Who's stupider at the NYT, Friedman or Krugman?

This is an epic race for the bottom.

First, Krugman continues to be an ever-more-rabid Clintonista. Over the weekend, he essentially accused FBI director James Comey of treason. No, really:

So Comey and Putin installed a crazy, vindictive can't-handle-the-truth person in the White House. Scary. pic.twitter.com/pr3WPT9HYH

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) November 27, 2016

Beyond the treason angle, Krugman is being trolled to the max by a man who's a classic troll.

This is also the same Krugman, Nobel winner in economics, who on Election Night blamed Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton's losing Florida, even though, in real time, Donald Trump's margin over Clinton was three times that of Stein's total votes.

But, Teapot Tommy, aka My Head is Flat Friedman, isn't going to surrender without a fight.

First, his latest book is stupid enough. Per Gizmodo, it also has one of the dumbest graphs of all time. It's so dumb that Matt Taibbi is running a contest for the best skewering of it. At left is my entry, which if you click the Gizmodo link, you will see directly plays off Friedman's original.

Can't put it much more clearly than that, can we?

All of this shows its no wonder that, when the New York Times, a decade or so ago, first proposed a paywall, Times Select, and limited it to columns and other semi-proprietary material, that the columnists bitched. They were afraid of finding out what the public thought they were actually worth.

Douthat hits new low on gay marriage

Here's the shorter Ross Douthat this Sunday: Increased yearnings for gay marriage have been part of the reason for the decline of straight marriage.

Now ol Rossty later says he's just talking about correlation, not causation.

Bullshit. His "just saying" tongue is clearly thrust in the side of his cheek.

Given that he's written two straight columns about gay marriage issues, linking to hardcore social conservative traditional marriage think tanks, and been blogging about it, this is clearly a pony he intends to keep riding for some time.

And, also, just on causation, it's a flat-out lie.

The divorce rate was actually higher in the pre-World War I era than in the 1950s, and I know there there was no push for gay marriage when Taft was president.

I mean, ol Rossty writes some craptacular columns at times, but it's clear that, on this issue, he's going to tell half-truths, lies by insinuation and more, all he can.

Maybe his gay colleague Frank Bruni will actually find some balls and kick Douthat in his. I highly doubt that, though.

===

That said, it's a craptacular Sunday at the NYT op-ed page in general. Teapot Tommy Friedman tells us that we should all be able to just create our own jobs. Bet that sells well at Davos and Aspen, eh?

Should the Times tighten its paywall further, to defeat NoScript or simliar workarounds, I'll be no more likely to buy an online subscription than I am now.

Teapot Tommy has a Warren Buffet bromance

Tom Friedman once again plummets to the depths of his political column inanity. About the only thing he could have done worse this time is actually mention Americans Elect, and I'm surprised he didn't, even though it's a dying dodo.

He says Dear Leader didn't use Buffett well enough. That's true enough. And trite and trivial enough, to boot.


But, from that, he leverages into an entire column that's yet another paean to the mythical inside-the-Beltway (plus NYC extension) "centrism," which ignores that Dear Leader is, with the stumbling exception of gay rights, a centrist.


If an Overton window exists in the GOP, it's because a parallel Overton window exists in the febrile minds of "pundits" like Teapot Tommy.


The Teapot Tommy who ignores that the reason the GOP didn't play ball with Obama is because he's Kumbaya. The Teapot Tommy who ignores that Obama created the Catfood Commission.


If Teapot Tommy wanted to write a good "wasted" column, he'd write one about the Peter Principle and how he's wasting good op-ed turf at the NYT.


That's ignoring the fact that Warren Buffett ain't such a centrist, either. Besides his pablum, how specific does he want to get as to HOW to have him pay more taxes than his secretary? When Buffett mentions limiting deductions for executive pay and raising the capital gains tax rate, then we'll know he's at least more serious than Teapot Tommy Friedman.

#Friedman needs to talk to #Kristof about #China

Teapot Tommy Friedman, aka "My Head is Flat," has never met a breathless story about the successes of globalization, especially in China, that he hasn't liked, embellished, spun into a column and loved to death.

Therefore, it's ... er ... "interesting" to note that he's said not a column-inch word about the recent news about corruption-laden, possibly  criminal Chinese Communist politico Bo Xilai.

That said, his op-ed partner, Nicholas Kristof, has no problem in so doing, and in spelling out what this really means, and what the likes of neocentrists like Friedman refuse to see, let alone accept: The Chinese bubble is bursting.

First, the corruption problem:

Even good people are on the take in China these days, because everybody else is. Chinese doctors take cash from patients’ families before surgery. Journalists take bribes to write articles. Principals take money to admit students. 

If this were about Mexico, Friedman would be all over it. But, it's China, so you hear the crickets on his column pages.

Second, as I said, Kristof notes that the bubble is bursting. Or, in some ways, it never expanded to include all of China:

The backdrop is the staggering wealth enjoyed by the elite. More than 300 million Chinese lack access to safe water, but one tycoon’s home I visited had an indoor basketball court, a movie theater and a pond with rare fish worth up to tens of thousands of dollars each.  

There's more, about the alleged money-laundering by Bo and his wife, and more. Kristof notes that reform voices are making themselves a little bit heard, but that's nothing new, either.

Zhao Ziyang was doing the same before Tiananmen Square in 1989, and his pains got him exiled from the government and under house arrest.

Contra neocentrists and neoliberals, capitalism of a sort can and will coexist with dictatorial government of a sort. Hell, it wasn't called "capitalism," but look at the Roman Empire.

That said, it will often become corrupt crony capitalism on a scale of the Koch Brothers' wettest of wet dreams.

And, despite Kristof's hopes, I doubt liberalization of Chinese politics, even within the Communist Party, will happen to any great degree in any time soon.

#Centrism - Teapot Tommy Friedman can't help himself again

Once again, Teapot Tommy is beating the drum for "centrism," and again, the particular presidential centrism of Americans Elect. (Sorry, no longer providing a link to a group of largely rich folks even more secretive than Republicans and Democrats.)

Teapot Tommy now has a man crush, or a political boy toy, to carry this party's standard: Michael Bloomberg.

And, the dual crush, on party and man, has so besotted Friedman, he says this:

Bloomberg doesn’t have to win to succeed — or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election and, most importantly, the course of the next administration, no matter who heads it. By running on important issues and offering sensible programs for addressing them — and showing that he had the support of the growing number of Americans who describe themselves as independents — he would compel the two candidates to gravitate toward some of his positions as Election Day neared.

How, other than the Peter Principle, did Friedman get his current, sweet gig? (And why does the NYT not wonder why it becomes less and less relevant?)

First, being "Miss Congeniality" in an election gives you no power to sway election dynamics. Second, when have a politician's election homestretch promises ever actually been honored?

I mean, if Friedman is too dumb to grasp even that, what was he doing in all those interviews before he got his op-ed gig?

Or, if he's too conniving to be truthful here, why is he, even by Punch Sulzberger's lax standards of Judy Miller and all, holding the spot he does?

The real answer? This is what passes for wisdom inside the Beltway/New York axis, and even more so, inside its incestuous mainstream media. As proof of that, Friedman quotes Peter Principle fellow grad Matt Miller of the Washington Kaplan Post:

“The right kind of independent candidate would explain that the real question on taxes, once the economy is back on track, is this: Given that taxes have to rise, how should we raise the revenue we need in ways that are best for the economy?” wrote the columnist Matt Miller in The Washington Post last week. “The answer would involve lower taxes on payrolls and corporate income, and higher taxes on dirty energy and consumption.” 

Yet, neither Miller nor Friedman can be bothered to explain details, no more than the mainstream parties they profess won't make the tough choices. Besides that, is there any guarantee Bloomberg will propose any real tax hikes? Let alone progressive ones?

And, yes, I feed the Peter Principle every time I write about Teapot Tommy. I usually don't even bother to read him, but, in this particular case, his blatherings are the symptoms of a larger disease. The same "centrism" led to the rise of neolib Democrats who are now too liberal for the likes of Teapot Tommy.

Friedman shills for 1970s GOP again, still, yet

Teapot Tommy, My Head is Flat, Tom Friedman continues to beat the drums for what could be little other than the 1970s GOP, if he wants a party halfway between today's GOP, which Paul Krugman rightly noted has the most conservative Congress since 1879, and today's centrist Democratic Party.

If that's what you want, fine. At least be honest about it, and be self-honest about how unlikely it is to happen, or to solve anything if it did.

Be honest about other things, too, including how Obama, at least, HAS put entitlements on the table, which is exactly one thing that scares real liberals about today's Democratic party.

Of course, Tom Friedman stumbles upon intellectual honesty like the proverbial stopped clock.

Friedman's #socialmedia is flat

Groupon and Zynga are "social media"? In the mind of Teapot Tommy Friedman, yes. (Probably in the mind of David Brooks and some of his boboes, too, but he didn't co-write the column.)

In the real world the rest of us inhabit, Mr. My Internet is Flat, Zynga is about online games, with access/links that can be found on Facebook ... and other sites. Groupon isn't media at all, except to the degree ads are considered part of media, and other than Groupon coupons being valuable or not depending on other users, there's nothing social about it.

That said, Teapot Tommy's real inaccuracies are in economics. Groupon has yet to make a dime; both it and Zynga, IIRC, have backed off IPOs. More on how "problematic" Groupon is, is here:

Groupon faces concerns about the viability of its daily deals business model. The novelty of online coupons is wearing off. Some merchants are complaining that they are losing money — and customers— on the deals. And competitors are swarming the marketplace.

"Groupon is a disaster," says Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research analyst. "It's a shill that's going to be exposed pretty soon."

I think that sums it up pretty well.

Teapot then gets cloud computing all wrong:

The latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven (in part) by ... “the cloud” — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

Nooo, that's not quite what "the cloud" is.

With that in mind, and ignoring Zynga's and Groupon's not-so-sterling economic performance, it's no wonder Friedman can write a Jeff Jarvis-like paean to speculation.

#TeapotTommy loves him some #Rahmbo

Only in the mind of someone like "My Head is Flat" Thomas Friedman could Rahm Emanuel be a progressive. The man who recruited Blue Dog Democrats Republicans like Heath Shuler? The man who helped persuade Obama to cut back on stimulus size?

A progressive in the age of Big Biz like this?

Doug Oberhelman, the C.E.O. of Caterpillar, which is based in Illinois, was quoted in Crain’s Chicago Business on Sept. 13 as saying: “We cannot find qualified hourly production people, and, for that matter, many technical, engineering service technicians, and even welders, and it is hurting our manufacturing base in the United States. The education system in the United States basically has failed them, and we have to retrain every person we hire.”

With big biz that won't pay more for better education?

Oh, I'm not saying that public-sector bureaucracies can't get better. Ditto, though, for private-sector bureaucracies. And, not just by cutting staff.

Meanwhile, Rahmbo buys into this:

On a good day, such as last week, a firm like Accenture announces it is adding 500 jobs in Chicago. And, on a bad day, Emanuel notes, he finds himself “staring right into the whites of the eyes of the skills shortage.” His city has thousands of job openings going unfilled, he says: “I had two young C.E.O.’s in the health care software business in the other day, sitting at this table. I asked them: ‘What can I do to help you?’ They said, ‘We have 50 job openings today, and we can’t find people.’ ”

Dude, when your neolib big biz friends cut and dump people by the bushel rather than investing in retraining them in the first place, they're part of the problem. And, you're part of the problem.

Frank Bruni, secularly clueless

Frank Bruni, with the red herring false lead of Rick Perry's "The Promise' (certainly not a rose garden), then jumps to the real subject of his column: the claim that secularists have their own degrees of magical thinking.

I may have found somebody dumber than Teapot Tommy Friedman AND Mojo Dowd on the Sunday NYT op-eds, at least for this week. Bruni erects a straw man and calls it "secularism," showing he clearly knows no such thing of real secularist thought. Here's his entree into wrongness:

But if we stick with this honesty thing, don’t we also have to admit that to varying degrees and with varying stakes, there’s magical thinking in secular life, and that it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers? Didn’t the debt-ceiling showdown show us that?

No, it did not, and ergo, no, we don't have to admit any such thing. First, there's only one avowed secularlist in Congress, Pete Stark. Second, the debt talks didn't involve "secularism" in any way, shape or form, other than some tea party types perhaps claiming divine backing for their stances.

This blather comes next.

We all have our religions, all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now.

Wrong again. Many of us accept that life simply doesn't have absolutes. Not all of us are existentialist about that, but some of us are. (I, like Camus' Mersault, sometimes open my arms to the empty starlit sky.)

Then, there's the allegation that secularism is somehow gullible in some way:

“The minute you decide to buy the Toyota, your evaluation of it goes up,” said Jon A. Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who studies attitude formation. “You overly romanticize it.”

The same goes for religious creeds, political theories or, for that matter, management philosophies.

Oh, some secularists may be. But, the educated, skeptically-minded (in its right sense) secularists are aware of just how irrational human behavior can be at times, and wisely make no exception for ourselves. We may still engage at times in irrational behaviors at first, but we next engage in some form of self-examination.

Teapot Tommy Friedman gets the stupidz on politics again

You know, Friedman, in my mind, is getting near Rich Cohen or David Broder level - not just stupid but phoning it in from inside the DC Village, albeit the NY suburbs of it.

His latest? Touting a "third way" party/candidacy in 2012? Hey, My Head is Flat? I thought neoliberalism WAS "the third way.

Thomas J. gives us the lowdown:

Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand, a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012. I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but an impressive group of frustrated Democrats, Republicans and independents, called Americans Elect, is really serious, and they have thought out this process well. In a few days, Americans Elect will formally submit the 1.6 million signatures it has gathered to get on the presidential ballot in California as part of its unfolding national effort to get on the ballots of all 50 states for 2012.

Well, first, new parties poll higher without a candidate, with a blank slate, than they do with an actual person.

Second, as those of us outside the duopoly know, for various reasons of political structure, mindless loyalty and slothful indulgence, America continues to gravitate to a third-party system.

Third, getting back to Point 1: If you're going to be so bold, Teapot Tommy, why don't you tell us if Americans Elect has tried to tap any candidates yet? If so, whom? If not, whom are your "third way squared" favorites?

That said, I urge my left-liberal friends to go to Americans Elect and spam it.

#Friedman hits a new low in offensive-stupid with jobs

Teapot Tommy Friedman, aka My Head is Flat, never ceases to surprise me at the new ways in which he can simply be obtuse about the real world.

Now, it's about the idea, and even more, the naive acceptance of its likelihood of success, about how each of us needs to become a lifelong one-person entrepreneur in the business world.

Here's Teapot Tommy, full agog at the latest stimulation to his semi-wet brain:

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.

OK, let's unpack his opening presuppositions and show what's wrong with them.
1. Do CEOs ever get asked this by their boards, at least without snowing the said boards on their multimillion-dollar value? Nope.
2. Does Friedman even understand ideas of business ethics, ethical societal behavior and related issues? No.
3. Does Friedman understand that for every boss open to innovation, there's 10 that aren't and 10 others who say they are but are more than willing to pass the buck if anything fails? Again, no.
4. Does Friedman ask how successful companies might also help employees deal with change? Nope.

Teapot Tommy then blithely heads down the road:

LinkedIn founder Reid Garrett ... Hoffman says, that means ditching a grand life plan. Entrepreneurs don’t write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they’re always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.

Ahh, the CEO of a vastly overvalued Internet company, one as lazy as Microsoft about not weeding out spam now that he seems to have it "made in the shade," is full of ideas for the average Joe/Jane.

Hoffman won't tell us, and Friedman either won't tell us or is even more ignorant than usual, that for people who aren't the engineers in Silicon Valley, working there is an unethical anti-union, anti-labor hellhole.

So, with that background in mind, what Hoffman is saying is that YOU need to reinvent yourself without any aid from a company, or any government aid (unlike Export-Import Bank aid, etc.) and, if you don't, you're simply Social Darwinist road kill.

Hoffman then gets insulting:

Hoffman ... has a book coming out after New Year called “The Start-Up of You,” co-authored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career today.”

Hoffman adds: “You can’t just say, ‘I have a college degree, I have a right to a job, now someone else should figure out how to hire and train me.’ ” You have to know which industries are working and what is happening inside them and then “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”

First, for those of us not 21 or 22 with helicopter moms, we didn't grow up believing this.

Second, what if you're already at Hoffman's paradise and booted out because it's cheaper to outsource to India? Well, per Hoffman, if you don't not only reinvent yourself, but reinvent yourself to work for less than that Indian, you're Social Darwinist road kill.

Third, the financial meltdown showed us nobody can guess perfectly "which industry is working."

Beyond that, Teapot Tommy ignores, overlooks or is ignorant of the countless unemployed already trying to reinvent themselves as self-employed, and .... sadly falling short.

Friedman hit a new low not just in lack of smarts but lack of morals. I'd like to see the NYT fire him and let him try to reinvent himself.

Dear NYT: I was afraid of that

The gray old lady, the New York Times, is going to present to inflict upon its readers a new section next week, called Sunday Reader.

Here's the huzzahs and hallelujahs PR announcement.
Starting Sunday, June 26, 2011, The Times will bring you a new section, Sunday Review, that reinvents, reimagines and reorganizes the Week in Review to offer new features and a new way of presenting our finest analytical and opinion writing.
Oh, goody.

Even MORE David (Bobos in Pop Ev Psychville) Brooks? And MORE Thomas (My Head is Flat, Teapot Tommy) Friedman?

Will we get analysis defending the paper's regular suck-ups to the D.C. Village? Please?

Can we, instead, get the best of outside writing as part of this new section?

That said, Teapot Tommy actually has a good idea for trying to implement a two-state Israel-Palestine solution.

Ahh, must be stopped clock time.

Internet freedom meets strong-arm governments

Here's more on why Teapot Tommy Friedman is full of baloney when he talks about crowds of Tweeters in Cairo: It's easy, no, very easy in some cases, for an authoritarian government to shut down Internet access.

Start with this, re Egypt:

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Or, hell, Friedman ... look at the U.S. If the Bush Administration was able to get AT&T to roll over so easily like a dead dog and put in that Internet splitter, even in a allegedly free country .... what else could be done here in the USofA under the name of "War on Terror"?

Back to Egypt. Some people could claim Mubarak's shutdown didn't work, but many cyberexperts, without passing political judgment, say rather it was that he waited too long.

But, what about the "decentralized" Internet? Not so fast:

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data

.
What about Western media in Egypt?

If they were based on wired broadband, Egypt could cut them off, too, if it wanted, I'll venture. On wireless? If those networks were state-controlled, ditto. If on a satellite-type system, like a satellite cell phone, the government might be able to try jamming that.

Now, Egypt might not be able to pull that off. But China? Or our USofA?

Tom Freidman, flat-Twitter asshat

Teapot Tommy Friedman, Mr. Earth is Flat, in talking about Twitter, Egypt and related issues, is even dumber, more uninformed, and more American-exceptionalist chauvinistic than usual, and that's hard to imagine!

Here's the nut graf on his stupidity:

The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.

Just one problem. There IS no "diffusion of Twitter." The reality of Iran's failed Green Revolution showed that, as did the reality of Egypt's protests becoming stronger after President Mubarak shut down the country's ISPs.

Fortunately, Friedman's colleague, Frank Rich, knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/01/how-wired-are-egyptians.html of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

He's not the only person writing for the NYT to know the truth about Twitter, too.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

The more I read out of Shirky's mouth, the less and less intellectual capacity I will give him credit. It's like he is a fellator of anything called "New Media." But, that's pretty much the case with his whole tribe of Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen types.

Obama likes Teapot Tommy Friedman, Bobo David Brooks

Shock me that two of the NYT's mushiest, most inept, Peter-principle-promoting columnists are among Obama's favorite pundits:

Obama does reserve a certain respect for opinion writers such as Tom Friedman and David Brooks of The New York Times, Jerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal, E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post, and Joe Klein of Time. "My impression is that he reads a lot of columnists," says Brooks, "and therefore he sort of cares about what they say."

Dionne, as Greenwald notes, is an often-platitudinous liberal, who rarely will challenge the administration. Joe Klein? If he can't even understand the difference between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering, that says it all. Seib? The more rightwing-ish side of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment incarnate.

And, contrary to a commenter, I don't doubt it at all. Teapot Tommy is exactly the type of neolib whose thinking comports with The One's. Brooks' kinder, gentler rational bobos are the type of conservatives Obama thinks exists to engage in bipartisanship with him.

Oh, PROOF that GQ is onto something with Gibbs' comments? Bobo Brooks and Teapot Tommy were two of the columnists The One invited to his pre-inaugural pseudointellectual confabs.

You first, Teapot Tommy Friedman

In his latest bit of inanity, Thomas Friedman says that American workers, in the future, will all have to add "extra" to their jobs to avoid being replaced by foreigners.

So, you first, Teapot Tommy. I'd love to have your job outsourced.

Beyond that, Teapot Tommy claims that, as more and more Boomers get older and need health care assistance, Americans will have to add "extra" to these jobs.

Really? Pandahugger Tommy, China's going to have an even steeper age curve than us quite soon. None of them are coming over here for that reason; there will be plenty of elderly Chinese. (Besides, although illegal immigration does come from overseas, amending legal immigration statues would set off a Congressional firestorm.) Oh, and they're not likely coming from Mexico; its birthrate isn't much higher than ours.

The rest of the column has mixtures of the same vapidness and triteness.

Tommy Teapot Friedman gets stupid on China

So what if he and others don't like the name. It's clear, from this column, that he's a panda-hugger who thinks China has to offer social liberty at some point for its economy to truly grow in the 21st century.

Says who, Mr. My Head is Flat? The same type of people like you who, two years ago, believed in the rationality of Homo economicus?

Here's an example of his latest bloviating:
But what would happen if China had 600 million villagers on Twitter? In a country that already has thousands of protests every week over land seizures and corruption, its system probably could not handle that much unrestricted bottom-up energy.
Really? Iran did quite well handling its Twittering, even getting people like you to believe all these Engligh-language Tweets were the sign of revolution nigh at hand.

What a fucking doofus.

China is the world's No. 1 country at cyberespionage, and it would be brought to its knees by more people Tweeting?

Tom Friedman out-stupids himself

Taking off from his previous column about how he's found the real, centrist, "tea kettle movement," he now talks about how such a fictional critter could nominate a 2012 presidential candidate.

Friedman, among other stupidities (and, don't get me wrong, I'm not a backsliding Obama lover, all of a sudden), overlooks the Senate filibuster:

Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority.

That's my emphasis, re Tommy Teapot ignoring the filibuster. X to block, Tommy!

That said, some of what Tommy Teapot says is true: Both the major parties are bankrupt. But, to have a centrist party, or so-called centrist party, split the difference between an already centrist party and a party tacking ever further rightward is the wrong prescription.

And, Tommy Teapot, looking for his Brooksian Teapot Bobos, is too stupid to understand that.

Friedman claims to discover "real Tea Party"

And, instead, Mr. "My Head is Flat" has only discovered his flatuent, solipsistic bloviating on what he wishes could be a centrist political movement with enthusiasm.

Hey, Friedman, you want a centrist political movement? There is one. It's called the Democratic Party. As for enthusiasm? It's like Jim Hightower says, regarding most centrism and enthusiasm: "Ain't nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes adn dead armadillos."

Friedman gets Russia wrong

In his joking column (or is that joke of a column, the norm, it seems) about the denouement of the Russian spy ring, Tom Friedman talks about the allegedly tanking Russian economy:

Were it not for oil, gas and mineral exports, Russia’s economy would be contracting even more than it has. Moscow’s most popular exports today are probably what they were under Khrushchev: vodka, Matryoshka dolls and Kalashnikov rifles.

Wrong.

All little Tommy had to do was crack the CIA Factbook online:

(I)n 2009 Russia was the world's largest exporter of natural gas, the second largest exporter of oil, and the third largest exporter of steel and primary aluminum. ... A revival of Russian agriculture in recent years has led to Russia shifting from being a net grain importer to a net grain exporter. The economy had averaged 7% growth since the 1998 Russian financial crisis, resulting in a doubling of real disposable incomes and the emergence of a middle class.

True, it's not a bed of roses. But, finished steel and primary aluminum aren't "mineral exports." Besides, many of those mineral exports are almost as valuable as oil. Maybe more so, in some cases.

And, as for the snark about Russian government mismanagement, per Wiki:

The federal budget has run surpluses since 2001 and ended 2007 with a surplus of 6% of GDP.

Six percent of GDP? We'd be installing a president for life who produced a $600 billion surplus, or something like that.

On the agriculture side, to follow up on the CIA report, Wiki notes that only the EU and the US are bigger agricultural exporters. Yes, Russia is ahead of Brazil, Argentina and Australia, among others.

Finally, Russia is supposedly third, behind only China and India, in computer software outsourcing.

The IT market is one of the most dynamic sectors of the Russian economy. Russian software exports have risen from just $120 million in 2000 to $1.5 billion in 2006. Since the year 2000 the IT market has demonstrated growth rates of 30-40 percent a year, growing by 54% in 2006 alone.

So, once again, STFU, Friedman.