Michael B. Duff

Mr. Miller isn't the only Congressional staffer making such stock bets. At least 72 aides on both sides of the aisle traded shares of companies that their bosses help oversee, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of more than 3,000 disclosure forms covering trading activity by Capitol Hill staffers for 2008 and 2009.

Add to that the nearly infinite possibilities for corruption when one group of private citizens (i.e. big banks) gets concrete info about government stimulus before others, and QE2 has the potential to be a fiasco of oligarchical manipulation, the worst example possible both of government meddling in the market and of corporate cronyism and regulatory capture. It should be a huge political issue for both the left and the right, and yet it is not an issue at all outside of Wall Street, where there are few objections to the impending arrival of this new rush of money – and what few objections there are seem mostly to be intellectual and theoretical.

Mr. Soros, a champion of liberal causes, has been directing his money to groups that work on health care and the environment, rather than electoral politics. Asked if the prospect of Republican control of one or both houses of Congress concerned him, he said: “It does, because I think they are pushing the wrong policies, but I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”

I've decided to adopt a Nick Denton posting style and balance every political link with a story about Megan Fox.

Apparently Obama is attracting a more literate class of heckler. Also note that Bush had the presence of mind to DUCK. I was hoping the book would turn out to be a copy of the Constitution, but that's probably too much to hope for.

“Hypocrisy is the only modern sin,” he likes to say. {I think Nick Denton has read my favorite book.]

This is why libertarians will never change the world. They can't engage the real issues because they're too busy arguing stuff like this.

Do you see the card he palmed? Basically, the effect of letting the Bush cuts expire is so tiny that the only way to make it noticeable is to compound it over 30 years, which reduces the eventual payout of his writing assignment from $2,000 to $1,700.