Congratulations to Paul Krugman on his Nobel Prize!

Our heartiest congrats to economist Paul Krugman for his newly-announced win of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences! In addition to his well-deserved win, Krugman is also a professor of Economics at Princeton University and the mind behind one of our favorite blogs, The Conscience of a Liberal, which he writes for The New York Times.

In addition to all that, he's a frequent and very welcome guest expert on television, and never fails to give brilliant observations while at the same time displaying a charming wry sense of humor that makes you laugh even as he's leading you unerringly to facing the grim truth of things. To prove my point, here are a couple of his appearances, first on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, and then in a clip which we've featured before, from HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, from about three weeks ago. Of course, he's a little more amusing on Maher's show, but he has such an approachable demeanor no matter what, and is able to talk about economics in a way that assures us that this guy knows his stuff, and how. He's great:






Let's see. A brilliant guy, the perfect choice, just won something important and world-shaking. Might this be a good sign for us? I'm crossing my fingers.


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Bill Maher & Guests on Sarah Palin This Past Friday

On the last Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, The Simpsons' writer Dana Gould is brilliant and hilarious, Rep. Maxine Walters is wise, and Wall Street Journal reporter Stephen Moore is a Republican apologist who's obviously made up his mind to support whatever his Party puts out there, even validating and making excuses for Sarah Palin. It's shocking to watch:



"Why are feminists not behind Sarah Palin?" the besotted WSJ writer asks, surely not seriously. I would venture to put forth a generalization, that most/all feminists are educated, serious, pro-choice, pro-sex education, pro-rape-kit reimbursal, and all the other things that Palin is not. Feminists tend not to be quite so crazy about women who use their feminine "charms" -- if you find winks and golly gee vacant blinks fetching -- empty platitudes and innuendos to get ahead, instead of having the right stuff and triumphing through achievement.

When I hear a guy like Moore babbling on about Palin -- "She'll be the first Woman President!" -- you want to shake him and say "Is that all you think this country deserves?" Is this whole thing a joke to people like him? I thought he was a pompous jackass.

Here's my own take on that supposed "sex appeal" angle for Palin:

In what mythical world does a right-wing, gun-loving, bible-thumping redneck man want to have some woman telling him what to do? Of course, she's one of the few women around who hates women as much as these fellers do, deep down. I can hear them now: "Teach those rape victims what for, how dare they get free po-lice tests...we wuz only having a good time..fuck her, anyway." "Choice? I don't think so. When a gal gets pregnant, tough shit. We love babies and all...right, sure we do, whatever...but the fact that we can fuck up a woman's life and she doesn't get a say, that's what we REALLY like about being pro-life."

I believe that there must have been some magical right-wing email going around -- and we know that's where these nutjobs get all their information and marching orders; you know, that's where they found out that Obama is an Arab, and is a Muslim, and is a terrorist, and so forth. Well, I think one of those emails went around saying something like this:

"SARAH PALIN WILL GIVE YOU A BLOW JOB IF YOU VOTE FOR HER"

If the Sarah Palin/John McCain ticket wins, Sarah Palin is going to make a personal visit to every right-wing man who only voted for her because he thought she was some hot -- and give him a blow job as a thank you for electing her President...er...Vice-President.

Please pass this email to all your friends, colleagues and menfolk to encourage them to vote for our Sarah, because you know normally with a mouthy bitch like her they'd rather smack her in the teeth, right? Bless you.


I just don't know what else to think.



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Parsing Palin's Persona

There's an amazing and 100% blood-chilling article on AlterNet by Jill Hussein about Sarah Palin's particular brand of personal ambition, and it's horrifying and undeniable. It's a corollary to Bill Maher's excellent rant from my previous post here, so be sure you watch that for yet another view on SP's disqualifications, which are many.

You will also want to listen to this excellent excerpt from Air America radio's Clout program hosted by Richard Greene. In this segment -- "Palin-tology" -- he explains the two sides of Sarah Palin. He's dead right about what Palin has been specifically programmed to do and say, and what that means to the United States and this presidential race. This show is from last Friday, the day after the Vice-Presidential debate.



Of course the overall choice is between Obama and McCain, but the presence of this woman on the Republican ticket has many implications and none of them can be ignored or underestimated.

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Great Post by Alec Baldwin on Huffington Post

Check out this excellent blog by Alec Baldwin reflecting on his appearance this past Friday on HBO's always entertaining and engaging Real Time with Bill Maher. Baldwin was excellent on the show, but gives great credit to co-guest Garry Shandling for the best line of the night. I wanted to hear more from Baldwin, frankly; he's strong and unsparing when he speaks and writes, and absolutely compelling. Smart, passionate, serious -- he really is somebody to be proud of as an example as an involved artist.

CNN's Christiane Amanpour was also a guest, and you don't get much smarter than she is, but I felt she was a little too supportive of Sarah Palin's symbolic place on a Presidential ticket, citing all the high-ranking women in other countries. All well and good, but that the U.S. has such a lightweight, obviously unqualified and cynically chosen -- to reflect and appeal to a specific radical slice of the demographic out there -- lady on the ticket doesn't say anything good about the state of the U.S. and what we'll settle for. Amanpour put forward that she felt she needed to defend the notion of her on the ticket, but liking the idea of having a woman on the ticket certainly doesn't mean that it should have been this woman, or just any woman. And that's just about what we've got in Sarah Palin. I just love it when somebody refers to her, boastfully, to boost her up, as the governor of the "biggest state in the nation." Since when do we measure qualifications by the square foot? Yikes.

I will leave you with Maher's "New Rules" segment, which starts out with a few assorted funny bits then seques into a cogent and frightening riff on Sarah Palin's extreme religious views. Maher makes it funny, but he's also dead-on and it's scary stuff.

There are quite a few clips from this week's Real Time with Bill Maher on YouTube right now, and the whole show repeats many times during the week, until the new show on Friday.

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"The Worst Thing I've Ever Seen": NY Times' Economy Guru Paul Krugman on the Financial Crisis from "Real Time with Bill Maher"

Take a look at this scary discussion about the current economic crisis from last night's edition of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Krugman is sage and also witty, and full of dire news for the country.



"We Really Need a Better Government Than We've Got." -- Paul Krugman

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