We have reached, perhaps, the last stage in the establishment’s view of the Tea Party movement. First ignored or snickered at, then demonized as the racist creature of shadowy billionaires, and most recently a movement which some Democratic candidates try to co-opt, the Tea Party has finally done the one thing that will cause it to be viewed with unalloyed respect by the powers of the status quo: it has raised an ungodly amount of money.

Want to know what it’s like to live life as a genius? All you have to do is go hang around with the stupidest, most incompetent people you know. Cringe at their stupid jokes, feel the frustration as they fumble even the easiest tasks and fail to grasp the simplest concepts. Being a genius must be like that, only everyday. Everyone is an idiot compared to them. They’re living Idiocracy.

… voters don’t want to hear any more about President Bush. The Democrats’ real problem, it seems to me, is that it is late in the day for them to start listening to the American people. If they had cared what voters think, they wouldn’t have passed the stimulus bill or the government medicine bill, wouldn’t have run up trillions in debt, wouldn’t have adjourned with tax increases looming for every tax-paying American. Nothing the Democrats can say or do now is likely to change the underlying dynamics of the election. Still, that doesn’t mean that Obama’s flailing for a theme is entirely wasted effort. The best the Democrats can do is to try to change the subject, and to some degree they have succeeded in that. Every minute a voter spends thinking about Karl Rove or the Chamber of Commerce is a minute he isn’t thinking about taxes, spending or the economy.

One wonders why this recession is lasting so long and unemployment stays so high. The government has done everything it could to delay the corrective market forces in a failed attempt to make things better. They have failed on all fronts and now fellow Democrats are even attacking the Obama Administration

As I have said many times, the Keynesian argument depends upon seeing factors of production as being homogeneous and having no particular special relationships. Everything from mine output to making of cotton candy is just one amorphous and homogeneous set of factors. This is not economic theory; it is a theory of convenience to justify the presence of government spending.

Bear in mind, that none of this foreclosure mess or for that matter the housing mess in general has anything remotely to do with the Free Market. Yves continually and erroneously blames the Free Market when the cause for this mess is a Failure of Regulation rather than a failure to Regulate.

The correct lesson to draw from the science isn’t that intuition is overrated, but simply that some plausible intuitions must be sacrificed to preserve other, even more plausible intuitions.

Who would you rather prepare your taxes? A professional tax return preparer with over a dozen years experience in preparing tax returns for taxpayers without incident. Or me, an attorney who has never so much as taken a law school class or continuing legal education course in tax law, and gave up on doing his own taxes last year once he started needing to itemize his deductions. You probably think you’d prefer the first option, but the IRS says you’re wrong.