Midday open thread

• Jim Glassman, he of "Dow 36,000" fame, is still an idiot.

  So, ten years ago you predicted the Dow would reach 36,000. This week, the Dow fell to its lowest level since 1997, and 6,000 seems more likely than 36,000. On behalf of investors and readers everywhere: What happened?

  I think that people who read my columns would consider me a level-headed person who doesn’t get upset, either way, doesn’t have tremendous enthusiasms…..The second point was that based on our calculations, we believed that stocks would rise to roughly 36,000. We said in the book that it is impossible to predict how long it will take for the market to recognize that Dow 36,000 is perfectly reasonable, but then, of course, we did take a guess

  You said three to five years

  Oops. Well, now he says the Dow will reach 36,000 someday, but who knows when! No shit. It's called inflation.

• The economy was kicking ass until Obama became president and ruined everything.
• Robots are cool.
• Have you guys checked out Daily Kos TV yet?
• Michael Steele is off the hook!
• The Communist Chinese are now more popular than Congressional Republicans.
• A really, really smart dude writes:

  A plurality of Americans — 46 percent — now approve of the congressional Democrats, compared to 45 percent who disapprove. Congressional Republicans lag far behind, with a dismal 17-68 favorable/unfavorable rating.

  For all the GOP talk of “unity” and having “won the stimulus debate,” the fact is, the American people don’t like them or their do-nothing obstructionist agenda. [...]

  Over the weekend, the GOP’s de facto leader, Rush Limbaugh, rallied his CPAC audience in a 90-minute speech televised nationally by Fox News and CNN. “One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas,” he thundered to great applause, adding that, “To us, bipartisanship is [Democrats] being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.”

  Given that the public is certainly demanding “better policy ideas” than what the GOP delivered the last decade, and given the current polling numbers, the GOP won’t be cleaning any clocks anytime soon. Meanwhile, Obama and his congressional allies have promised to withdraw completely from Iraq by 2011, provide universal healthcare and continue to use government as an instrument for vigorous economic recovery.

• Ever wonder how a whole country (in this case Iceland) can go bankrupt?

  This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously. (March 2006 Bloomberg News headline: iceland’s billionaire tycoon “thor” braves u.s. with hedge fund.)

  Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

  Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.)

• AEI conservative scholar:

  Casey Stengel, at a low moment for his 1962 Mets, asked plaintively, "Can't anybody here play this game?" The Republican Party looks a lot like the '62 Mets. Can you imagine getting into a situation where a radio talk show host-- a radio talk show host!-- is not only out there as the most visible and articulate spokesman for the GOP, but other key Republicans, including members of Congress and the chair of the national party, are out there visibly groveling at Rush Limbaugh's feet, debasing themselves and making the party look even weaker. There may be worse things than having as your spokesman someone who says over and again that he wants the president to fail, which is a bit like having a passenger on a cruise ship who doesn't like the way the captain is steering the boat hoping it will hit an iceberg-- conveniently ignoring the fact that he and we are all on the same ship. In fact there is one worse thing: having the chair of the House Republican campaign committee say that his colleagues have learned about their insurgency tactics from the Taliban. Cringeworthy. Actually, I want to apologize to the 1962 Mets; you were much better than the 2009 Republicans.

• Which sports records will never be broken?