MEGAN: Oh, hey, so, apparently we all agree that Obama hasn't screwed anything up yet on his trip. And I think Obama knows where to recruit door-knockers for Florida, if only because I think the sight of a bunch of Palestinians knocking on doors saying "Ma'am, believe me, we know, Barack Obama isn't going to change the United States' policies on Israel one iota."
MOE: I DRANK SO MUCH LAST NIGHT actually I didn't I just drank enough. Surprising fact: I did not drink on Saturday or Sunday night at all. Not one drop! When that happens it throws my system out of whack you know.
MEGAN: I know, it's like, the sun is less bright on those days. I started buying beer, actually, because it was so hot and to get into shape for Germany but I can't consume enough of it all in one sitting to get drunk, it's a little sad still.
MOE: Oh look David Brooks is talking about debtor nation again huh cool.
MEGAN: In honor of your hangover, I recommend reading this analysis of how, by not publishing McCain's OpEd on Obama and the surge, the New York Times MOE: Holy itshay is that you Bobo??

This third position begins with the notion that people are driven by the desire to earn the respect of their fellows. Individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them.

Yeah regarding McCain, he wouldn't have looked like an idiot I don't think because who reads op-eds "written" by really important people? (Exception that proves the rule being Angelina of course.)
MEGAN: Dammit, I hate agreeing with Brooks! I mean, he does it without resorting to Marxism which is where you or I would go with it, but the idea that we're eroded a social norm by scaling down luxury goods, accept indebtedness as a way of life and normifying conspicuous consumption, man, dammit, I hate that. It's like, even my friends in Germany were surprised that as an American the only debts I have are student loans and my mortgage.
Like, even they all know we're a fucked up country when it comes to debt, even if they only know if because they're importing our debt culture like the rest of the bits of the worst of American culture we export elsewhere.
Oh, wait, phew, all is right in the world as Brooks descends into madness again.

The Treasury and the Fed are trying to stabilize the system while still ensuring that those who made mistakes feel the pain.

LOLZ, the government is trying to make sure people who made mistakes feel the pain. Sure, unless you're Bear Stearns or Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, sure unless you're the trader that committed the frauds that undermined the stability of IndyMac and cost a bunch of old people their (uninsured) retirement savings and shit. "Feel the pain." The people that caused most of the problems won't feel any pain.
MEGAN: Anyway, so, the GOP has decided to stop suing people for using their logo which is like unAmerican to stop suing people and yet it's anti-trial lawyer and sort of pro-tort reform so perhaps more fitting with Republican ideology.
MOE: And I still don't know what to talk about, I guess there was that meme about how Colin Powell and Condi Rice may endorse Obama because of that whole identity politics factor but Condi identifies more with fellow alienbots so I'm thinking no on that one.
MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, what exactly is fitting with her political ideology that Obama espouses?
MOE: Well I think her exercise regimen is a big component of her ideology, and she totes has a crush on Michelle. But is that enough? Well shit, maybe for Condi!
MEGAN: Ok, can we talk about the fact that Cindy McCain travels with a stylist? I knew her and Megan's hair was too shiny to be true.
MOE: Oh I guess we have to talk about Obama's "fake" interviews. I mean, it would be one thing if someone said this who did not work for the memefactory, but I see what she's saying. That's the one thing I always dug about McCain is his "I'm just going to babble about whatever pops into my mind" PR strategy.
And Meghan HAS to have extensions right?
MEGAN: I don't know, I mean, I have seen her up close, if they are extensions, Ken Paves is grinding his teeth down to little points in envy.
MOE: Whoa I did not realize Cindy

fought her fear of campaigning via small planes by getting her pilot's license without telling her husband

Oh this is a good story, I love Libby Copeland.
MEGAN: I mean, you want to hate her, and then it's just hard. She's so nice-seeming.
The charity work, etc. Also, wtf, Andrea Mitchell? I'm not sure I get that, is she just mad she flew all the way over their and Obama chose Lara Logan or something?
MOE: (The writer.) (Who I was like totally jealous of for like ninety years because she went to school with me and NEVER WORKED A MILLISECOND ON THE SCHOOL PAPER WHERE I TOILED.) I did not think she was so good when she started at the Washington Post but now I love pretty much everything she does and I have to say, it is nice to suspect you would dislike someone and then turn out to be wrong. Okay, so Cindy McCain, she seems cool, I have to say. Not as cool as Michelle, but the thing about having disadvantages or whatever is that it is sometimes its own advantage, and Cindy grew up rich and blond and cheerleadery in Arizona. I wonder if she ever even saw Do The Right Thing. Nevertheless, she was just in Cambodia.
MEGAN: And for Operation Smile, which we all know I have a very soft spot for, even if the founder seemed totally amazed that I didn't have a speech impediment when we met once.
MOE:

"You just can't just help but love her, honey," says John's mother, the irrepressible 96-year-old Roberta McCain, who several times during an interview says she has nothing to say and then keeps adding things. She describes Cindy as a seamless mother who has managed her four children's lives with seeming effortlessness, all while looking fantastic and wearing the most stylish clothes. "I don't see any chink in her armor, and I'm not biased," she says.

MEGAN: Yes, as a mother-in-law, you certainly wouldn't be biased at all Roberta. Now, see, this is a serious question. I can't say from his first wife, as she's not so keen to do interviews, but between his mother, her, and Cindy, how in the world does McCain still not know better than to tell anti-woman jokes? Because, really, he's kind of surrounded by cool-seeming chicks. I want to totally be Roberta McCain when I'm 92, if I don't off myself at 60 of course.
MOE: hahaha

She is, in the words of her brother-in-law Joe McCain, a self-editor. Aware she is under a spotlight, she recognizes that everything she says must be carefully framed, or it can be taken out of context. "The best way to put it in context is to not say it," he says.

I am getting that tattooed on my knuckles.
MEGAN: Fuck my knuckles, I might be wearing gloves! I'm getting that tattooed upside down on my cleavage, the one thing that is always visible.
MOE: omg let's get tattoos together!
MEGAN: Yes, totally, I have been itching for one for years, I'd bet Attackerman knows a place, you know, somehow.
MOE: Yo this is really rough:

"John was with me the first time I lost a baby," she told Harper's Bazaar last year, "but not for those after, which was hard."

MEGAN: Yeah, I read that then and I felt awful for her. I mean, dude, as obviously as she wanted kids and as young as she apparently was, you have to wonder how they got through that. It wasn't like in the 50s or something, you know?
Also, can we all say a heart "Fuck you" to Karl Rove for this again?

She did, however, cry in front of reporters after smear attacks during the 2000 South Carolina primary insinuated that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child — a reference to Bridget, born in Bangladesh.

All together, please: Fuck you, Karl Rove.
MOE: Here's another thing, like, she didn't feel like she was addicted because he didn't notice. Oh my, you know, like that is a lesson: do not rely on dudes to notice you have a problem, or really, anything at all about your condition unless they somehow interpret it to involve you being "mad" at them. I bet she was actually weirdly flattered that one time he called her a trollop for wearing too much makeup because it was like, you noticed?
MEGAN: Oh, God, I hear that for sure. Like, actually, a friend of a friend divorced his wife (eventually) for being a coke addict and he only noticed when he couldn't get money out of an ATM one day and went to the bank to complain and found out they didn't have any more. Like, any. That's an addiction.
Also, I stopped trying long ago with dudes. If I want them to notice, I'll say "Hey, I got my haircut, do you like it," or, "Hey, I dyed it red, what do you think," or, "Hey, I lost 30 pounds, what do you think of my ass now," you know, shit like that.
MOE: Hahaha I feel like dudes are pretty good at noticing that shit. "You look different…good" Hey thanks I washed my hair! I found that purple eyeshadow that vaguely recalls Debbie Gibson circa Electric Youth but oh well! I brushed my hair! I'm wearing a color other than black or gray! It's more like the, I dunno, subtler stuff they are shitty about. That's actually why I don't think it's such a bad thing to write about them on the internet.
MEGAN: Maybe I just date really oblivious dudes. But, also, my emotions aren't really subtle. And I try not to blog about actual dudes I'm currently dating. Dudes I used to date — particularly if they've pissed me off and aren't speaking to me anyway — somehow feel like fair game. Oh, also, before we end this, we should probably mention the fact that Radovan Karadžić was arrested yesterday.
MOE: oh right he totally was!
MEGAN: Amusingly, to tie it back into drinking, reportedly while drinking a beer on the street! Man, who knew Belgrade was so much like Boston?
MOE: This is a really educational blog post that puts things nicely in perspective! So this guy's poetry: crappy or what? Hmm.

In his defense, his supporters say that he is no more guilty than any other war-time political leader. His ability to evade capture for over a decade made him a local hero among the Bosnian Serbs.

So maybe now that he has been arrested while drinking a beer he will look less badass?
MEGAN: Hrm, well, being a bit of a translator myself, I sort of wonder if the reason these sound so incredibly shitty is translation error, but thematically I think they're also overblown and so I'm going to call crappy.
Also, I think Richard Byrne is suggesting that Ratko Mladić, the guy behind Srebrenica, might off himself rather than turn himself or be captured. And, to your point, that's totally what Byrne says, that not only will Karadžić look like a f'idiot, but that the former government that "couldn't find him" might look stupid to the people on whose support they counted. God, if only making an Administration look like a bunch of bumbling incompetent idiots would work here. God, we could dream, right?

MOE: So today Obama is a country club snob who sips a martini and alternately peddles a fruitcake version of the Constitution and makes snide comments about passersby while ignoring the beautiful date he brought for some new chick from out of town…ummmm is the whole campaign going to be this incomprehensible a tantrum? Why don't they go after the fact that his Christian outreach program consists of hosting things called "American Values House Parties"? That could at least make for some fun photoshop work.

MEGAN: Also, he wants to be President soooo bad, he's made up his own seal. But, to answer the question, yes, I think for the foreseeable future the campaign will just be one incomprehensible temper tantrum.
MOE: Do you think Karl Rove is trying to evoke a sort of Greg Germann image re Obama? Because Karl, I know you don't need me to tell you this, but it would be a lot easier to just play to the whole "latent racism" thing. But not nearly as fun!
MEGAN: People say they want clean campaigns, but they only pay attention and change their minds when it gets dirty, so it'll get dirty. Plus, you know, you've got pissed off PUMAs and the media is all sad that their golden boy refused to take public financing and so it's their disappointment that drives the coverage right now because they are literally 90% of the total population of people that understand what public financing is on a basic level and what it means that he didn't take it (and they're probably still mad that 99% of their viewers/readers didn't give a fuck about it).
MOE: oh my Goddd just when you thought David Brooks was sticking to his meds…

MEGAN: Whoa:

Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call [to have a surge]

I don't think that qualifies as "off his meds" as much as "on hard drugs this time."
MOE:

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.
Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. Bush is also a secretive man who listens too much to Dick Cheney. Well, the uncomfortable fact is that Cheney played an essential role in promoting the surge. Many of the people who are dubbed bad guys actually got this one right.

Ha ha, yes, dubbed. Oh for the rest of the world to be so attuned to the selflessness and idealism at the core of all Dick Cheney's actions.
MEGAN: Dick Cheney's just a peach! He knows what he's doing!
MOE: Anyway, I must confess, I think of stability in Iraq right now and I think not necessarily "failed state" or "fragile state" but honor killings and virginity checkups and the like. In that vein I don't think of coal consumption and "a distinctly American problem, as opposed to that of oil" automatically but according to this guy, James Hansen, I should. Do you sometimes wish all these nebulous global warming based arguments for minimizing waste and reducing consumption would do like the ice caps and wash away to reveal to Americans the secret reason everyone's trying to get them to stop driving Hummers and living in exurbs and swilling bottled water and gorging on high fructose nuggets of deforestation and animal cruelty which is to say IT'S JUST BETTER FOR EVERYONE THAT WAY??

MEGAN: Oh, I meant to tell you, HuffPo went out and couldn't find a single economist — not even a right wing shill — that would say that McCain's drilling plan would lower oil prices in the short-medium term?
MOE: Oh but to get to a point I was trying to make earlier coal is burned widely in China and I wouldn't call it "counterintuitive" to want to put an end to that. And yeah if the fucking Fox News booker couldn't find one I don't know how they were supposed to.
MEGAN: Two-thirds of our energy in this country comes from burning coal, and although the coal we burn is of high quality (and thus less environmentally unfriendly in terms of SOx emissions, if I recall correctly) than the higher-sulfur coal which is burned in China, it still ain't good. Someone on MSNBC yesterday, I wasn't looking at the TV so I didn't see who, said that we should try to become the Saudi Arabia of coal. I thought it was a bad talking point.

MOE: Did you read all the latest on our boychik Efraim Diveroli and the ambassador and the coverrup etc.

The day after the November meeting, the embassy’s regional security officer, Patrick Leonard, wrote an assistant an e-mail message obtained by the committee: “NY Times just arrived today and might be doing a story on this and it might get ugly. Ambassador is very concerned about the case.”
When The Times published its article on March 27, it was quickly forwarded to embassy officials. In an e-mail message to several embassy officials, Mr. Leonard said that the article focused on the arms company’s dealings. “No mention of Embassy involvement — thank God!”

MEGAN: HA! Wow, dude, way to remember that email is forever.
MEGAN: I guess Efraim wasn't the only dumb one in that conspiracy.
MOE: Also: I don't know dick about dick, but HOWWWW again does the expanding influence of an Iranian-backed Shiite cleric who, by the way, isn't opposed to exploding his fellow Shiites by the dozen for the sake of stirring up hostility towards Sunnis = the troop surge is a success? Seriously, Megan? You know me, I don't know much about this stuff, and I never really did trust that David Brooks since he made up all those facts about how you couldn't find a $20 dinner in Franklin County etc., but seriously…
MEGAN: OMG THAT IS THE SAME DAVID BROOKS?
MOE: Um, earth to Megan??
MEGAN: My friend gave me that book for Christmas like 7, 8 years ago and it was soooo annoying I never read it.

MEGAN: Ok, sorry. Wow, that guy's more of an idiot than I thought.
MOE: Yeah the only good thing Brooks ever did to my recollection was this Slate "Breakfast Table" with Thomas Frank that I will dredge up sometime for old time's sake. We could role-play it on Crappy Hour, in fact, but I get to be Tom.
MEGAN: Man, why do I have to be the stupid one?
MOE: David Brooks wasn't as stupid then, maybe he was taking Adderall who knows.
MEGAN: I don't know, that book sort of made me want to gouge my eyes out (sorry, Ed).
MOE: But no on second thought I'd rather be Brooks because I think his writing style would be easier and more fun to emulate. I just have a hardon for Frank.
MOE: Bobos in Paradise?
MEGAN: Yes, it's literally sitting on my bookshelf right now, staring at me.

MEGAN: Ok, the back cover quotes are like a rogue's gallery: Christopher Buckley declares "The self-loathing yuppie is dead," which, obviously not because Brooks kept writing after this.
MOE: Oh shit, so this girl: just about plain looking enough that…okay but seriously dude, what's up with the jacket? Also, who fucking holds hands? Ah the mystery of that particular specimen of humanity. Which reminds me did you read that New York Magazine piece on how Bill Clinton's speeches were actually written on a more elementary reading level than Bush's? Well that wasn't what it was about exactly obviously it was about Obama but you get what I'm saying.

MEGAN: Aw, I hold hands. I like holding hands sometimes. It's better than talking sometimes, and you know I love talking.
MEGAN: The thing that's amazing about Bill Clinton is his ability to take a speech, like, 10 minutes before he gets it, read it, and then give it with the right tone and everything that it sounds like he just wrote it, but perfectly. I guess it would make a kind of sense that it would be relatively easy language, etc, because most people don't like when you use big words.
MOE: Haha Reagan didn't know the names of many of his speechwriters.... Poor Peggy and her XXXes... did you ever read how she never really got to say goodbye to Reagan in Political Fictions?? It's heartwrenching really. And speaking of …speaking, you ever read this presidential speech? I read it after reading a particularly impressive TR introduction to this book on, of all things, the Mongols. Right now however I'm a little too hungover to parse.
MOE: Oh shit, segue but Charlie Crist: comes off rather well in this Deborah Solomon interview, but why does he look like he raided Tim Russert's closet before the photoshoot?

MOE: Wait, that
MEGAN: Hrm, it seems like we might have wanted to pay attention to this part a little more carefully:

The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals.

MOE: Ah the beautiful and the lofty. Gotta bring back the lofty.
MEGAN: Well, we could just start by having some ideals, that would be good too.

MOE: Anyway The Man in The Arena was quoted by Richard Nixon in his resignation speech. Nixon who ushered in the end of the Meaningful Speech when he formally separated his speechwriting department from his policy analysis department, which sort of begs the question which department wrote his resignation but that, folks, doesn't appear to be on Wikipedia. Oh and Barack Obama referenced Man in the Arena when he brushed that dirt off his shoulder…

MEGAN: Well, speeches aren't about policy, they're about PR. That everyone before Nixon didn't know that was just their loss.
MOE: Well the point of the story was that style and substance are distinguished from one another to an unproductive degree these days in the political arena, which I would argue is actually the opposite of true these days, it's more like style is differentiated from "substance-esque style", but anyway sometimes a speech is just about sticking it to the haters and this is pretty awesome.

MOE: .

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.

MOE: Of course this speech is just one long scathing critique of the critics so maybe not that much has changed except that I didn't know "voluptuary" was a word.
MEGAN: Dude, and now I know why voluptuous is sort of insulting: "a person whose life is devoted to the pursuit and enjoyment of luxury and sensual pleasure." is the definition of that! So, like, if I've got curves, then it's all about luxury and sensual pleasure? Dammit, where's my luxury? Where's my sensual pleasure?
MOE: I sense a POST coming on!!! Dude, here's a good paragraph from that New York Mag story
MOE:

M
y relationship to Obama has been a complex cycle of enthusiasm canceled immediately by self-correcting cynical objections, canceled by self-correcting enthusiasm, canceled again by the cynicism, canceled by the enthusiasm. Is he really this good, I wonder constantly, or do we just need him to be? The speech that finally tipped my inner scale decisively toward belief was his least decorative: no refrain, little alliteration, no audience exploding at shouted catchphrases—just the man himself standing there solemnly, neutralizing the hysteria of a potentially career-killing scandal with the naked power of grown-up thought. With his race speech, Obama chose the riskiest path in American politics: to be conspicuously thoughtful. It would have been like Clinton, in 1998, giving a long contextualizing address to the nation about human sexuality, the international status of adultery, etc. It was one of the most encouraging political moments I’ve ever experienced.

MOE: OK now I really have to figure out what picture to use
MEGAN: Enjoy!

MOE: I gotta get coffee but apparently David Brooks does a 180 on Obama re the farm bill today
MEGAN: cool. i hate the farm bill
MOE: Well speak of the devil! Does David dig the 22-year-olds? Or do you think this young lady was applying for a job?
MEGAN: Do you, can you, apply for a job in white knee high boots? I mean, other than as an actual go-go dancer?
MOE: Kids today totes! She probably wanted to be his research assistant. Or maybe he was just encouraging her not to pursue the wrong way. So should we talk about Iran and Syria and North Korea…just how "serious" are these places anyway?
MOE: We should also maybe talk about oil.
MOE: I'm going to get coffee though I'm off my meds today.
MEGAN: The oil on my face from all the greasy fucking food I ate last night to make up for not eating all day (hello NY Jezzies!) or the black shit in the ground?
MOE: Vito Fossella abandoned his bid for re-election "in a bombshell announcement that brings the curtain down on one of the most storied careers in Staten Island political history," says the Staten Island Advance. They should enlist Method Man to run. I don't even think he has any secret love children.
MEGAN: "Storied career?" Dude, can we talk hyperbole? He wasn't even a Committee chairman. The only thing that's gonna be legendary about his career is how it ended, which is balls deep in his mistress with his illegitimate child in the other room and his wife and other kids sound asleep in New York.
8:35 AM
MOE: Yeah so I have coffee and my Acela ticket now and David Brooks is totally right, the Farm Bill is horseshit, and the only thing I would add to the statement "as the number of small, organized factions in a society grows, the political culture becomes more divisive, the economy becomes more rigid and the nation loses vitality" is that the organized factions don't have to be as small as agriculture. And speaking of which, $307 billion is an astonishing number.
MOE: The question is, I guess, whether McCain get Americans to see in agribusiness the same fatcatism they see in Countrywide Financial and Exxon and Jimmy Cayne.
8:45 AM
MEGAN: Well, I don't have coffee yet but if my nose does not deceive me, my friend whose house I'm at in NY has made me some for when I get done here and that's one of 100 reasons why he's awesome. Also, this farm bill is additionally a huge fuck you to the WTO and the developing countries that stymied progress in the Doha Round in order to achieve progress in terms of reduced subsidies. Fuck you, African nations. Fuck you Bangladesh. Kiss our collective asses, Brazil and Argentina. Enjoy that global food shortage thingie and that poverty thingie because we wanted more market access for our artificially cheap foodstuffs.
MOE: Hey, look, the EU is rethinking its own farm subsidies!Theirs are only $75 billion annually though. What if we proposed to just cut our bill down to Europe's level?
MEGAN: Actually, at the WTO, we wanted them to cut theirs more than we cut ours and vice versa. No, seriously.
MOE: That sounds like something we would do! And here's an unfortunate news analysis to which Drudge is linking that credits the increased use of ethanol to the breaking of our foreign oil addiction.
MEGAN: As though ethanol has to come from corn.
MOE: Total digression but GOP Senator Bob Corker rejected/denounced the Michelle Obama ads.
MEGAN: Same way he did the Harold Ford/white girl ads no doubt.
8:55 AM
MOE: Apparently ethanol consumes a third of the US corn output. Just one reason USDA economists are expecting a 5% increase in food prices this year…ugh, this topic is so obvious and boring though. Ethanol subsidies = BAD IDEA. There is just no good alternative case to be made there! While he tries to figure out how to articulate a plan for The Rest Of The World That Resents Us, just where is the harm in adopting the one position that happens to both be held by the Republican front runner and the world's poor??? I guess it's in alienating his Iowans. I wonder, though, how often something like "unwavering support for agribusiness welfare" came up during those caucuses.
9:05 AM
MOE: Especially when four out of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction!
MEGAN: Also, like, we could eliminate the ethanol tariff, which is really high and effectively keeps out ethanol imports from places like Brazil, where it is not made from corn.
MEGAN: We could also rejigger the current subsidies to reflect the chemical reality that one can make ethanol from things other than corn, and push investment in that direction rather than encouraging the construction of more corn-based ethanol facilities but, yeah, Obama's got to win Iowa, so...
MOE: Annoyingly, ethanol is nowhere to be mentioned in today's Bob Herbert "Let's Be Serious" column. But thanks for alerting us to this:

The Houston Chronicle did a long takeout on Sunday on the suicide in March 2007 of an Army recruiting sergeant, Nils Aron Andersson — just one day after his marriage to Carry Walton. Sgt. Andersson, 25, had spoken of the many horrors that he had encountered in Iraq and was deeply depressed. He shot himself while sitting in his pickup in a parking garage. Distraught, Ms. Walton bought a 9-millimeter handgun at a sporting goods store the next day and killed herself.

MEGAN: Hooray for a lack of a waiting period in Texas.
MOE: Before I try to summon the will to check out that uplifting story I'd like to draw attention to an obvious but important Page 1 story in the Journal about how the American auto industry's manipulation and systemic inflation of demand via aggressive rebating, employee discounts, predatory lending, large-scale offloading to employee fleets, over the past ten years has finally been deemed unsustainable! The American automakers who embraced waste as a business model for so long are now finally accepting that auto demand might never fall back to where it was…maybe because it was never really "demand" in the first place!
9:20 AM
MEGAN: Wait, but I liked 0% financing. Goddammit. Does it mention that what is also sustainable is negotiating with the UAW to determine production levels years in advance is also probably a bad idea? Because that's not exactly market forces, people.
MOE: Well right but market forces, at least the way we think of them, absolutely DO NOT GOVERN DEMAND in this country. It's one of my pet peeves. There's a very good Harper's reading this month further probing this.
9:25 AM
MEGAN: Well, but what are market forces and what is demand? I mean, they do to a degree, it's just not the absolute that our college professors and some on the ideological right think it is (or know it's not but try to tell us it is).
MOE: Right and the problem with the ideological left is that they just don't engage with the issue enough.
MEGAN: I think because it's too complex to really explain to people. I mean, hell, I TA'd economics in grad school for other grad students and getting them to understand microeconomics was like pulling teeth sometimes and they were all smart people. It was like this insane mental block for some of them to the point I truly wondered if I was, like, speaking German and not noticing or something.
9:30 AM
MOE: Well I don't even understand microeconomics. I think it's fucking stupid. Macro is where it's at.
MOE: hahah I being, of course, an authority on such matters.
MOE: I got a C
MEGAN: Micro is like a really simple way to start understanding how the stock market works at a very basic level. I assume you work up from there but I didn't because I wanted to get a real job. HAHAHAHA.
MOE: Hey here's Jonathan Chait saying we should ignore everything John McCain and Barack Obama say about foreign policy, which I'm sort of down for.
MOE: Did you happen to catch George Will on Sunday btw?
9:35 AM
MEGAN: I mean, why don't we just all accept that every policy proposal ever made by a candidate is prefaced by "In a perfect world, where I and I alone got to decide, we would do this...." and ends with "But it's not a perfect world, so what eventually happens will look nothing at all like this but it won't be my fault but vote for me because I had a good idea."
MOE: (Oh and speaking of economics not being a real job Floyd Norris slyly agrees with you:

According to the C.P.I. numbers, gasoline prices in April were 13.7 percent higher than the were in December. Or at least they were before the seasonal adjustments were factored in. With seasonal adjustments — the numbers that are prominently reported — gasoline prices were down 1.6 percent.
I have not troubled to try to figure out how this could be, but Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG, gathered data and constructed spreadsheets. He figures that the May number, seasonally adjusted, will be up 5 percent for the month. Presumably, those sounding comforting words about inflation now will have less to say then.
Only a Ph.D. in economics would think he needed to spend a couple of hours to prove that gasoline prices are not declining these days.

MEGAN: Dude, we get to "seasonally adjust" what things cost?
MOE: Well certain things always cost more in certain seasons and certain months are more consumptive than others so…I can hazard a guess as to why this was but the point was just that data ≠ reality in a lot of areas in economics, which is scary
MEGAN: Yeah, like everything other kind of reality, economics is just a subjective reality. Shadows on the wall, etc.
MOE: lol you ALWAYS FALL BACK ON THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
MOE: I'm on to you lady
MOE: You probably have a secret Nietzsche sig file of your own
MEGAN: Yes, but it's in the original m'fucking German.
9:45 AM
MEGAN: Because that's how I roll. Quoting dead white German guys. I'm sofa king cool.
MOE: I am bringing this back to George Will and baseball btw.

In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like — life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.

MEGAN: I love how George Will's theories on life are so similar to my own. He just forgot to add "never-ending" there at the end.
MOE:

When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.

MEGAN: Well, unless you get fired for Working While Black. Then it is actually not equality.
MOE: What I love is that it seems that Hillary's own staff would agree. Sexism: why, they don't blame it for sinking her campaign either! Indeed, because they are too busy blaming one another. But Geraldine Ferrarro's reality is different..
MEGAN: Geraldine Ferraro should be president of the society of women who are so damn angry that their candidate didn't win that they'll fuck over the rest of us out of spite.
MEGAN: Also, ahem, it seems like they're trying to blackmail the superdelegates and the remaining states and shit, which is not a good tactic.
MOE: Well that society shares a reality of its own. It's just not mine. Or George Will's. And any society that claims us and George Will as a member is not a particularly exclusive one
MEGAN: I mean, I'm happy to create my own reality, I just realize that I have to function in the collectively shared reality.
10:05 AM
MOE: And I'm out with this, because I didn't want it to go unnoticed:

Is Lebanon viable anymore?" he asked. "Is Lebanon really viable?"
"Frankly, 40 years of my life have been wasted. Fifteen years of civil war, 15 years of Syrian domination and now we've come to something worse," he said, growing angry. "I've lost 40 years of my life in this stupid country. It really is a stupid country. I have nothing good to say about it anymore. I'm disgusted by what's taken place."
He dragged on his cigar, as he sat in his stately villa in Zqaq al-Blatt, enveloped by a scourge of concrete cluttering the neighborhood. Light reflected faintly from stained-glass windows of red and blue, resting under graceful Levantine arches.
"I wish I was born in Syria. Or that I was born in Egypt. Can you imagine living in a country that has gone through 30 years of this? What kind of country is this?"
He shook his head, his anger giving way to dejection.
"There's something wrong here," he said, "something wrong."

• So, like, do you ever read the little box at the beginning of every issue of the Economist where it explains that the magazine was "first published in 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." I don't know why that came to mind today (it's been awhile since I, uh, tried to take part in that game!) but...
  
• Today 300 students at Washington University in St. Louis protested the school's baffling bestowal of an honorary degree on Phyllis Schlafly. [STL Today]
  
• About whom the best the local paper can say, "she's no Robert Mugabe." [STL Today]
  
• And who once, in words that surely could have inspired our president's insinuations before the Israel Knesset yesterday, said: "The delusion that America can be defended by treaties instead of by weapons is the most persistent and pernicious of all liberal fallacies." [TNR]
  
• And also said (just this week): "Feminists, if they get tired of a husband or if they want to fight over child custody, they can make an accusation of marital rape and they want that to be there, available to them." [Feministing]

• And yeah, uh, Mike Huckabee + National Rifle Association + incomprehensible Barack Obama assassination joke = "audience laughter." [DailyKos]
• Barack Obama tells David Brooks "there are rarely purely ideological movements out there. We can encourage actors to think in practical and not ideological terms. We can strengthen those elements that are making practical calculations." And David Brooks...rescinds his assertion that Obama is living in Chomskyland! [NYT]
• "Running as an incumbent, as the inevitable candidate, was probably our biggest mistake, particularly in a time when the country is really hungry for change." That and like 76 other reasons the Clinton campaign was a failure, by the Clinton campaign staff. [TNR]

MOE: so tell me what happened at these famous debates. i'm barely capable of holding up my head.
MEGAN: Dude, I am SO AWAKE this morning because when I got up slightly hungover and walked into my bathroom, I was greeted by my apartment's official harbinger of warm weather: the single cockroach that each year finds its way into my apartment.
MOE: oh GOD boric acid boric acid eeek gross i'm sorry
MEGAN: Yeah, 6 months ago I sprayed every inch of the bathroom with some terribly carcinogenic anti-bug thing, so it was only half alive. It nonetheless scared the crap out of me.
However, I have to say, that carcinogenic stuff is only supposed to last 6 months so hooray cancer! and buh-bye roaches.
Anyway, so, the debates. If you actually wanted to see them talk about their differences on issues, you probably should've just re-watched the Ohio one.
MOE: The booooing thing sounds kind of historic
MEGAN: You mean, when the audience booed the commercial break?
MOE: This thing says they booed charlie gibson.
MEGAN: Because he sucked. And because he lost the coin toss to Snuffleupaugus and kept having to do the bumper to commercial.
MOE: Fox News doesn't seem to have a verdict on who "won"
MEGAN: Fox News is the only one, then. The papers and MSNBC have awarded it to Hillary because ABC grilled Obama more or something. I think it's just because he stuck with the whole "the American people are tired of this kid of politics" theme and didn't sic her when offered the opportunity on a platter and Hilary, like me, tends to dig right into some bloody, rare meat served up on a platter.
MOE: Tom Shales called the two of them "despicable"
which is kinda cool.
MEGAN: Aw, Snuffleupaugus wasn't as bad as "despicable" would suggest. I'm sure he didn't write his own questions.
MOE: I got some kind of confused emails and text messages throughout...such as THIS DEBATE IS THE MOST RIDICULOUS THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. YOU CANNOT 'BELIEVE' THE QUESTIONS STEPHANOPOULOUS AND CHARLIE GIBSON ARE ASKING. I AM ASHAMED AT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. PLEASE BLOG THIS IN YOUR CRAPPY HOUR - I'M SURE ALL THE BLOGS WILL BE DISCUSSING IT ALL NIGHT. IT'S A DISGRACE.
and "ummmm, is this thing as big a waste of time as it is for the candidates as it is for me?" etc etc
This is the most
hilarious recap though.
MEGAN: I have to say, I drank last night so it wasn't a total waste of time. A lovely French red.
MOE:

If Hillary Clinton had not gone into politics it is possible to imagine her as a brilliant actor, whose Lady Macbeth would come to be seen as definitive....He looked as cool as a cucumber: a highly alert cucumber, but not one which was frightened of being sliced up and turned into sandwiches.

The boyish Stephanopoulos, who has done wonders with the network's Sunday morning hour, "This Week" (as, indeed, has Gibson with the nightly "World News"), looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky
and slimy. He came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist. That was "40 years ago, when I was 8 years old," Obama said with exasperation.