Sarah Palin was widely if not nearly universally seen as a completely disaster in her run ins with the press.

The tiny amount of vocal followers who insisted that they were a majority were disproven when she and McCain were trounced in the polls.

Barack Obama is nearly-universally seen as having done extremely well with the press. Any equation of the two in this regard is simply absurd.

Insisting that all you meant was that "the press is evil" was a common thread is after the fact evasion. Plus, I don't think "the press is evil", I think that the White House press corps displayed some idiocy and shallowness last night. I think most here expressed similar sentiments.

Your facile equating of Palin and Obama, in any sense, was comically absurd. I don't mind debate here, I mind sensationalist idiocy masquerading as debate.

Bachmann seized on something because it sounded like "flag burning" to her, not because she understood the first thing about what Geithner said.

If anyone gets in the position of using another currency as the main one for the world, it will be because ours stopped being worth anything. The idea that anyone in the US could just legislate against that is absurdity in action.

AKA, Michelle Bachmann.

While there no doubt are some interesting things worth heeding in his article, there are also some rather typical conservative arguments that no one here is pointing out.

For example, you didn't quote this part:

Before running up further outsized budget deficits, should we not heed the markets that now see a 10 percent probability that the U.S. government will default on its sovereign debt in the next five years?

I think Paul Krugman would disagree.

Lachman's criticisms of the oligarchs and his admission that the US gave bad advice in the past are welcome, but his ideas for what to do instead sound in some places like the same old conservative cant as always.

Paul Krugman, who spent the past years criticizing the practices that led us to this crisis while Lachman spent his time promoting them at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that we're not spending enough to get out of this crisis, and cites history from the 1930s fairly convincingly to back that up. Lachman would seem to think the opposite, which is basically the conservative position at this point, heard everywhere from George Will to John Boehner.

I don't think our middle class is like what Russia had before the 1990s, there's no comparison. Our two-tiered society is a problem, but it's nothing like the tiers that the Russians had, and have.

I suppose a right wing economist waking up to the fact that two tiers is deadly for a society is a good thing, but he immediately jumps to the wrong conclusions as his idea for how to fix that, and in fact in some ways those ideas are exactly what got us in this mess.

I didn't say that his observations about the similarties were invalid.

In fact, I'm fairly sure I said exactly the opposite.

What I'm saying is, well I thought my last part summed it up:

I suppose a right wing economist waking up to the fact that two tiers is deadly for a society is a good thing, but he immediately jumps to the wrong conclusions as his idea for how to fix that, and in fact in some ways those ideas are exactly what got us in this mess.

The small, parenthetical line you included wouldn't seem much considering that you spent an entire column on his article, and only at that point even hinted that his solutions were pretty much the same as any other conservative out there. I thought that part deserved more attention.

Why? Because if we lavish attention on conservatives finally waking up to what got us in this mess (good) and don't point out that their proposed solutions would just get us in this mess again (not so good) -- doesn't it seem sort of obvious what's wrong with that omission? Does to me, anyway.

Oy.

I agree with everything you've said here except the idea that Thomas's revelation was unintentional, it seems to me he just openly admitted that he writes for the established order, to keep it in place just as it is.

I think the cognitive dissonance created by the fact that these types constantly protest the same idea while openly admitting it as we see here is just a fact of life these days.

John King can be "shocked, shocked!" to find that someone is questioning his independence from the political subjects he covers, and at the same time, often in the same paragraph, be proudly claiming that he's not some fringe extremist who wants to upset the status quo.

That's the stance of the current day mainstream "journalist": He's proud that he doesn't rock the boat, and furious that anyone would accuse him of doing so.

I just realized that last part may not be clear:

He's proud that he doesn't rock the boat, and furious that anyone would accuse him of not rocking the boat.