Bezos Trades Up

We've deconstructed Ezra Klein here a few times, mostly because he has infected Bloomberg, which I stare at all day long.  I early concluded that Ezra was a mediocrity and I was bewildered at his following and vaunted status as a commentator.  The Washington Post could have done the whole "addition by subtraction thing" in getting rid of Klein but new owner Jeff Bezos appears to have done better than that, which one would expect from a bazillionaire.  David Catron outlines the trade.

But Bezos is no dummy. He didn’t earn enough money to buy one of the country’s most respected publications by making dumb decisions. Interestingly, on the same day that Klein’s departure was confirmed, the Post also announced a partnership with The Volokh Conspiracy. Eugene Volokh and his co-conspirators have been “lawblogging” since Klein was in high school, and enjoy a vast national readership. All of which suggests that, rather than committing a blunder, Bezos has traded up.

Only 117 more trades like this and the MSM might be looking at having a future.

400 Economists (incl. 5 Nobelists) Support Romney's Economic Program

Here (h/t Mark Perry).  I case you were wondering, Krugman is not among the 5 Nobelists.  Check it out, pretty powerful stuff.

We enthusiastically endorse Governor Mitt Romney’s economic plan to create jobs and restore economic growth while returning America to its tradition of economic freedom. The plan is based on proven principles: a more contained and less intrusive federal government, a greater reliance on the private sector, a broad expansion of opportunity without government favors for special interests, and respect for the rule of law including the decision-making authority of states and localities.
Applying these principles, Governor Romney would:

• Reduce marginal tax rates on business and wage incomes and broaden the tax base to increase investment, jobs, and living standards.
• End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.
• Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.
• Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.
• Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.
• Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.

In stark contrast, President Obama has failed to advance policies that promote economic and job growth, focusing instead on increasing the size and scope of the federal government, which increases the debt, requires large tax increases, and burdens business with many new financial and health care regulations. The result is an anemic economic recovery and high unemployment. His future plans are to double down on the failed policies, which will only prolong slow growth and high unemployment.
President Obama has:

• Relied on short-term “stimulus” programs, which provided little sustainable lift to the economy, and enacted and proposed significant tax increases for all Americans.
• Offered no plan to reduce federal spending and stop the growth of the debt-to-GDP ratio.
• Failed to propose Social Security reform and offered a Medicare proposal that relies on a panel of bureaucrats to set prices, quantities, and qualities of healthcare services.
• Favored a large expansion of economic regulation across many sectors, with little regard for proper cost-benefit analysis and with a disturbing degree of favoritism toward special interests.
• Enacted health care legislation that centralizes health care decisions and increases the power of the federal bureaucracy to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on patients and doctors, and creates greater incentives for waste.
• Favored expansion of one-size-fits-all federal rulemaking, with an erosion of the ability of state and local governments to make decisions appropriate for their particular circumstances.

In sum, Governor Romney’s economic plan is far superior for creating economic growth and jobs than the actions and interventions President Obama has taken or plans to take in the future. This November, voters will make a fundamental choice between differing visions of America’s economic future.

And yet MSM doofi like Ezra Journolist Klein will still publish things like "Romney vs. the Economists".  Although I warn you not to go to Klein's Wonkblog, the obsessing over Paul Ryan is a bit nauseating.  Paul Ryan appears to be to Ezra Klein as Sarah/Trig Palin was to Andrew Sullivan.

Gays, Genes and Lefties Who Proclaim Fealty to Science

I thought lefties were into science and all.  Back to that in a minute.

Apparently there is a kerfuffle because Ezra Klein hired a gay guy who is not sufficiently or appropriately (can't tell, and don't want to) gay.  Deroy Murdock has some skinny.

“Judging from the reaction, you might have thought Ezra had hired Rick Santorum,” wrote columnist Andrew Sullivan. As Robert Stacy McCain details on The American Spectator’s website, Ambrosino has become a heretic for not echoing the liberal “gay = DNA” incantation. 

Why is this important?  Because it is.  Here is why.

The gay-rights movement advances the “born gay” hypothesis. If gays pop out of wombs that way, the argument goes, equality will cascade forth like Iguazú. If being gay is a choice, however, the public and politicians will respond: “Eeeeeeeeew, gross! Shut up and get back in the closet!” Bye-bye, gay marriage. Hello again, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Murdock points out a few reasons for gays to not want to toe that line, good points too, but this is what I want to know - how can homosexuality be genetic and evolution be true?  Except for the small number of homosexuals who procreate before fully embracing a homosexual lifestyle and those who conceive through modern fertility science, homosexuals do not pass down their geteric line.  All told, homosexuals certainly do not achieve replacement rate procreation.  If you believe in evolution, the "gay gene" would disappear over time.  So which is it?

Was That Trade Out of GOOG to AAPL Fair?

Bryan Preston tips me off to a lovely video where inexplicable media wonderboy Ezra Klein puts his daft brand of liberalism on display and gets whacked by Rick Santelli.

There is much that can be said about this, but suffice it for me point out that Klein is a new marquee voice in Bloomberg's editorial feature - Bloomberg Views. Yes, Bloomberg - a major brand in the world of finance - has hired to much fanfare a puerile naif to the ways of money and capital. Head-scratcher, that one. OK, not really.

Liberals Forget - The Constitution Keeps the Money Rolling In

All this hub-bub about the reading of the Constitution on the floor of the House of Representatives is fun to follow. The Powerline guys are all over it here and here, but the emerging view is that the left is pretty darn disdainful of the Constitution. Yeah, I know, shocker. I would warn those on the left, however, not to be so hostile to the Constitution for no other reason than that it is the only thing enabling the funding of even the most basic liberal vision. Many citizens, myself included, view the Constitution as the only basis for our government's legitimacy, thus without it there is no legitimacy and nobody pays taxes to an illegitimate government. Got that? No Constitution, no taxes. You'll have to come and collect, and that will exceedingly difficult. That's the political science conundrum that all you Constitution-haters face. But that's not all. On a raw note of practicality, those who base legitimacy in the Constitution own more guns than those who don't, so I'd start lovin' that 100 year old (so Ezra tells me) document or start thinking about how you're gonna gain the firepower advantage.

The Guy Who Shopped Around for Hernia Surgery

Here is the opening thought in a Ezra Klein column that I had to read so that you don't have to, dear reader.

 Health care and education pose the same basic threat to the economy: How do you keep costs down for a product that consumers must purchase? Saying “no,” after all, is how consumers typically restrain costs. If Best Buy Co. wants to charge you too much for a television, you can walk out. You might want a television, but you don’t actually need one. That gives you the upper hand. When push comes to shove, producers need to meet the demands of consumers. But you can’t walk out on medical care for your spouse or education for your child.

There is so much wrong here that I could blog all day about it, but I'll just tackle this one small piece. Klein is overtly wrong.  Actually, you can walk out, and it just so happens that the WSJ carries an op-ed today that recounts the story of someone who did just that, literally just walked out, and got the needed medical care at a fraction of the original proposed cost.  This could be replicated on a massive scale to drive down the cost of healthcare across the board.  But that would require unshackling consumers and providers to contract together, and that would make the central planners and the noblesse oblige left go bonkers.

I See Now Wherefore Hate Is Bred

Liberals are supposed to be smart, or so they tell us, but then they put on display for all the world to see monumental foolishness like, say, Ezra Klein's ruminating that a home foreclosure process could have spurred Faisal Shahzad to want to blow-up Times Square. (If you really think this you are as dumb as dirt, if want the world to know that you think this, well, you are setting new standards in dumb.) Let's put aside that Shahzad stated he was angry over the US's war on terror. Let's forget for a moment that he trained in bomb-making in Pakistan, known to the be the worldwide nexus of radical Islamist movements, where jihad against the West is fomented and plotted. Let's leave all that be. Let's look at what this man lost that drove him to the brink of homicidal madness. Behold the castle that was ripped so heartlessly from this striving American middle-class king. Just gaze at the quintessential American Dream shattered over the bloated wallet of some fat cat banker.













How heartless a society do we live in that we would tear asunder a man's hopes and dreams of simply setting down on his fold up chair at his empty fiberboard desk to take in the day's events before he retired for the night on his air mattress surrounded by the edifying minimalism of his stark white walls. Cruelty thy name is America! Can you not feel the rage boiling up within you now! You feel it don't you!!! MURDER IS TOO GOOD A FATE FOR THESE DESPICABLE CAPITALIST PIGS!!!!!!!

"Journolist" Has New Name

It can now be unveiled..."Journolist" is now called...Bloomberg News!

You would think that organizing an overtly partisan cabal of journalists and academics for the sole purpose of trying to get candidate Barack Obama elected would taint one's standing in the journalism profession - maybe not enough to get you fired in this day and age, but at least enough to keep you from getting additional career opportunities. You would think, but you would be wrong. Not with Al Hunt running Bloomberg News. As if Al didn't have enough lefty yo-yos on the roster, he's launched something called Bloomberg View to jam more lefty drivel down the throats of his captive financial professional audience; and Ezra Klein - of Journolist infamy - appears to be one of the marquee hires (along with a host of Al Gore acolytes and a castoff from that magazine that sold for $1).

I almost couldn't bring myself to read Klein's first column, wot with permanent scarring from the Thomas Frank/WSJ episode. But one has to try new things, even if one is 99.99% sure it's the same old thing. Well, I didn't get three short, taut sentences into it before I was hit with "He’s worried that [government] doesn’t fail often enough." What?!?!??! Government doesn't fail enough!? Off the top of my head, in 2.76 nanoseconds...from NYC's disgustingly botched, corrupt whizbang employee payment system, to Fannie Mae, to the DOJ's Mexican gun-running scandal, to Amtrak, to the British healthcare system, to everything goddamm thing that government touches - it doesn't fail enough!?!?!??!?!? Government fails at the small stuff, the medium stuff, the big stuff, and the super-sized jumbo stuff. What is this yahoo talking about?? Anyway, after I picked myself up off the floor, I completed reading the article and it is a mostly forgettable soup of ignorance of healthcare economics and naive cheerleading for ObamaCare, which I guess is the mission. Al Hunt has his eyes on the 2012 election and is looking to flood the zone with this drivel as he is wont to do.

More Media Crap About Hedge Funds

Good God.  The MSM's ongoing antipathy towards hedge funds is ... ongoing.

Every few months or so, the highly underpaid geniuses in the media business feel the need to tell you that the people in the hedge fund business are highly overpaid mediocrities.  Reductive Freudian penis imagery is quite useful in this regard.

OK, we get it.  A predominantly white-male group is scamming the public and garnering unto themselves undue influence and power that is both unearned and pernicious.

(Incidentally, I could say the same about the media.  It's mostly a bunch of weaselly white guys too.  They talk a big game about 'speaking truth to power' yadayadayada, but it's mostly a sham, they're just propaganda artists with bylines.  Same dichotomy - big honkin' Johnson in terms of their view of themselves versus flaccid Irishness in reality...Ezra Klein, I talking about YOU!)

Anyway, it never stops.  Here is the latest from The Journolist Crew at Bloomberg View.  There are all the usual things wrong with this as the umpteen previous version of this EXACT SAME article, which have been addressed over and over.  But the fatal flaw is right there, blaring in the title.

"Hedge Funds Won't Make You Rich"

I'm not sure who makes that claim.  In fact, when I started my hedge fund many years ago, my principal financial backer took me aside and gave me, in his words, the one piece of advice I'd need to run my hedge fund.  "Remember," he said, "you are not in the get rich business, you are in the stay rich business."  In other words, the type of clients I'd have were more interested in preservation of capital than return on capital. There may be some that quibble, but in over a decade I have found that those with staying power and a rock-solid reputation in this industry hue to that view of their role.  I have NEVER heard of a hedge fund marketing pitch by anyone other than a scamming scheister that says, "you will get rich investing in my fund."  So, we are talking about a straw man here.

Then there is the classic lefty argument for things that they don't like and can't come to terms with - the players don't understand their own interests.  This is the Thomas Frank/What's Wrong with Kansas argument.  We have to ignore the fact that people choose over and over again a certain alternative, because, well, they're stupid.  Even though ALOT of very rich and putatively savvy people and institutions invest alot of money in hedge funds, they clearly don't understand what is in their best interests and must be wrong.  Ugh.  Just Ugh.

UPDATE:  Here is an intelligent rebuttal by Matt Levine of Bloomberg News that says many of the same things that I said, citing a recent Citibank survey of the hedge fund industry.

Gotta Be Coming...Bloomberg News Is Easy Touch for Media Matters

The Daily Caller says they have alot more on Media Matters jamming propaganda into the MSM. Here is a pretty easy speculation - they will finger several names at the Obama Re-election Satellite Office otherwise known as Bloomberg News (the King Daddy of "Unexpectedly"!). After all, we know Ryan Donmoyer was a proud member of JournoList and, of course, propaganda guru in chief Ezra Klein is now at...wait for it...Bloomberg News. Wait for it.