And you are here why?

via The New York Press Matt Taibbi: Flathead: The Peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman Flathead : I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meantbut one had to assume the worst "It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing. It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called The World Is Flat. It didn't matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme o...

Will someone please make him stop? Do you think he might just go away if we ignore him? Or maybe we can pay him to leave? I've said this before , but its worth repeating - the dude just uses  pretty damn much any random factoid that he encounters, whether true or false, as ballast for whatever bullshit point he is trying to make. All the time. Every time. Exhibit A - his latest column , where he is trying to draw some sort of equivalence between India, China, and Egypt. He could have gone with a Standard Freidmanism ™ something like " The shared history of these countries dates back to the river-valley civilizations 25,000 years ago " or some such bullshit. But nooo, he goes one better, and basically makes something up out of whole cloth ( emphasis mine) India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society, bubbling with elections and associations at every level. China has a muscular central government but a weak civil society, yet one ...

The Mustache of Understanding wants Bloomberg to run for president . Ok. Fine.  I can get behind that for a bunch of reasons (and can also oppose it, but that ain't the point). But then he comes up with the following Mustache Moment   I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City You I know, and I know that Acela sucketh most profoundly.  But, amongst the suckocity, the one thing that you can't blame Amtrak for is the cellphone reception.  Matt Yglesias explains it best I've also been annoyed by this, but it's very unclear to me what the political system can do to remedy it. For starters, Amtrak passes through a number of tunnels on this route. Another thing you might notice is that mobile service is generally better if you travel on the cheaper Northeast Regional rather th...