Dylan Matthews, guesting at Ezra’s place, provides this handy dandy chart to track Jim Cramer’s predictions on the Dow: He concludes, Actually, I’ll give Cramer some props. With the small exceptions of Boeing, GM, and IBM, the market tends to do the reverse of what he anticipates. ...

Michael Spencer, a self-evowed evangelical Christian, predicts the end of his kind. We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious...

Matt Yglesias challenges Lisa Schiffren’s assertion that “The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most...

Via Taegan Goddard, I see that Harry Jaffe is proclaiming an age of fluff in the newspaper business. Today’s news is there is no news on the front page of today’s Washington Post. Not one of the six articles on  page A1 begins with a hard news lead that imparts real news to readers. Welcome to ...

Barry Ritholz has a depressing list of companies the were going gangbusters quite recently and are now damned near worthless.  A partial list: AIG (39 cents) Citigroup (98 cents) E*Trade (66 cents) Unisys (37 cents) Ford ($1.83) GM ($1.83) For those of us who don’t buy individual stocks, here...

Ross Douthat has discovered Barack Obama’s evil genius: What Obama does have, though, is an atmosphere of crisis and a massively-unpopular opposition party, which grants him an unparalleled political opportunity to pass whatever spending the Democratic Party likes, and damn the short-term cost...

Julian Sanchez and Jesse Walker draw a great connection that would never have occurred to me:  Joe Wurzelbacker as the Republican Cindy Sheehan. They’re at odds as to the relation. Julian: It’s hardly new to see political advocates whose non-ideological identities are as important to their ...

The juxtaposition of Andrew Sullivan’s post “A Nation Of Penny-Pinchers” and Eric Martin’s totally unrelated “Living on Spaghetti, Potatoes, Rice and Beans” in close proximity in my feed reader was rather amusing. The topics they deal with, ordinary Americans cutt...

In an era where everything is the worst somethingorantother since the Great Depression or some other time, I suppose retro comparisons are just in style.   I’ve seen several references of late to the Republicans being stuck in 1997 or 1993 or whathaveyou.  Hell, I’ve made them myself....

In my New Atlanticist piece “Euro Drops Ever So Slightly After Bailout Rejection,” I give a YahooNews headline writer a hard time for turning an insignificant change in the dollar-euro exchange rate into a commentary on Europe’s response to the financial crisis. Hilarity (or, at le...