Quotes of the day

If your world view depends on believing everyone you disagree with is either corrupt or incompetent, you are not clever.  You are a fool.--Epicurean Dealmaker

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.--Dr. Seuss

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.--C.S. Lewis

[Kanye West] is unsatisfied with Miss Albania even though he's spent his entire career working to a place where he could have sex with Miss Albania. A woman whose only talent is being beautiful bores him because he wants a woman he can talk to and feel comfortable with, the way he felt around his mother. That he channels this into a song that vaguely suggests a desire to have sex with his mom is extremely Portnoy's Complaint of him. And then, of course, he sees himself in his mom's boyfriends. In the various boyfriends who mistreated his mother, men who lied to her when she was obviously smart enough to know when they were lying. And he wonders how he could have hated these men so much as a boy, only to turn out exactly like them.--Molly Lambert

Like Obama, Hoover was the child of a broken home with an unconventional background. He was far more widely traveled than most Americans in his day, and his time overseas made him a globalist in his thinking in many ways. His wife (Lou Henry Hoover) was unusually well educated and assertive — at a time when few women went to college, she graduated from coeducational Stanford with a degree in geology. Hoover was an unconventional candidate who came into office on a tidal wave of support. ... President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems. That’s beginning to sound a little like the current President’s predicament. ... Lincoln, Clinton, Carter, Hoover: that is a trajectory no President should want — nor will the country benefit from 18 more months of Presidential subsidence. One hopes the White House realizes just how much trouble it, and we, are in.--Walter Russell Mead

Krugman writes as if the volatility of stock prices alone disproves market efficiency, and believers in efficient marketers [sic] have just ignored it all these years. This is a canard that Krugman should know better than to pass on, no matter how rhetorically convenient. There is nothing about ‘efficiency’ that promises ‘stability’. Stable price growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency as it would imply easy profits.--John Cochrane

... we must stop telling foreign entrepreneurs to build their companies in other countries--Michael Bloomberg

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.--Noam Levey

... at the highest level, poker isn't even gambling at all. It's a gunfight, with both sides exactly equal in weaponry and numbers; over time, only strategy, courage, and execution separate winner from loser.--Brian Koppelman

[Meredith] Whitney has become known for exaggerating a bit in her predictions. That’s probably true this time, at least for the moment as localities scramble to balance their budgets and the worst of the debt crisis is still overseas.  But just as her calls for 100 muni defaults may be off the mark, so is the notion that all is well in the state of government debt.--Jeff Cox

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