Atrios is really a quite good blogger. I think a lot of people forget this, since he is like the weather, and older than dirt in blogging term. Hell, it wasn't even called blogging when I started reading him every day.
He does the smart thing, which is linking to other people's critiques of politics, instead of linking to the original outrage and blowing his top. He is by definition a traffic driver to other people's opinions. He also drive traffic to people he doesn't agree with if their explanation is interesting.
He also admits that sometimes he doesn't have an opinion. That sounds boring, but taken with the previous point he drives people to relevant conversations about things he has no opinion about. If he's not interested in it it doesn't mean it's not interesting to someone, thus, linkage.
Weblogs.com used to have a business model where they injected an adbar at the top of your free webpage. It was annoying to someone like me that runs AdBlock, and has run ad-stripping Squid servers in the past. It irritated me on principle enough(the webpage wouldn't load because it was waiting for the ad) that I "bought out"(pay $29 for the adbar to go away on a weblog page) Atrios' adbar.
Yeah, I'm internet old. And that was my contribution to the beginning of all this modern mess we live with today. Can't really call that a loss or win, but that's what happened back then.
It wasn't a housing bubble, it was a credit bubble.
Gather your own information, and you will come to the same conclusion.
Dean Baker reports on NPR reporting that "one investment bank had a contract with New Century, a leading issuer of subprime mortgages, that it would reject no more than 2.5 percent of its loans".
One of the first commenters asks about The Giant Pool of Money, the This American Life hour that nails this credit bubble issue down, easily. Not even hard. Seriously, go listen, the reporting is not hard and you will know what happened.
Not housing bubble, credit bubble. Get that part clear before you think you know what happened.
Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of Households
All Races: 1967 to 2006
Atrios points out it's too late for Republicans to distance themselves from George Bush, as a CPAC organizer throw Bush under the bus.
As another data point for the confluence of denial, Michelle Malkin was on Washington Journal this morning doing the same thing, claiming Bush wasn't a conservative.
Digby would be so proud of her.
So, the local paper reports a local factory is closing. The company is Baltimore Aircoil.
They say they might be offering some of the existing employees jobs at their other locations.
One of these locations is Madera, CA. The closing plant is in Paxton, IL, and my wife's first comment was that the people from Paxton were going to be surprised at the cost of living in California.
I agreed, but then checked myself. I didn't know where Madera was, so I started searching.
Hmm, smack dab in the center of the state, apparently.
So, how about housing? Here's 245 listings between $75K and $125K. It looks like ~60% of home sales in December in Madera were foreclosures.
Anything anyone would want?
4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2 car garage, built in 2006, for $89,900.
I think some of those people from Paxton, IL might be able to do OK in Madera, CA. Odd, but true.
I like Ezra Klein, he's a good wonk. And the Washington Post is almost certainly full of beans about whatever it's writing about, even Ezra's little foodie clique.
But the Post didn't name their group The Internet Food Association, did it?
The?
Internet Food(all of it, the internet and food, eh)?
Association. Me and my friends watching Top Chef is an association, hmm? I'm not watching Top Chef, by the way.
I kid. But it's not Basque, and let's just leave it at that.