Paul Krugman

Once again, the right is up in arms, yelling that the Liberal Media is conspiring to distort coverage and silence opposing views so that their chosen candidate might claim the White House. Several specific developments account for the current clamoring.

One is the presidential-level press coverage of Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East, where he’s been accompanied by all three network news anchors and many of the most prominent television and print correspondents. John McCain, meanwhile, has taken many similar excursions but never received remotely comparable coverage. And this week in particular, McCain seems sort of like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – left by himself while everyone else heads overseas.  read more »

Care for a bitter draught of economic realism to start off your summer weekend?

In his column in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman predicts that the housing market won't begin to emerge from its current slump until at least 2011, and that's because that market will keep slumping for a while. Waiting for a bubble to deflate is the opposite of popping a water balloon -- it takes a while.

And the overall economy? That won't begin its repair until 2010 or later:

It’s true that some prognosticators still expect a “V-shaped” recovery in which the economy springs back rapidly from its slump.  read more »

• 5 comments

Paul Krugman in The New York Times this morning on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

[T]he storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it’s already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won’t take down the economy.

Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.

Still:

... Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman brings his considerable knowledge to bear on all things from the economy to intellectual property to the elections in his twice-weekly columns. But on his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Mr. Krugman also plays media critic for his own paper.

In an impassioned post titled "On Not Knowing Who," Mr. Krugman scolds his colleague Sarah Lyall for writing the following bit about British TV series Dr. Who:

The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices.

"No, no, no!" Mr. Krugman scolds. "The TARDIS looks like a police box." (TARDIS stands for "Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space.") He even provides a Wikipedia entry to back up his claim.

 

Paul Krugman just put up a post that's a pointed rebuttal to a statement made by Nicholas Kristof in a blog post of his own today.

Kristof argues that one of the reasons the media snoozed on the pre-invasion Iraq story is because Democrats didn't really attack Republicans on it. Without a fight in Congress, it's a tough story for the media to comprehend.  read more »

Today, Barack Obama decided to meet with an Amtrak worker and talk about expanding and improving rail service. The timing is not an accident.

He is alone among the presidential candidates in not advocating a cut in gas taxes over the summer, a stance for which he received an extremely rare bit of (conditional) praise from Paul Krugman, but for which he was attacked by his opponents.  read more »

One of the strange subplots to the Democratic primary race has been the ongoing feud between the Obama campaign and liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman has argued that Sen. Obama's healthcare plan is too incremental, and more generally, that the senator's intention of working with Republicans and their allies, rather than taking them on, is naive and doomed to failure.

But could there be a thaw in the relationship? A few days ago, Sen. Obama told Tim Russert that his healthcare plan might involve a penalty for those who didn't get insurance, in order to deter the problem of free-riders and get closer to universality -- something Mr. Krugman had been calling for. In response, the Times-man sounded optimistic.  read more »

Two decades after he left office, too many Democrats still refuse to face up to the very simple—but powerful—reasons why their clocks were so thoroughly cleaned by Reagan.  read more »

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus gets all bloggy in her column today, quoting the Times' Paul Krugman disparaging those who argue that Social Security faces a serious financing problem, then lining up passages written by Mr. Krugman earlier this decade in which he seems to agree that it does.

The attack comes on the heels of Mr. Krugman's spat with fellow Times columnist David Brooks over Reagan and race, in which, in apparent observance of an unspoken Times rule, each delicately avoided naming the other. So it'll be interesting to see whether Mr. Krugman responds to Ms. Marcus, and, if so, whether the rule seems to work any differently when the other columnist writes for a different paper.  read more »

The battle over Reagan and race that had been playing out recently on the New York Times op-ed page appeared to have subsided by the end of last week.  But it received new life over the weekend when Reagan biographer Lou Cannon contributed a guest op-ed asserting that "Ronald Reagan was not a racist." 

Today, Paul Krugman responds, arguing, as he has before, that Reagan used racist appeals for political benefit.  Referring to Mr. Cannon and Times columnist David Brooks, he notes: "Reagan's defenders protest furiously that he wasn't personally bigoted. So what? We're talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant."

 read more »

The recent Brooks vs. Krugman (with an assist from Herbert) smackdown on the New York Times op-ed page has left a lot of people wondering: Why aren't Times columnists allowed to attack each other by name?  After all, doing so would make these arguments a lot easier for readers to follow.

Well it turns out that, as near as anyone can tell, they are allowed. So why don't they?  We've put in queries to Messrs. Brooks and Krugman, as well as Times op-ed page editor Andy Rosenthal, and we'll let you know what we find out.

Fine writers and close friends gathered Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the passions and the prescience of Molly Ivins.  read more »

I thought Lamont won, but then I'm crazed about Iraq. My wife and Imus both said that Lieberman won. He seemed far more rounded as a person. Imus called Lamont a pencil-neck.

But if Lieberman won, he damaged himself among the engaged, like myself. As Howard Fineman of Newsweek said on Imus, Lieberman seemed angry and rattled. He's in real trouble, and knows it.

Fineman also made a revealing statement: Lieberman had shown "courage" in voting for the Iraq war. This is the conventional wisdom now in Washington, where as Paul Krugman said so beautifully, To be credible on national security, you have to have been wrong about Iraq.

Why is it the conventional wisdom? Because all the columnists were for this war and they're still covering their asses now that even blockheads are questioning their judgment. As Fineman said in his role as a cheerleader in 2003 (per FAIR): "We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back." Well, I remember disunity. I remember people saying, Not in my name.

Courage wasn't going along with a foolish idea that would alienate the Arab world and turn Iraq into a terrorist-breeding hellhole, it was opposing it. Ned Lamont's riding that wave.

Aspiring publicists take heed! Dave Platter proves that the "real-estate bubble" as a meaningful term has not only taken the summer off, but is heading for extinction.

It seems like only early June when we were discussing something called "the iron bubble" (subscription required) as a means of deflating some of the senseless bubble-talk about the New York market.

So I guess we're all done talking about the bubble, right? Wrong! The ever-concerned Paul Krugman had this to say only yesterday:

"Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong."  read more »

The professor's lecture (er, column) also included some new terms reporters can overuse this fall: "zoned zone," "flatland," and "the hissing sound."

Hiiiisssssssss. -Michael Calderone

Harold Evans and Tina Brown are, famously, editors.  read more »

The Roaring Nineties , by Joseph E. Stiglitz. W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $25.95.  read more »

On a fine summer evening a couple of years ago, my wife and I gave into nostalgia and paid a visit t  read more »

In Hollywood, the screenwriter William Goldman has notoriously remarked, nobody knows anything.Anoth  read more »

For those of a certain age-say, over 55- postmodern life is like living in an earthquake zone.  read more »