The temptation of stupid

Updated 3/9/15

Robert Walker in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), via lifeshouldbemorelikeamovie.

If you were sure David Brooks ("The Temptation of Hillary") would be supporting Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, I have to tell you that's probably not inevitable. He totally hasn't endorsed her yet. He's a little concerned that her economic views might not be sound, although he doesn't know what they are, but

it was always likely that she would move left as the primary season approached. It’s now becoming clearer how she might do it. She might make a shift from what you might call human capital progressivism to redistributionist progressivism.

I'll tell you the truth, I don't believe I would call anything "human capital progressivism". What is it when it's at home?

Reformiconostasis

Updated 2/17

St. Ilija's Macedonian Orthodox church in Melbourne. Photos by Serendipity.

David Brooks is concerned about capitalism:

Capitalism is not necessarily self-regulating, as we learned during the financial crisis.

No way, really? Who could have predicted that?

Brooksy's got an actual mission to accomplish today, putting some lipstick on the pig deposited in our nation's bookstores by Senator Rubio, a campaign book under the title American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, which came out in January with Sentinel (Penguin's fascist imprint, publishers of the bestsellers of Donald Rumsfeld, Mike Huckabee, and Feminists Say the Darnedest Things by Mike Adams). He doesn't actually link to any way of seeing it, I assume because he'd rather you didn't look, and just take his word for it that it's a very serious piece of thoughtfulness; because it only takes a glance to see its purely promotional character:

Amid Summers' night mare *groan*

Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers at a meeting with credit card executives, April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday!) 2009. The person to whom the other guys are paying such concentrated attention is President Obama. Via the reaction.

Jim White, one of the faithful correspondents at Emptywheel, knows far more about practically everything that interests him than most anybody you'll ever see on television, to say nothing of lowly me and my Google, but I fell into a disagreement with him in the democracy of the Twitter.

@JimWhiteGNV @emptywheel But he might have been listening to the people. Or even be one himself. Ever hear him say he has a crush on...
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 16, 2013