Archive for March, 2008
I CAN UNDERSTAND the Fed’s desire to preempt a larger financial crisis by helping broker a deal between JPMorgan and Bear Stearns.
I can also muster a high degree of sympathy for the hapless Bear employees who had everything in Bear stock.
I can’t, however, fathom why Bear shareholders should be entitled to get a certain price for their shares. I just don’t get it. (Please, someone explain it to me.)
I’ve never used the following acronym before, but it seems fitting now:
WTF?
It is only a good idea to remove a murderous dictator if this results in, on net, fewer people being murdered. –Megan McArdle
Three songs into last night’s Idol and one thing was immediately clear: The back-to-back Beatles episodes were a bust. Most of the contestants offered feeble-to-embarrassing renditions of a bunch of timeless songs. Last night, even though there we some flops, it was easy to see that they were on more comfortable terrain.
Chikezie Cheesy.
David Archuleta Very Disney. And that’s not a compliment.
Syesha Mercado Muscular, bold performance, if not particularly earth-shattering.
Amanda Overmeyer I missed her. She brought a refreshing rebelliousness.
Michael Johns Awesome.
David Cook As much as I think it’s weird to do a cover of a cover (in this case a cover of Chris Cornell’s cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”) I will grudgingly admit that his performance was pretty great.
Brooke White Not so good. But 37 times better than her performance last week.
Carly Smithson Despite the weird finish, I thought she rocked it.
Jason Castro He’s a total bimbo, but I suppose that’s 90 percent of his charm. He chose a great Sting song but sullied it with his guitar playing.
Ramiele Malubay Can’t for the life of me remember anything about her performance …
Kristy Lee Cook As an anti-American, I thought this performance was a travesty. Just kidding. (About the anti-American part.)
Paula What on earth were your wearing on your hands?
Sometimes it feels like I work in an elementary school. I mean, come on. Is this not incredibly patronizing?
Another question: If I pick my nose when no one is looking, what does that say about my character?
Andrew Sullivan regrets his initial support of the Iraq invasion, says it was born of a “narrow moralism”:
I recall very clearly one night before the war began. I made myself write down the reasons for and against the war and realized that if there were question marks on both sides (the one point in favor I did not put a question mark over was the existence of stockpiles of WMD!), the deciding factor for me in the end was that I could never be ashamed of removing someone as evil as Saddam from power. I became enamored of my own morality and the righteousness of this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn’t really engaged in a truly serious moral argument. I saw war’s unknowable consequences far too glibly. [Emphasis added]
Roger Cohen in the Times:
I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can.