Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

It’s a new Georgetown cocktail-party game: name the single stupidest piece to run in Fred Hiatt’s opinion pages this week. So many to choose from. After a week of colossal idiocies—for instance, running an editorial arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to a martyr of the Green Revolution in Iran, when the terms of the prize require the recipient to be alive—Gawker asks the obvious question: "Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails...." And David Broder doesn’t even get a mention! But maybe the question should be put differently. What did the reporters of the Post, who are plainly at the top of the profession, do to deserve such an embarrassing editorial page?

Atrios writes: "Journalists want me to care about quality journalism, and I do, if not necessarily the existing institutions and elite practitioners of it, but their failure to differentiate quality journalism from the partisan hacktitude of Fox News is one of the problems with their profession. I don't have any problem with ideological media, obviously, though ideological is different than partisan, but people in elite media should have a modest understanding of the role of the various players in their ecosystem. Maybe it's fine that Fox News is basically just an extension of the Republican party, what's not fine is all the people pretending that isn't the case." Ruth Marcus to the white courtesy telephone please...

Here is an interesting data point you may have missed: A study found that securitized mortgages were five times as likely to be delinquent as mortgages that were not resold to securitizers. Kinda makes you think that the banks that planned on keeping their mortgages had different lending standards than those that knew the paper would be off their hands soon. (Approximately one in eight homeowners have had their mortgages securitized). I do not recall the data source, but sub-prime mortgages are also much more likely to be securitized than prime mortgages are.

I think one of the most interesting moments of the presidential primary season came when the online Right and plenty of elite conservative commentators had a collective freakout about the possibility of Huckabee as their candidate. How exactly that squares with the Palin worship I don't quite understand, but keep that in mind as we watch the unfolding conservative movement crackup..

Oh my, Tapper has no idea how Fox News is different than ABC News, and he works there. Tapper can't tell what Fox News does differently that his own network. And Tapper was clearly irked that the White House had offered up an opinion that one of the Village's "sister organizations" wasn't professional. "Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?" Tapper demanded to know. (Hint: As a Beltway rule, Democratic White Houses are forbidden from calling out the press by name.)