots more weird than the other major city, more arts scene, better music, etc

yeah i mean its obv the best place in new england

best pizza too, except new haven i guess

except <3 the patriots but the rest of new england can have them. the rest of new england hates boston more than anyone

― daria-g, Monday, January 3, 2011 8:18 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so obviously the worst possible thing to love about boston outside of racism

um http://images.starpulse.com/AMGPhotos/pic200/drp000/p017/p01795e5ahc.jpg

plus http://auntiefashion.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/the-afflecks.jpg

part of the thing about the dc blogger culture is.. i wonder where they go from there, a couple years down the road? they've all been doing this for a while. doesn't the format become sort of limiting? there are a lot of progressive bloggers who i don't check in on too much b/c they don't say anything too surprising. rather spend time reading ta-nehisi coates which is one of my fave things on the internets

how is the format more limiting than regular journalism? seems less

gotta constantly crank out posts, content content content all the time, on twitters all the time. i have never had a blog but just my experience of being really into blogworld as a reader for a couple years, it's like.. the relevance of things gets weirdly distorted so that you might think some trivial issue is a big f***ing deal just because everyone's talking about it & the politico thinks talking about it will help them Win The Day

you pride yourself on living in the mouth of the dragon but being fireproof, and then one day you realize it is saturday and you are in whole foods buying ingredients for a cool mac n cheese with a twist recipe you found online, wearing new balance sneakers

― Roberto Spiralli, Tuesday, January 4, 2011 2:14 AM (10 minutes ago)

wow omg observational comedy

did i tell u abt the time i got pretzels instead of peanuts on a plane?

what is the deal with that?

http://i51.tinypic.com/2uthppl.jpg

the charming and delicious insularity of bloggers

I've actually always been curious how these dudes make money. Do they have day jobs?

yes, blogging

And someone actually pays them a livable wage to do this?

i dont

i mean

dogg one of these guys writes for the washington post

yglesias is embarrassed about having been a socialist and will occasionally mix in some right wing tinted bullshit to try and build a bit of center cred.
― Roberto Spiralli, Monday, January 3, 2011 7:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

other than ahem supporting the iraq invasion i really don't see this. he says 'markets' every now and again, is that it? i guess he's been pretty quiet about any doubts about the afghanistan strategy, a little suspect i guess.

(newly famous?) blogger 'ioz' absolutely loathes him, which is kinda entertaining, kinda o_O

How does the Washington Post have money to pay anyone?

theyre owned by massively successful test prep/'education' company

How does the Washington Post have money to pay anyone?

Kaplan University Online®
Try Our Classes for an Introductory Period w/ No Tuition Obligation
www.Kaplan.edu

ioz way more annoying than ygl at this point

i understand he has some problems with 'the state'

what's the next poll: digby vs Greenwald?

shd do a 'most annoying blogger' poll--i feel like there is some kind of bullshit wired article someone could write about 'blogger fatigue,' where when youre reading 10-12 things by these people a day they start to realllly annoy you cause its like youre hanging out with them all the time only youre not allowed to talk

what's the deal w/this ioz person?

Hypocrites Lecteurs, Semblables, et Frères

lol @ blogroll

he's an anarchist, man

i feel like there is some kind of bullshit wired article someone could write about 'blogger fatigue,' where when youre reading 10-12 things by these people a day they start to realllly annoy you cause its like youre hanging out with them all the time only youre not allowed to talk

Definitely feel this nausea after reading digby and Greenwald back to back.

he is an entertaining libertarianish gay dude who hates everyone and everything, and writes well i think.

kind of from the "define all problems as being way more deep seated and hopeless than you imagine, so 'doing something' is always stupid" school.

xps

wait is that "deep seeded"? i never know

are we talking about morbs?

its a if morbs were glen greenwald sort of thing

ioz - how do i not know this person. i'm sure i must..

greenwald is gay too xp

ioz is a good counterweight to the "lets think this 1 thru" school of technocratic liberal market-based solutions yglesias stuff that dominates the blogosphere... and wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more hilarious than glenn greenwald

ioz is v challopsy, no doubt about that.

recent controversies: racism didn't end after 1965 so rand paul talking shit about the CRA is nbd and if you complained about it you are probably a racist liberal anyway because obama presides over the drug war.

also, climate change? what, the climate changes all the time.

somehow he still entertains, i dunno

i'm like for real how do i not know this person in dc who is dropping snooty french language references and then posting stuff like too many unsportsmanlike penalties are called on THIS GUY on the steelers. (not enough of those calls are on the steelers imo)

its the ranting, the always on greenwaldian fire hose of anger, these guys are so proud of how mad they are

i can't read greenwald any more. he writes too much. edit that stuff please. get a powerpoint, maybe

Greenwald has other virtues but humor ain't one of them.

i think he is for real in pittsburgh!

i am not impressed! but yes he is funnier than glen

i also don't know how they manage to stay mad for so long! i got tired of that. and being angry on the internet looks pretty silly in retrospect, most of the time

also the showy erudition, plz u know u just looked half that shit up on wikipedia

digby is also exhaustingly mad @ world

balloon juice is borderline too angry abt stuff

never really liked digby.

you know who i miss? hilzoy.

greenwald is gay too xp

― fruit of the goon (k3vin k.), Monday, January 3, 2011 11:04 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Perm

and he lives in brazil, we should kill him

i like john cole on balloon juice but the rest of those guys are scrubs ime

speaking as a gay man, I can affirm that I'm not always angry, but I do get miffed when I'm out of rugelagh, as I am tonight.

man i had to google that

u had to goole it

gooler than me

I do get miffed when I'm out of rugelagh

are those like Celtic rugelach?

i heard goole offered to buy groupon

let me goole that for you

Greenwald has other virtues but humor ain't one of them.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 3, 2011 11:11 PM (Yesterday)

yeah my god he is completely humorless, def a flaw of his

Now suppose he sits down in a room with Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Donohue, and David Koch and persuades all three of those people that this is the right way to proceed.

classic yglesias

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

expected more votes and a klein landslide...tho I guess about 16 people post on the politics thread if you think about it

i didn't vote! so it would have been one more, for one of them.

close call!

http://grab.by/8nYN

jefferson airplane on krugman's blog. give my vote to him.

i missed this thread, but i would've voted for Ezra Klein. mostly because he is more insightful on economics and health care (which are topics i care more about) than Yglesias, whose expertise seems to be foreign policy (which interests me, but not as much). he also doesn't have Yglesia's tendency to disappear up his ass wr2 philosophical musings and such.

things i learned abt matty glesi today: he is a recovering rageoholic, he works standing up now

other things i know: he has lost a lot of weight recently, he is tall

what is rageaholism

it is when u cant get enough of rage i think

wow that would be terrible

working standing up is a donald rumsfeld thing, i wonder if the two are related? seems counterproductive if so

i miss billmon

working standing up is a newly popular weight loss strategy

its also supposed to be good for your heart

or not "good" just "not as bad as sitting all day"

i work standing up sometimes

i work standing on a pilates ball on top of an orphan

lol ward 8

http://grab.by/9wSw

or ward B rather

ward deal with it

he should just rename his blog 'I hate living in Washington DC'

he should move to nyc poor thing

I don't get why he couldn't, it seems like 90% of his job is online

all his friends are in dc :-/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/fashion/27YOUNGPUNDITS.html?hpw

klein, yglesias, & crew IN the ny times style section.

mostly innocuous, though i want to laugh at the editor that let "new thing called HTML" get through.

guyville!

the american ice company is a BRAND NEW bar that is always packed with young professionals

Juicebox Mafi
Facebook pundits
Brat Pack

Fuckin Nerds am i right haha guys *examines lifes accomplishments, sobs into keyboard*

so other than k and y who else can be considered a full-fledged member of this clique?

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:55 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

according to blog insider 'max' these two dudes were their roommates so theyre def in

the quotable yglesias:

"Off the top of my head, the fact that Korean workers are outliers in lack of leisure time as well as suffering from a skyrocketing suicide rate suggests that maybe they should relax."

I only read via rss feed but sheesh new thinkprogress site is pretty horrific

I mean, that image of him, gah

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/05/was-mugging-of-matthew-yglesias-hate.html

um

I was gonna respond but that guy's just some rando conversative troll, has a section on 'Interracial Marriage' on his site

steve sailer is a big mover and shaker in neo-scientific-racist circles

like, he's huge with the whole john derbyshire/taki mag crew. not a 'random troll' at all, sadly enough

weird, never heard of him

http://vdare.com/

ought to go on the right wing thread but it's not that entertaining :/

never heard of him either.

Lots of weird and snarky blog posts and comments about this.

http://agonyin8fits.blogspot.com/2011/05/morgan-stanley-yglesias.html

yup, a lot of people hate the guy

yeah celebrating an actual act of violence on someone you disagree w/ is nagl / bad karma. random acts of violence happen just as often outside ygleseque gentrifying urban areas.

yglsesque

c'mon dude

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/is-the-huffington-post-really-so-different/2011/05/19/AGJ4EzUH_blog.html

http://www.capitolromance.com/2011/06/21/real-capitol-romance-mandy-spencer/

lol/wtf/why/aww

hehe

Today’s Real Capitol Romance engagement feature is the EXACT kind of alternative, individualisticness (yes I made that word up), that I search for everyday in this sometimes too up-tight and one-note city.

[of course u need the colors for the real effect]

Ackerman in a banana costume and he likes the Clash. awwww

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/bachmans-right-about-obama-wanting-to.html

Digby vs. Klein

Yglesias and his lol indie tastes.

But he's right about so-called guilty pleasures. The comments are almost as bad as anything posted on The Corner though.

of interest to ppl who voted here

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/94773/leaving-tnr

http://i.imgur.com/uRovZ.png

https://twitter.com/#!/mattyglesias/status/116217219817545728

h/t Ned

(that title is from some crit theory tome, right?)

it's Alain Badiou, from "15 Theses on Contemporary Art", published in Lacanian Ink

sort of mao-ish, innit?

that's Badiou for you- he draws heavily upon Maoist slogans and has written about the Cultural Revolution in many texts- see part of "The Idea of Communism" for an example

love erykah badiou

but i think were talking about john maus here

http://i.imgur.com/Ky6BN.png

perfect

haha aw

seriously thought there was a next-level pun going on with "German" for, like, five minutes

next level typo

Christ, what an asshole.

Oh, we're not captioning it?

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/11/10/366765/important-programming-announcement/

cool actually!

when are they going to replace press box tho???

I’ll be blogging and column-writing (columnizing?) about economics, business, and economic policy as the latest incarnation of Moneybox

Hmmm

brad delong found something:

http://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f0800388340162fc4b5fc4970d-pi

Lmao

wonkbook's new 'we're not gonna let you read the whole post on your feed' thing is probably a good business decision but I am prob just gonna stop reading it for the most part

is there some haxor way to get around blogs that do that?

maybe page2rss?

hmm I don't think that'll work w/ the current wonkbook setup

—A note to readers: Full-text RSS has returned to Wonkblog. Huzzah!

was debating between trying to find a way around this and just deleting ezra klein

haha pwn http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/03/06/my_review_problem.html

lol

http://i.imgur.com/XI0bY.png

http://i.imgur.com/ZRJo8.png

lol how did i miss this raging controversy

1.0 out of 5 stars An Actual Review, March 6, 2012
By David Cole (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Rent Is Too Damn High (Kindle Edition)
A lot of people seem to be reviewing based on the author's recent tasteless, ghoulish tweet celebrating the death of Andrew Breitbart. My review is based solely on the book's merits. Of which there are none. This is simply a rehash of articles that are available for free online. I'd advise you to search for them instead of wasting your money, but the author's writing is bland and mindless. So don't bother. Instead pick up a copy of Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World An insightful and passionate book that succeeds in every way Yglesias's book is lacking. You'll be helping Breitbart's family.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you

Do conventions matter?, March 6, 2012
By ShieldWolf - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Rent Is Too Damn High (Kindle Edition)
Conventions around actually reading a book before reviewing it are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with giving this book 1 star.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?

The Book Is Too Damn Boring, March 6, 2012
By Ben - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Rent Is Too Damn High (Kindle Edition)
I'll be honest. I was completely blown away by all the male nudity in this book. I wasn't expecting 20 pages filled with naked pictures of the author in various poses. I found the photos that included animals to be in extremely poor taste.

ShieldWolf otm

haha we talked about this a lil in the suburbs thread, yglesias has always attracted high-quality trolls for whatever reason, I dunno if it even is bort related

it for sure is!

reihan salam left a good review, lol

Malcolm Harris ‏ @getsworse
For half the price of Matt Yglesias's ebook, get TNI's new issue "Youth" thenewinquiry.com/publications/m… Our is longer and contains no Matt Yglesias

those fucking TNI kids

they really want to be zingy and edgy and they are so bad at it

http://thenewinquiry.com/features/praise-for-tni-magazine-no-2-youth/10-praise-tni/

lol nerds, 'contains no matt yglesias' is quality tho

that guy mal harris is a tool

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/7/2012/02/1fa0f2d367bd695438b2da60efe49b17.jpg

http://gawker.com/5868073/im-the-jerk-who-pranked-occupy-wall-street

cool essay explaining your prank bro

he needs to get out of the way of that shot

I really want tni to be good but...

starting to think ezra isnt v good at understanding elections

he's also not very good on teevee

like he spends months telling us that romney is a more formidable candidate than he seems which is just ridiculous and writes dumb shit like this all the time http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/17/the-white-houses-huge-gamble-on-paul-ryan

the democrats literally maneuvered exactly the guy they wanted into the spotlight but watch out it might back fire!

oh no!

The Obama team never could have predicted that its efforts would help vault Ryan into the nomination for vice president. The difference between what they reasonably hoped a strategy like this could achieve and what it actually achieved is attributable to Ryan, who has proven a tremendously skilled politician — so skilled, in fact, that he’s convinced many Republicans that the fight Obama wants is the fight they should want, too. Many of them share House Whip Kevin McCarthy’s view. “It’s not so smart to raise [Ryan] up by picking him as an enemy,” he told Draper. “If he picks a budget fight with Paul, Paul will beat him.”

not understanding the difference between politician and political operative, get back to me when he convinces voters of something

how has Ryan proved himself a tremendously skilled politician

yes ezra you just mightve been wrong http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/13/why-is-obama-ahead

stick to explaining explaining legislation bro

xp- seems to have convinced almost everyone in the world he has written a budget that will reduce the deficit?

how has Ryan proved himself a tremendously skilled politician

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, August 17, 2012 4:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

via rising in the house ranks, getting the gop caucus to go along w/his budget/vision - which is where i was making the distinction between politician and political operative - ryans job right now is to get votes from people who are not in the house of representatives, something i suspect he is not particularly special at - also just to state the obvious who cares abt the vp pick

xp- seems to have convinced almost everyone in the world he has written a budget that will reduce the deficit?

― reductio ad burzum (flopson), Friday, August 17, 2012 4:37 PM (15 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would like to see some polling on this

to his credit he has worked the media p well but imho thats more due to the fact that they needed someone anyone to fill their wonky young smart republican w/srs ideas slot than his own strategic acumen

i suspect he is going to be fired from that job v shortly

think this is pretty skilled politics:

For a virtuoso display of this principle in action, return to another vintage Ryan moment: his Dave profile from last year, where he awed a swooning reporter by opening up the budget to a random page and fingered a boondoggle. The item Ryan pointed to was the Obama administration’s reform of the student-loan industry. “Direct loans—this is perfect,” Ryan said. “So direct loans, that’s new spending on autopilot, that had no congressional oversight, and it gave the illusion that they were cutting spending.”

The exchange is so perversely revealing that it rewards explanation. For decades, the government helped make college more affordable through “guaranteed loans”—it encouraged banks to lend money to students by promising to repay the banks if the students defaulted. Banks were making billions of dollars in profits at virtually no risk. The General Accounting Office, a kind of in-house fiscal watchdog for the federal government, issued sixteen reports over the years noting how the government could save money simply by issuing the loans itself and cutting out the middleman.

It was the simplest, no-brainer pot of savings you could find—ending pure corporate welfare, just like in the movie Dave. The cause attracted support from think tanks, as well as the moderate Wisconsin Republican Tom Petri, an eclectic reformer who is sort of the real-life version of the Paul Ryan character who appears on television. Two National Review editors endorsed eliminating guaranteed loans in an article advocating a new reform conservatism.

The banks lobbied fiercely to protect their gravy train. Among the staunchest advocates of those government-subsidized banks was … Paul Ryan, who fought to protect bank subsidies that many of his fellow Republicans deemed too outrageous to defend. In 2009, Obama finally eliminated the guaranteed-lending racket. It could save the government an estimated $62 billion, according to the CBO.

...

Ryan probably knew, even in that split second, that he stood little chance of exposure. (The overlap between television news reporters and people with a detailed understanding of the federal budget is quite small.) Yet a lesser politician might have panicked, or hesitated, or possibly tried to flip to a different page. In that moment, Ryan revealed the qualities that have propelled him to his current position. As cool as can be, and as winsome as ever, he said, “This is perfect.”

(http://nymag.com/news/features/paul-ryan-2012-5/index5.html)

guy just has convinced ppl by sheer force of nerdy swagger & a good rapport with media that he is a moderate think thank policy wonk making hard choices when his thinking is as shallow & ideological as like everybody else

i would like to see some polling on this

― lag∞n, Friday, August 17, 2012 4:38 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too actually i am concerned

guy just has convinced ppl by sheer force of nerdy swagger & a good rapport with media that he is a moderate think thank policy wonk making hard choices when his thinking is as shallow & ideological as like everybody else

― reductio ad burzum (flopson), Friday, August 17, 2012 4:42 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people =/ reporters - covered that upthread btw

Don't know anything about Ryan's district, but he might just mean getting elected in a state that's voted Democrat (sometimes just barely) in every presidential election from '88 forward. If Ryan's in a notably conservative district, no big deal.

its a lean republican district

and it doesn't matter how well or quickly Ryan has ascended GOP ranks. The guy sits in a safe district. He has never been tested except in front of Cokie Roberts types who want to be his Ayn Rand.

1. ryan doesnt really matter because hes just the vp candidate
2, the democrats made him famous ON PURPOSE
3. just take a look at this dude he is so clearly not the political genius being sold by the credulous ezra klien et al

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PXCxBDTMqQ

check out the charisma dripping off this guy, a v cool character

I looked at his district:

--he's won lopsided elections every year since '98: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan
--the district was Republican but pretty much dead even in the two elections before he arrived: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Neumann
--a Democrat held office from 1971-95 (mostly Les Aspin, who I vaguely remember as being conservative?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin%27s_1st_congressional_district

So: I think you've got to credit him for winning the district convincingly every time out--it's only been solidly Republican since he started running. I realize there are undoubtedly many other factors at play.

Les Aspin was Clinton's doomed first defense secretary and a classic but extinct subspecies called the Dem hawk.

under no circumstances should anyone be given any credit as a bigtime politician for winning house races

it is also generally rated as a lean repubican district

Didn't Aspin have a heart attack while in Clinton's administration?

It's been leaning heavily Republican...exactly from the moment he started running.

u realize there are people who do things like rate congressional districts professionally right, apologies to your 30 seconds of googling

And you carry this information around in your pocket? Anyway, I know you're pretty obstinate when you fixate on something, so this one's all yours--Paul Ryan is clearly a disaster for the first district of Wisconsin.

u can find the infos using yr google, so obstinate

Paul Ryan is clearly a disaster for the first district of Wisconsin.

― clemenza, Friday, August 17, 2012 5:09 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol v poor paraphrasing of my argument

guys

guys yrself

clearly a disaster for the only Klein-Iglesias thread

So I looked at--I googled--Charlie Cook's ratings for various districts, and sure enough, he has Wisconsin's 1st at +2 Republican. The rating--I googled--is based on "averaging its results from the prior two presidential elections and comparing them to national results."

Simple question: if the district runs about +2 in favor of Republicans, and Ryan's winning each election by an average of +30 (I googled), and it was held by Democrats from 1971 until four years before he started running, might it not be reasonable to conclude that he's a pretty good politician at the district level?

a. who cares
b. no

You see, that's what you did when we argued about the Sarah Palin film--you reverted to your schtick. Which I continue to find pretty funny in most contexts. It's just a little deficient in actually supporting your argument. And very difficult to counter.

sry thinking success in a house race translates over to a presidential race is a non starter for me

as far as my 'shtick' this might shed some light for you on our interactions

I think that's perfectly valid, and probably right--we'll find out over the next couple of months. But if Klein says that Ryan is a skilled politician, he can only base that on what's already happened, not on what might happen. And based on Ryan's performance in seven elections, and the fact that he's now one-half of the Republican ticket, I don't think it's that strange a conclusion to reach.

ya sure just like everyone said rick perry was a killer campaigner

i mean its not strange conclusion to reach, theres a logic operating there, its just based on v poor assumptions thatre constantly being contradicted by reality

Is there a reality yet, after six days? One poll I look at says Ryan has hurt Romney, the next one says he's helped, the next one says no difference. I don't think anything conclusive has emerged yet, other than the fact that Ryan is the main focus of the election right now.

The Obama team never could have predicted that its efforts would help vault Ryan into the nomination for vice president. The difference between what they reasonably hoped a strategy like this could achieve and what it actually achieved is attributable to Ryan, who has proven a tremendously skilled politician — so skilled, in fact, that he’s convinced many Republicans that the fight Obama wants is the fight they should want, too. Many of them share House Whip Kevin McCarthy’s view. “It’s not so smart to raise [Ryan] up by picking him as an enemy,” he told Draper. “If he picks a budget fight with Paul, Paul will beat him.”

not understanding the difference between politician and political operative, get back to me when he convinces voters of something

― lag∞n, Friday, 17 August 2012 16:32 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't read anything suggesting pr would get more voters in the blog post tho? it is confusing that he sees consolidating gop behind ryan's budget as both a successful dem strategy goal, and a flaw or too-risky gamble, but i thought the point was the risk is that forcing republicans to rally around the budget would mean they take passing parts of it much more seriously than they would have had he remained in obscurity, something reinforced by vp pick (also possible that they hoped it would be more divisive, but he doesn't make that point)

*take passing parts of it if they win

post is basically: everything is going just how the democrats planned, they should be more careful

man he pointed at a computer and said "this is perfect." Dude has NO FEAR.

Republicans are so good at getting a reputation for being smart by simply insisting that they are smart.

btw clemenza ur generally a chill bro but it's nagl to be all "lago_On you're generally v. obstinate, now watch me strawman ur argument."

http://yaledemocrats.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/IMG_3161_Feature.jpg

http://wiki.washjeff.edu/download/attachments/25364131/college+dems.jpg?version=1&modificationDate=1227556500000

http://sophia.smith.edu/democrats/images/dems_obama2.jpg

I'm not sure what you mean, Matt, if you trace the argument. Lagoon ridiculed the idea that Klein called Ryan a good politician; I found, what seemed to me, some pretty good evidence that he was a good politician, at least based on past history (running almost 30 points ahead of his party for seven consecutive elections); rather than explain why that wasn't good evidence, the one-word response was "no."

Anyway, I know you're pretty obstinate when you fixate on something, so this one's all yours--Paul Ryan is clearly a disaster for the first district of Wisconsin.

― clemenza, Friday, August 17, 2012 9:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If your point is that I'm just as obstinate, guilty as charged--I am being hypocritical there.

lag00n otm a) vp's don't matter and b) the little that they do ryan is a historically bad one. he is even half-assed at bringing the lulz

Don't dispute the first point at all. The second one, I don't know yet--I still say it's early. But I wasn't arguing either--just the one very narrow point about whether Ryan was, in Klein's words, a skilled politician. Having said that, now that I go back and look at the actual column, I do see that Klein wasn't referring to Ryan's skill at winning elections, but rather his skill at working himself into the VP slot. So I can see lagoon's argument better--he's saying Ryan's only there because the Democrats wanted him there, not because of any special skill. Fair enough--not sure I agree with that, either, but at least it makes sense to me (whereas the Republican-lean stuff didn't).

right, it's possible he's a great VP that doesn't matter

woah hold up, Tippecanoe AND Tyler too??!??!?!

haha

right, it's possible he's a great VP that doesn't matter

― ticagrelor rotini (k3vin k.), Saturday, August 18, 2012 12:53 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its much more likely that hes a terrible vp that doesnt matter tho

I don't what a good veep is. Thomas Marshall?

i just mean campaign wise

btw whats up w/all these prog rock pieces by dave weigel, what an utterly terrifying concept

idk if you could engineer a more perfect link i will never click

what constitutes a 'skilled politician' in the gop today?

Ezra Klein ‏@ezraklein
"Jethro Tull recorded not one but two albums that consisted of single, 40-minute songs. And they both went platinum." http://t.co/H6K1m5bW

oh god its spreading

Jethro Tull was a skilled progressive rock band; I have some numbers concerning their tricky 5/8 time signatures to back this up.

http://www.cjr.org/feature/boy_in_bubble.php?page=all

just read the matt yglesias reddit ama kill me

i haven't enjoyed reading him in years. totally humorless + wonky.

http://wonkwank.tumblr.com/

tumblr is p dumb

October 2, 2012

In general, I like the direction Romney is going in here. Capping deductions seems more achievable than picking through them one by one
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 2, 2012

oh man what a crazy right-wing argument ezra klein is making, somebody get out the tumblrs

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/ezra-klein-in-line-to-replace-ed-schultz.html

this seems like...a bad idea...

I like Klein a lot as a writer. I've only seen him on TV for about 5 minutes, filling in for Maddow and seemingly mimicking her cadence.

I like Ezra on TV.

he is really bad on tv, can barely talk, of course this could describe chris hayes too, wonder if matt is jealous

matt is too ugly for tv and even he must realize this

aw

Klein needs TV lessons.

get w/an elocution coach

i'd rather msnbc got rid of lawrence o'donnell than ed schultz

shultz brings a good old school vibe to the proceedings imho

yglesias could do lockup raw

http://www.vice.com/read/paul-ryan-what-stupid-people-think-a-smart-guy-sounds-like/

ostensibly about paul ryan but mostly about ezra klein & matt yglesias

Yglesias is a total idiot when it comes to school "reform".

yglesias has probably made good points here and there but god he's insufferable in general.

By comparison, the Republican impulse to close ranks and enforce ideological conformity around litmus tests and shore up their own social base seems awfully sophisticated. Big policy changes, after all, require mobilized and militant political actors.

the GOP hasn't achieved any big domestic policy changes in decades and its awfully sophisticated decision to close ranks has lost it countless elections, is responsible for the slow death of the party itself.

Yglesias seems like he'll turn into David Brooks as he ages.

surely Ezra Klein would

article is pretty dumb

left-wing people who don't operate as total ideologues said something less than 100% uncritical about public sector unions, scandal

xp Klein fights the liberal fight with some passion at least. Yglesias/Brooks are dry, remote, and see THE DATA only for the trends and not the underlying fomenting morass — pure, unadulterated technocrats. I haven't read much Klein in a long while though, only here and there.

i'd rather msnbc got rid of lawrence o'donnell than ed schultz

― goole, Monday, November 12, 2012 10:36 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

shultz brings a good old school vibe to the proceedings imho

― lag∞n, Monday, November 12, 2012 10:37 AM (1 week ago)

ha really? i much preferred ratigan as the "angry guy who yells"

wtf comparing yglesias to brooks, gtfo

sorry, chief. i'll leave.

left-wing people who don't operate as total ideologues said something less than 100% uncritical about public sector unions, scandal

― iatee, Monday, November 19, 2012 7:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh this is a p bad mischaracterization, they point wasn't that it was 100% uncritical but that it was misrepresented union's actual goals/popular support

they didn't say anything about the overwhelming (47%?) popular support? and whether the union's goals are $ or fighting reforms that doesn't really contradict what yglesias said about them. this is a 'gotcha' w/ no 'gotcha'.

lol @ the idea that brooks traffics in 'data', is a 'technocrat' - i see this and i think the person who thinks this never passed a science or math class after the third grade and/or is a gop congressman serving on the house science, space, & technology committee.

Brooks is Emperor Epistemic Closure.

i'd rather msnbc got rid of lawrence o'donnell than ed schultz

― goole, Monday, November 12, 2012 10:36 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

shultz brings a good old school vibe to the proceedings imho

― lag∞n, Monday, November 12, 2012 10:37 AM (1 week ago)

ha really? i much preferred ratigan as the "angry guy who yells"

yeah i kinda miss Ratigan. what's he doing now?

i originally had moderate hopes for O'Donnel but really can't stand him now. i'd p much rather watch that cock Olbermann

tbf i have watched all of these shows like two times

I just got cable and already the only person I can stand is Chris Hayes.

hayes is p otm but he is sooo bad at talking on the tv

like you listen to him and then realize you have absorbed absolutely nothing hes said, hes not connecting the words and meaning or something

slightly suspicious of him as a guy i must admit, even tho i agree w/what hes saying, feel like he might just be jumping on the inequality bandwagon

I disagree. Two weeks ago he gave a synopsis calling bullshit on the Fiscal Cliff that was concise and on-point. It's not baseball bats against Nazis, of course.

also he wears those light sensitive lenses ON TV

worse: his teeth are capped and whitened.

i'm still pro-hayes but having his twitter go from links to stuff in the nation etc to promoting his show and the coinciding change in tone(?) is like a less horrifying version of when donald glover's twitter feed went from 'behind the scenes lols at community' to 'ATLANTA - CHILDISH GAMBINO TONIGHT twitpic'.

yeah hayes seems pretty earnest and otm

Yeah Hayes' endless earnest excitable grad student who just loves to have the conversation thing is actually pretty adorable & heartening from my POV.

His book, like I wrote elsewhere last week, is an excellent master's thesis.

slightly suspicious of him as a guy i must admit, even tho i agree w/what hes saying, feel like he might just be jumping on the inequality bandwagon

― lag∞n, Tuesday, November 20, 2012 7:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my sources tell me he started out as a labor beat reporter in chicago, so, i don't think so!

yeah its maybe not that he doesnt believe it but twilight of the elites has some aspirational meme creation vibes

his book's thesis is v otm but I have no desire to actually read it

what is the thesis

“We overestimate the the advantage of meritocracy and under-appreciate the costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces.”

punkd http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/18/chamber_pots_in_brooklyn_artisanal_poo_is_a_bad_substitute_for_housing_supply.html

read hayes' book, it's totally inessential

i have to say that i was a lil hard on hayes upthread i v much appreciate that hes a dude on tv whos really hammering inequality issues, hes just sort of bad at tv, msnbc needs to provide some coaching or something

Ezra Klein ‏@ezraklein
Pretty excited that the West Wing is streaming on Netflix now

About 5 years ago Hayes wrote something for the Nation I disagreed with (in part) so I wrote him a brief & somewhat unfriendly email telling him as much. He replied with about a thousand words thoughtfully explaining himself to me when he had no obligation to do so, and he did as if he were having a conversation with one of his colleagues or someone he respected and not some random butthurt internet dude. Our politics are basically the same but I would be Team Hayes even if they weren't.

http://i.imgur.com/o4bOC.png

Awww.

Meanwhile neo-con Mickey Kaus is after Ezra for saying years ago that digitizing hospital records would cut healthcare expenses, while a new report now says that this has not been the case.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/18/the-mystery-of-ezra-klein/

sort of feel bad for ezra sometimes, hes kind of like an extremely precocious eleven year old and politics is like girls http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/today-in-well-duh

lol krugs sonned him read that this morning

mike murphy ‏@murphymike

Yes RT @mattyglesias @murphymike So yr view is that if Obama agreed to all-cuts deal today, he could build trust, get balanced deal later?

the recent profile of ezra in some publication i've since forgotten (TNR? i think it was TNR) wasn't very flattering

when i read that first article and was like wow he's being awful credulous about this. sort of nice to see he was quickly disabused of it.

whenever he appears in front of a camera he looks like Rick Moranis ogling Sigourney Weaver.

omg alfred

TNR? i think it was TNR

It was:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112366/ezra-klein-profile-wonkblogs-wise-boy-cannot-be-stopped

lol all his old blogging pals launching subliminals

lol at krugman saying "man up"

@ezraklein
Is the NYT article that Don Draper picks up at the end of the Mad Men season premier online anywhere?

I feel like both of these people get a pass on their inferior analysis due to being pretty-smart-for-one-of-those-nu-generation-hipster-blogger-types

it's so sad, you can just feel Klein's publicist shoe-horning him into appearances on Maddow etc and Klein just looks so DESPERATE to be a media star--and he just reads so much more "Beltway" than Hayes or Kornacki that it's never gonna happen...I really revel in this, but I'm an awful person

otm. He's Chuck Todd after yoga classes

its totally working tho klein is really popular

klein's a media star in his own way, he has more pundit legitimacy than anyone on tv

and he just reads so much more "Beltway" than Hayes or Kornacki that it's never gonna happen - this makes no sense to me

its totally working tho klein is really popular

― lag∞n, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:33 PM (6 minutes ago)

brunch at Cokie's?

also "Moneybox" is a really, really dumb name, but that's probably not Yglesias's fault

it precedes him

i still don't know what to think about yg turning himself into an economist. like, can you really do that

well, I grew a beard two years ago

'actual economists' link to him all the time, so I guess you can

the world doesn't really need another general politics daily grind internet liberal, but otoh, exactly how am i to value matthew yglesias' snap judgment on jc penney or w/e

xp yeah i see dudes like tyler cowen and scott sumner taking him seriously so who knows

yglesias has the economists talent for being really shockingly stupid about obvious common sense stuff

and the Beltway talent too.

and he just reads so much more "Beltway" than Hayes or Kornacki that it's never gonna happen - this makes no sense to me
― balls, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:39 PM (14 minutes ago)

Centrist/center-right like the political punditry he aspires to, as opposed to the "progressive" demo that Hayes-Kornacki cater to...

its totally working tho klein is really popular
― lag∞n, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:33 PM (6 minutes ago)
brunch at Cokie's?
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

exactly

yeah its always seemed like klein just ran to the borg going "assimilate me! assimilate ME! i'm making myself an "expert" on healthcare."

i have read yglesias like 4 times since he went to slate, so i don't know what he's doing anymore really.

having his mind blown by walgreens

isn't that David Brooks? No, wait, sorry -- David Brooks had his mind blown by Coldstone.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/04/obama_s_2014_budget_obama_wants_to_soak_the_rich_to_help_the_poor_republicans.html

This is simplistic and not completely accurate if you ask me. He's got false equivalence issues and he doesn't mention that O's request for more tax revenue is less than O's earlier such requests; there's no mention of how the tax code has changed over the last 50 years and how taxes are lower now

"Obama’s vision of America really is one in which many people will see their living standards rise thanks to better government benefits rather than higher market wages."

I mean "Moneybox." It's like calling a dining column "Dinner Plate."

x-post-- who knew Yglesias was a Romney supporter? "better government benefits" --those luckie duckies.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/la_taqueria_vs_chipotle_buttito_summit_and_burrito_economics.html

i like how if you rarely read yglesias now columns like these can give the impression that his professional angle is basically to convince people about burrito insights he has a cassandra complex about

The potential one-two punch of this package would be to create background checks and records for the gun show and internet sales and stiff penalties for the people who buy guns legally and then privately sell them to folks who commit crimes with them.

lol "folks". i think he obviously got this from obama but i don't think even barry would refer to gun criminals as "folks"

just folks

crime folks

is the name of my gang

it's the fucking worst tbh. very condescending

i find it more folksy

http://www.peterfrase.com/2013/04/the-perils-of-wonkery

so many of his idle thoughts are so uniformed and stupid

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_are_high_too_high.html

okay ths is gonna sound terrible but yglesiases ongoing economic ayalisis of game of thrones is p amazing

ha i love it too

yeah best yglesias posts in a while

proving that his best analysis requires a fantasy world

wow a $1200 mac laptop has a larger profit margin in dollars than a $500 Dell laptop, you don't say.

fuck this fuck
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html

What a stupid and insensitive Yglesias post. There's no discussion there of this alleged choice poor Bangladeshi people can make, and of the history of wrokplace safety rules in the US, and its just cold and careless.

Yglesias linked to this article and then just basically ignored it

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/04/holding-corporations-responsible-for-workplace-deaths

jfc, this guy

just going for the most basic tired econ challops, its evil but not even fresh evil

Great takedowns of that piece by Erik Loomis and David Atkins.

Also this which begins

Matthew Yglesias—a Norelco marketing experiment to see if a hand-drawn Sharpie beard on a peeled potato could sell men's earrings—wrote a morally and intellectually odious article at his second job yesterday. His Slate column, "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK," addressed the deaths of 161 workers in a factory collapse in Bangladesh with the tone they so richly deserved: bored.

and gets better from there.

Atkins' response is terrific.

booming takedown

better link for Atkins one

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/we-can-choose-that-workers-not-die-in.html

It's such a tired, econ 101 argument he's making too. There's no reason you can't place some floor on what the free market allows. Yes, that means more expensive tee shirts. But maybe tee shirts are too cheap.

Aaron Bady ‏@zunguzungu 17h
Different Places Have a Different Likelihood of Being Murdered by Robot Airplanes and That's OK

I wonder what Yglesias is saying on twitter now about this. Is he doubling down?

From the mrdestructo link:

Pish-posh! He sets the fools straight: in America, dangerous jobs, like "fishing, logging, and trucking... pay a premium over other working-class occupations." That's why Americans commonly say phrases like, "I'm as rich as a fisherman!" or, when you see a man in a suit flash a wad of cash, say, "Hey, Mr. Rockefeller, what are you, some kinda long-haul trucker?"

Maybe Yglesias should becoma a non-union factory worker or a coal miner.

if he weren't a non-union factory worker he wouldn't be producing things like this

a Norelco marketing experiment to see if a hand-drawn Sharpie beard on a peeled potato could sell men's earrings

I wish I could write things this funny and get away with it

great zings throughout history

matt yglesias can go DIAFF

what does that mean?

he should look for new employment in bangladesh

this comment on yglesias from the start of the thread just keeps getting more otm

strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been a member of 'the best and brightest' or whatever

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 5:45 PM (2 years ago)

Die In A Factory Fire xp

can we change this to the matt yglesias thread because i come here for some good timey Klein bashing and there's nothin'

klein is horrible in his own way but soo boring

something's happened to this thinking since he changed haircuts.

Adam Johnson ‏@adamjohnsonNYC 3m
@ZaidJilani @Bro_Pair @Mobute But I do think dragging @mattyglesias name through the mud distracts from argument. But I'm sure he'll b ok

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani 2m
@adamjohnsonNYC @Bro_Pair @Mobute actually it wont because thats what he intended, he just wants clicks. i worked w/him. he likes attention

agree w this guy that yglesias is trolling, like he couldve easily made the same point in a far less offensive manner, instead he takes this ho hum tone about ~160 recently dead people and then doesnt even bother to connect the dots on his argument, hes not new to the internet

he works at slate

he probably got a raise

Another response

http://coreyrobin.com/2013/04/25/would-it-not-be-easier-for-matt-yglesias-to-dissolve-the-bangladeshi-people-and-elect-another/

Yglesias responds:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/26/some_further_thoughts_on_bangladesh.html

Of course he can't help but begin with telling everyone how "annoyed" he is at the response.

Fuck that piece of shit and every other beltway parasite like him

iatee's right, slate thrives on this shit -- half their articles are some lame-ass trolling of 'conventional opinion.'

In summary, I'm not a Marxist. But I worry that political conservatives are going to turn me into one.

yglesias otm

in summary

Oh you nerd Yglesias (yeah narcissism of small differences but JEEZ):

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2013/05/star_trek_movies_and_tv_series_which_are_the_best_why.single.html

leave it to yglesias to think voyager is better than the original series

Also in Slate, Matthew Yglesias ranks every Star Trek movie, television series, villain, and crew member.

Every extra, every continuity problem, and every time he desperately dreamed of Orion slave women.

Top Ten Tribbles

Ezra Klein just read a XKCD comic on air

and you were watching

hey man I lean forward

haha

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/15/eating_lunch_outside_sucks_stay_inside.html

god how much does this twerp get paid

youve done it again mr yglesias

http://prospect.org/article/ezra-kleins-blind-spot

Klein's article also never really covered rich people tax deductions, effective corporate tax rates (after deductions), or the capital gains tax rate and who that benefits

http://i.imgur.com/OfZYOtA.png

http://i.imgur.com/4SZfh3F.png

oh no who will save matt from weird twitter

http://i.imgur.com/ghw4mCj.png

The best strategy for expressing displeasure is to do nothing.

cause thats what he always does

all your interactions w/ me should be pleasurable ones

Matt Yglesias @mattyglesias
Finished the new @Gladwell on my flight. Don’t listen to the haters. His books keep getting better.

he's only read this one but already he feels comfortable making inferences based on limited data.

Once again, Yglesias with the fresh, unconventional insights:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/12/27/red_lobster_s_bad_food_problem_it_s_egregious.html

Matt Yglesias ‏@mattyglesias 44m
Everyone praising Red Lobster's cheesy biscuits should look up "exception that proves the rule."

damn, harsh

Tomorrow: Big Box Retail's Internet Problem

The Knicks' Problem: They're Not Good at Basketball

A bumper crop is pushing lobster prices through the floor, so why aren't restaurants charging less?
By Matthew Yglesias

more urgent lobster analysis

sticky lobster

matt yglesias is a pretty good blogger like i understand why everyone hates him because he is disgusting but hes pretty good, also he writes a lot of posts which is good

wait, why is yglesias "disgusting"?

just like a disgusting human

the sad thing is he's actually probably one of the best things on slate, he's only really bad if you compare him to, yknow, good things

hes pretty good tho

on the other hand ive decided ezra is not good and i unfollowed him and dont read him anymore

ezra is just dumb srsly no clue get a clue ezra

I agree with the above posts by lagoon

ezra was fooled by paul ryans brainy young republican with charts routine never forget

guess we now know how much Ezra Klein isn't worth to WaPo

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck"><p>I look forward to investing in <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein";>@ezraklein</a>'s new startup.</p>— Eric Ries (@ericries) <a href="https://twitter.com/ericries/statuses/418938926477242368";>January 3, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

oops
that was a tweet showing that Eric Ries is excited to back Ezra's startup.

Un fucking believable.

http://yellowhammernews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/YH-Bill-Simmons-and-Nate-Silver.png

not pictured: ezra klein

they both look very focused

After consultation with the newspaper’s editor, Marty Baron, according to one of the people, he put forward a proposal with detailed revenue projections to build a new website dedicated to explanatory journalism on a wide range of topics beyond political policy. It would have been affiliated with The Post, the person said, but would have been a separate enterprise. The investment he sought, the person said, was in eight figures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/business/media/blogger-said-to-plan-to-leave-the-post.html

8 figures!

some sort of gold website or something

mansplanatory journalism

Dude knows you can set up a wordpress blog for free, right?

yes but does the post

the eight figures he was asking for sounds more like he wanted the post to just give him all the money and hed do it himself, where grantland and 538 prob have their own editorial budgets id imagine lots of their technical and promotional stuff is just handled by espn, like the site lives on their servers etc, the whole thing in some ways is just a branding exercise, sounds like klein wanted a more independent thing like what greenwald is doing cause if youre just gonna hire some reporters it not gonna cost $10m

its interesting you see a lot of these sort of sub publications or sections or w/e like wonkblog or dealbook thatre kind of separate but still obvs under the banner of their parent publications, no one else seems to want to go as far as espn is going, they dont want to give up all their little links and logos all over the place

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/07/extreme_cold_is_better_than_extreme_heat.html

feel like he's slowly turning into henry blodget

Wonkblog ‏@Wonkblog
It's official: Ezra is leaving the Post. Hoping for the best for him.

ezra taking dylan matthews with him is worse than ezra leaving the post

Alexis C. Madrigal ‏@alexismadrigal 37m
The strangest thing here is that 4 million pageviews a month is ... downright modest. http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/ezra-klein-leaves-washington-post-102424.html

i mean for a "blog" that's pretty good but it's certainly not sustaining a web site or anything

yeah i wonder if hes as famous as he thinks he is

if that's 4m uniques it would make a bit more sense

its weird hes never written a book

for comparison at the height of election season nate silver was getting more traffic than that a day

well tbf ezra's web traffic is not 4 million random bozos in montana like one of the views is barack obama

he is worth like 1.5 views really

very not mysterious why an analytical business guy like bezos wouldnt want to write klein a big check for a site he wants to co own

well tbf ezra's web traffic is not 4 million random bozos in montana like one of the views is barack obama

― iatee, Tuesday, January 21, 2014 11:31 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does the president use ad block tho

all the ads will be native duh

Ezra hasn't yet found flattering TV glasses imo

in person he and Steve Kornacki blur into garrulous sincerity

hey michelle check out this list 10 things only 70s kids who are also the president will understand lol so true

'I don't think that's funny'
'oh yeah I guess...you're not the president'

Eric Fisher ‏@EricFisherSBJ 11m

Numbers are in - Richard Sherman piece on The http://MMQB.com drives 4.3M uniques yesterday - highest day in SI Digital history

lol i dont think thats the url youre looking for

http://mmqb.si.com

think i mentioned this before but you see how si cant quite make mmqb its own site, its url is a sub domain and theres si navigation in header and footer, where grantland is all its own stuff, much clearer more confident branding imo

politico's web traffic can't be that high either (relatively speaking) but I think they get by on the same idea, it's not how many it's who

in person he and Steve Kornacki blur into garrulous sincerity

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 21, 2014

may be, but in terms of their presentation and focus as cable-hosts, they're very different. kornacki might make a career out of investigating chris christie (it seems like the perfect story for kornacki), and maybe it will transform up into something of kornacki's own. but i always felt like hyper-wonky klein should have succeeded hayes on up, and kornacki should have been given another show. anyway, i hope that as part of his new entrepreneurial endeavors, klein gets more time on msnbc to be a policy wonk (i wish hayes got back to being a policy wonk, too, btw).

politico prob just has some evil billionaire investor set on the destruction of democracy funding it

one good thing about this is that we'll have to see the word 'wonk' less frequently

unless he calls it like webwonk or something horrible

you know he will still ride for WONK

thats him brand

hes a drag queen whos persona is WONK

new site new word

ronk

donk

http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/123/8d0029025ed44be6b1a84df485ce834b/l.jpg

wonkcoin

otm

I can't believe he already published the first issue dude is amazing

very amazing work ethic truly a wunderkind

with their powers combined ezra could write articles about things before they happened and amazon could send you the paper before you wanted it

what a missed opportunity

this one chart is coming from inside your house

wait so where do u read ezra klein now?

look inside

your own butt

may be, but in terms of their presentation and focus as cable-hosts, they're very different. kornacki might make a career out of investigating chris christie (it seems like the perfect story for kornacki), and maybe it will transform up into something of kornacki's own.

No doubt. Kornacki's a good reporter, and Christie's giving him a chance to carve his own identity (before this he flaunted his amazing knowledge of the life of Jerry Brown)

no ten million dollars inside of my butt last time i checked

should I post a gif

go for it

no

Ezra Klein ‏@ezraklein 11m
NYT has this wrong: There’s nothing more glamorous than a great CMS. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/business/media/ezra-klein-leaving-washington-post.html

sounds like hes going with vox and their world famous cms, iirc he was a frequent subtweeter at the posts cms

vox are v smart people imo and he would be wise to jump on board, theyve built huge properties in the most crowded fields in the verge and sbnation and other stuff too, and everyone says their cms is tite if youre into hat sort of thing

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of-a-fanboy

that's actually not the best example

is there a good new nyt paywall workaround?

"reset safari" if you use safari works

No doubt. Kornacki's a good reporter, and Christie's giving him a chance to carve his own identity (before this he flaunted his amazing knowledge of the life of Jerry Brown)

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 21, 2014

exactly right. kornacki's a talent. it was kind of unfair to make him host of a show that has an audience expecting a hyper-wonky discussion.

I hate the word "wonky" tbh.

not my favorite word, either, but i hate slang and most jargon. so how about "policy-focused."

"knowledge"

wonkish is useful as a term, i think of it as an attempt to rinse out gross imf-era connotation of "technocrat" or "neoliberal" to more domestic focused policy nerds

used by bloggers i think wonky or wonkish is often used as a disclaimer signifying "will now operate under the assumption that the reader took a 100-level econ course in college"

more details re Klein's leaving the W. Post

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/ezra-klein-leaves-washington-post-102424.html?hp=t1

But when Klein proposed the creation of an independent, explanatory journalism website — with more than three dozen staffers and a multiyear budget north of $10 million — the Post said enough is enough. Indeed, Jeff Bezos, the Post’s new owner, and Katharine Weymouth, its publisher, never even offered an alternative figure, sources familiar with the negotiations said.

it's funny that after bezos bought the post everyone was like "hundreds of million dollars is pocket change to the guy!!" and now ezra is like "throw me $10+ million over a few years" and they're like "...nah"

he prob thought it was the perfect time to fleece this rube

i think this is smart of the post

well the idea of ezra having a "brand" is a pretty myopic DC thing imo and it probably didn't help that it took like 3 months for wonkblog's upworthy site to outpace the original

maybe the rich whiteness of his readership really is more important than the pageviews but like.... my parents know who nate silver is. ezra is no nate silver.

seems like if they couldve kept him happy w a smaller operation it might not have been a bad idea to give him his own site, idk about his ownership demands and whatnot, but obvs his initial pitch was a lil extravagant

leaked pic of the pitch meeting:

http://mystery756.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/rushmore-max-with-brian-cox-headmaster.jpg

waiting for The Corner to appropriate "rich whiteness"

is there a good new nyt paywall workaround?

― flopson, Tuesday, January 21, 2014 3:24 PM (Yesterday)

google the headline

get yr dads login

my dad's not a communist he doesn't read the fuckin nyt

the wifi is too slow in the gulag i guess (sick anti-communism zing)

giving $10 mil to ezra k still seems like a better idea than spending $250 mil on the post

no one reporter, even one w/ a brand, is worth it, basically ever

cmon max don't be so down on yourself

hah

it kinda depends on what you can build together no like grantland seems to be doing good

is there a good new nyt paywall workaround?

― flopson, Tuesday, January 21, 2014 3:24 PM (Yesterday)

any browser with private browsing option (chrome, firefox) renders nyt paywall irrelevant

somewhat-relatedly, it looks like foreign policy recently eased their reading policy. i haven't seen a paywall in a while.

espn couldve let simmons go, wouldntve been a big deal for them in the end, and grantland would probably not exist, certainly not in its present form. but espn also has soooo much more money than the post or the times or wsj that i think their calculations are pretty different

sure they couldve let him go but instead they kept him and it was a win win cause of synergies and shit

lol i mean... was it tho?

just from a bottom-line perspective i think its about even. maybe espn loves having the Cool Brand of grantland but they dont need bill simmons for that shit, they just need to hire better editors and writers for their website and magazine

simmons is as important to ESPN as any 1 person could be but grantland definitely seems like something espn loses money on just to keep him around to do other stuff

good for us though

lol i mean... was it tho?

― max, Wednesday, January 22, 2014 12:14 PM (8 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obvs we have no way of knowing but they def seem interested in doing more of the same type things

simmons is def a big thing for espn, their web traffic would take a huge hit if he dipped & '30 for 30' is a big thing

simmons is huge max r u living under a rock bro

yeah and the times traffic takes a big hit w/ silver gone. its not that espn would keep chugging along but that in the long term its not a big deal. there is always newer, cheaper talent

yeah simmons is prob the most popular writer on the nets, as to whether his deal w espn is working financially for them i dont know, their willingness to roll up nate silver points to yes tho

and like, simmons is WAY bigger than klein, and also WAY more important to espn's brand than klein is to wapo's

grantland itself idk it's just a website, how much money does it take to run a website? espn has enough money anyway tho you're otm about that i think

xp thats fair, idk. i think if the nyt had espn-level dough they wouldve kept silver... its kinda apples to oranges comparing a multiplatform sports brand to a newspaper

i mean grantland is pennies to espn im sure but have you seen their masthead, they have like 20 people working for that shit, and im sure their traffic is shit

the formula might be more like its not really worth paying for brand writers unless you can leverage that brand, like now all that newer cheaper talent has been infused w the sweet simmons bro-juice, i just wish they wouldnt let him on tv during basketball broadcasts

and im sure their traffic is shit

― max, Wednesday, January 22, 2014 12:20 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk man i think theyre doin pretty good, at least the sports stuff, the more pop culture things i could see absolutely no one reading

stuff that gets the espn homepage pipeline probably does pretty well yeah

~synergies~

i enjoy simmons on basketball broadcasts

omg that is so terrible, u need to go on a visionquest

the whole new yorker has always been a big red line for conde nast, afaik

i think it's just an ancient thing that owners run prestige media for their own nefarious cultural capital reasons

what kind of cool ski resort ideas summit hookup parties do the people at tv guide throw, i ask u

nyer is profitable or very nearly so over the last decade, im pretty sure! not that i dont see your point

oh huh i seem to recall a profile of remnick that said the opposite.

...that could just be that remnick himself is clueless about the NYer's numbers

i mean, i dont think si newhouse is expecting it to make money, ever

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/01/ezra-klein-next-roger-ailes

this is a nothing of a post so i think KD just wanted to air out that title

The only thing on Grantland I read regularly is Mark Harris on the Oscars, but I've occasionally followed links there and think, "I should read Grantland more often."

they have really good basketball stuff m/l all i read there

yeah simmons, lowe, keri is all i read there

grantland nba shootarounds are frequently awesome

eh i find those corny tbh

it's kind of weird how they got like all of knicks twitter to be contributors even though none of them really has anything to say

i hope ezra klein's new website is 100% devoted to nba basketball.

there's a guy who does longer bball features (not zane lowe type analysis) that's pretty great. i read all the nerds he brought in - barnwell, lowe, keri. the only pop cult guy i really like is wesley morris; steve hyden is fucking awful and the rest just kinda seems like warmed over vulture (by design obv)(one reason i always kinda blanche at boutique/prestige talk around grantland). love love love rembert browne. the fallout from their fuckup this past week has been interesting cuz i've always been curious at just how hands on simmons is at this point. then something like an oral history of swingers goes up...

probably most entertaining grantland thing this week was finding out that nate silver has hired a weather nerd.

what does rembert browne do, middlebrow cultural criticism? i've never read him

would've preferred "Nate Silver has hired a boyfriend"

rem does rap, race, reality tv... pop cult, i guess. great, great writer, smart kid

it's generally gawker/vulture kinda stuff though less 'here's some shit i found on the internet' than that. occasionally he does a 'but seriously folx' thing like this - http://grantland.com/the-triangle/stanford-man-richard-sherman-and-the-thug-athlete-narrative/. i'm an old man and when i find a millenial internet writer whose voice i not only find tolerable but charming (maybe entertaining is a better word there but somehow not specific enough - there's tons of interent things i find intolerable yet entertaining)(www.ilxor.com) i take what i can get. i mean i don't think caity weaver should get a pulitzer prize but when i see that byline i go 'this should be good', there's added value there beyond just the 'well here's a story i'm gonna read eventually cuz every internet outlet is gonna write their version so i might as well read this one' (which reminds me i've been meaning to start a thread about the homogenization of the internet but have never bothered enough to investigate how much my hunch there is accurate)(i mean seriously why did thinkprogress do golden globes red carpet coverage?)

i've been meaning to start a thread about the homogenization of the internet but have never bothered enough to investigate how much my hunch there is accurate

been feeling this real bad lately, like whatever happened to being able to -find- something, something fresh to you. instead the internet is like this ever-constricting circle of empty attempts to up the urgency on anything fool enough to poke its head up and become 'news'

rip geocities

yeah it's tough for me to know how real it is or if it's just i've liked/followed too many fluffy sites. i strongly suspect it's largely the latter but man i've followed junkfood internet sites for awhile and it didn't used to seem like this. i think the way upworthy has nearly destroyed the likelihood of seeing a non-obnoxious headline this decade is a factor also. i mean ppl hate buzzfeed and god knows there's evil lurking there (perpetua) and there are things there that horrify me personally (look i know the numbers and i get the demographics to understand why the entire 90s has been reduced 'man remember tgif on abc' but it still hurts *goes off to give new malkmus album another chance*), but there's a few 'good' things and they save me time finding youtube clips of dogs so i bear no ill will toward them really but upworthy man. a fucking cancer. lately it reminds me of how cable used to be really diverse and the channels had a purpose (the 'a' and 'e' in a&e meant something man) and then everybody figured out their lives would be so much easier if they just showed friends reruns.

btw global warming will likely devastate our way of life within our lifetimes

good tv shows today are way better than good 90s tv shows

no show is better than homicide

yeah i think the golden age etc is over or close enough (still rep for mad men what can i say) but agree that the yr average 'good, not great' tv show now (justified, game of thrones, whatever) is way better yr average 'good, not great' from the 90s.

it's a brand new era but it came too late

tv inequality is like income inequality, the average tv show has suffered and its quality of tv-life continues to decrease, but the top 1% of tv shows are living the good life

lol

nbc = detroit

tv is better now because televisions are better, homicide is even better than it used to be