And it was easy to sell the mortgages as securities irregardless of their quality, because big sophisticated financial services firms devised tactics for slicing and dicing the securities into packages that could be easily resold.
As expected, Matt's commenters have a merciless disdain for made-up words.Brock puts it bluntly: "Harvard called; it wants your degree back."
This would be over triple as costly as the stimulus that will soon be signed, probably less effective at producing jobs, and much more devastating to the United States' long-term budgetary situation.
I have mixed feelings about reporting on these kind of findings. On the one hand, I don't actually think that elected officials' future has very much to do with the public's opinion, such as it is, on this kind of question. I think, for example, that Obama's re-election prospects will be based much more on whether or not living standards are increasing in 2012 than on whether or not the policies he pursued in 2009 matched up with at-the-time public opinion. So the politically smart thing to do is more-or-less ignore year-one opinion and just do things that you think will work out in the medium-term (of course the wise and moral thing to do is to also think about the long term) irregardless of the polls. But on the other hand, there's lots of reason to believe that people's beliefs about short-term public opinion do influence how they act so it's important to spread the information around when it points in the right direction.
Editor's note: Grammarians prefer not to use irregardless, as it is a made-up word with the same meaning as regardless.
The beginning of the Obama administration is good for the world, but probably bad for the progressive blogosphere. Fewer conservatives in positions of power equals fewer wingutty policies to complain about it. Fortunately, here comes Big Hollywood to the rescue with a fine wine from Dirk Benedict who played Starbuck on the old Battlestar Galactica. Benedict's hilariously insupportable thesis is that the old BSG was better than the old BSG and that the specific reason the old BSG was better than the old BSG was the old BSG's tendency toward simplistic storylines and retrograde gender politics
Like Kevin Drum, I haven't yet posted on the Oscar Grant case. In part that's because this seems so open-and-shut that there's not much to say. As you can see on live video, officer Johannes Mehserle pulls out his gun and shoots an unarmed, subdued man in the back for what looks to be no reason
But mere improvement isn't, to coin a phrase, the change we need.
I suspect Barack Obama might disagree with Matt's claim to have just invented that phrase.
