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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Mollycoddling terrorists and ruining America

By Megan McArdle
Sep 3 2008, 9:41 PM ET Comment

Mitt Romney seems to use the word "liberal" in a randomly perjorative fashion.  I half expect him to say "I was eating breakfast this morning, and my hash browns were all liberal.  I sent them back and told the waitress to bring me some good, conservative hash browns.

He also seems to think that giving American citizens habeas corpus rights is some sort of crazy scheme dreamed up by liberal justices intent on destroying America's proud tradition of secret trials and warrantless arrests.  Jim Henley seems sort of prescient:

John McCain is, and as Larison says, John McCain would be everything anyone hated about the Bush years minus the occasional bouts of temperance. Eve and Nat Hentoff (whom she links) wonder if Palin would be "as flip-flopping as Mr. McCain on the Bush torture policy," which is an odd way to put it. There's no evidence that Palin has a preexisting torture policy to flip away from, let alone what it would be. What there is evidence of is: Sarah Palin is John McCain's running mate, not the other way around. Sarah Palin and John McCain are running under the aegis of the Republican Party, which has made support for torture a litmus-test issue.


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