Derek Thompson

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis has testified that former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke essentially forced him to acquire Merrill Lynch despite evidence of its growing losses. Even though this was certainly done with "America's best interests" in mind, it's still a bit troubling. It's especially troubling because early this year, Merill CEO John Thain was forced out for hiding Merrill's red ink. But doesn't Lewis' testimony reveal that explanation as completely, 100 percent bogus? For me this raises three big questions about one of the biggest financial mergers of our time:

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Outside of Virginia, there was little reason to notice that Creigh Deeds won the state's Democratic primary for governor. But here's something that political campaigns and marketers across the country should pay attention to: He did it partly with a technology called Google Blasting, an eleventh-hour strategy to blanket Google-affiliated webpages in an area with a single ad campaign to impact voters' final decision. This is now the second time in three months that a Democratic underdog has used Google blasts to seal a surprising victory. Goodbye robocalls, hello Google surges?

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When the US government passed the stimulus bill, it allocated about $287 million to buy cars for the General Services Administration. In doing so, the government demonstrated its own preferences among Detroit's automakers by spending almost half the money on Ford automobiles, as opposed to the now-government-owned General Motors and now-pawned-off Chrysler. See Uncle Sam? Now you see how Americans consumers feel.

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Here's an interesting study from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that takes an interesting look at an issue I've been grappling with: the sin tax. For a while, I wasn't for the sin tax so much as I was against arguments against the sin tax, but after reading this, I'm tempted to sin tax my most regular sin more than ever.

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Blogging is just about the most portable job in the world. All you need is a computer with internet to read and write and a phone to make occasional calls. But really, that makes it like a lot of jobs. With email, instant messaging, document sharing and cell phones, connectivity isn't an office perk, it's a cinch at home too. As a result, telecommuting is on the rise, and one report estimates that by the next presidential election, "nearly 75 percent of the U.S. workforce will be mobile." So why is this guy writing in The Big Money saying that's a bad thing?

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I'm going to level with you: I don't have the first idea what to do with the deficit. On the one hand I hear the serious-sounding argument that we are flying into a fiscal disaster if we don't fix the deficit right away. On the other hand is another serious-sounding argument that, not only is the deficit not urgent, but deficit hawks could plunge us back into recession a la 1937. And on top of all this is the likelihood that nobody is going to take deficit reduction seriously, either now when the economy needs a boost or later when Democrats will be nervous to inflict fiscal "pain" before the 2010/'12 elections.

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Via Andrew, Richard Posner isn't too worried about the country's leftward drift. In fact, he thinks that if Obama shifts America too far from the center, it will be good for conservatism, opening the door for a Republican Bill Clinton. But what would a Republican Bill Clinton even look like?

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Via Andrew, Richard Posner isn't too worried about the country's leftward drift. In fact, he thinks that if Obama shifts America too far from the center, it will be good for conservatism, opening the door for a Republican Bill Clinton. But what would a Republican Bill Clinton even look like?

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Via Chris Orr and Mudflats, here's a little taste of the exchange between Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity:

Hannity: ...The price of oil is going up again. It's not quite at $140 a barrel, but it's on its way up to $70 and $80...

Palin: Yeah, well and I thank God it's not at $140. You know people say, "Hey, Alaska! 85% of your state budget is based on the price of a barrel of oil. Aren't you glad the price is going up?" I say, "No!" The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend. And that's good for our families and for the private sector.

You learn the strangest things from reading economic blogs. Did you know that higher beer taxes will make you lazier at the gym? It's true! Or that Zach Galifianakis is the comedic genius of my generation? He certainly is weird! Or that "Alan Greenspan is a fan of men's underwear sales as an important economic indicator?" Now that just might be the fact of the day.

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The country's largest banks appear stable even as Obama's largest bank plan is dead. Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner's Public-Private Investment Plan to price and buy toxic assets from the banks has withered on the vine, and it's enough to make some writers wonder whether the Obama bank plan has failed. But wait, how can you say the big bank plan failed if the biggest banks aren't failing?

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"No one I know has a job anymore," Daily Beast editor Tina Brown observed early this year. "They've got Gigs." You know, gigs. Part-time jobs, here and there, that provide a decent trickle of checks without the umbrella of benefits. I remember reading that and wondering whether Tina was getting a representative cross-sample or hanging out with too many New York journalists and bankers. Both things could be true of course, but it looks like Tina was onto something:

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Let's follow the logic. Apple iPhones can now buy movies and TV shows just like a computer. What about magazines? Maybe them too: an application called Scrollmotion says it hopes to offer on the iPhone "50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers and 1 million books," possibly including Esquire and Bon Appetit. Is the stage set for iPhone to cash in on that grand-daddy of  journalism life preservers: The iTunes of Journalism?

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School is out for almost all students in Kindergarten through college. So now that the teachers and students are out relaxing, let's talk about them behind their backs: Our education system stinks. It's a paragon of wasteful spending and mediocre results. Lucky for us, Obama and his whip-smart Secretary of Education Arne Duncan know that better results require bold changes. So let's get bold! From killing tenure and the SAT to requiring Spanish classes for everybody (er, para todos!), nutty ideas abound. Here are 10 crazy ideas for remaking our schools from K through College:

1) Eliminate summer vacation.

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Did you ever think that America was silently lusting for a quarter-pounder with cheese, fries and a mocha latte? I sure didn't. But maybe that's why I'm stuck at a desk blogging about coffee marketing while the guys at McDonald's roll in their big piles of money. With sales are up more than 5 percent (more than Burger King or Wendy's), McDonald's is boasting about its McCafe campaign's stronger-than-expected debut. Is the time nigh when, thirsting for a cup of joe, you trade the faux-Francaise atmosphere of Starbucks for the bright plastic counters of McDonald's?

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European Parliament elections are contested country-by-country by national parties. In other words, in France the Parti Socialiste runs against the UMP, and then separately in Germany the Social Democrats run against the Christian Democrats. But the MEPs do sit in cross-national blocs. And in the voting that finished up this weekend, the cross national Party of European Socialism, representing the mainstream center-left parties of Europe, got really hammered. The Greens picked up seats. The far-right picked up seats. The Euroskeptics picked up seats. And the main center-right bloc, called the European People's Party, picked up a bunch of seats. The ALDE bloc of centrists and liberals basically held even. And the social democrats lost out big time. This, courtesy of the BBC, is what the new European Parliament will look like:

AFTER months of anxious planning, it was time for Hugh Verrier to finally press send.In his two years as chairmn of White & Case, the venerable Wall Street law firm, Mr. Verrier had already laid off 70 young lawyers and shuttered offices in Bangkok, Dresden and Milan. He had watched top partners flee to competitors and suffered a depressive 2008 holiday party at Cipriani's, which had half the budget of the prior year's $500,000 event -- a Neroesque fete at the United Nations with fireworks and a band.

Isaac Chotiner's 6000-word TNR takedown of the collected works of Arianna Huffington came out last week, but, late as always, I didn't get around to reading it till over the weekend. It's packed to the gills with good stuff. That said, I don't think I can sign on to Isaac's most pointed paragraph:

Here at the Atlantic, we have considered the impact of the recession on Americans responsible for making investments, and making cars, and making students. But how about the impact on Americans responsible for making, well, nothing at all? Now the recession has hit New York hipsterdom and Williamsburg wallets are feeling skinner than a pair of Levi's 511s.

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This Jonathan Alter piece from Newsweek about Obama's education strategy calls for the White House to get tough with teacher unions. No more "peanut-buttering" money nice and even across the multigrain face of America's school systems. It's time to get tough with teachers, find the ones that are working and axe the ones that are failing. How do we do it? We use the education stimulus spending.

But wait, I thought the point of stimulus spending was to save jobs. Can that really be true of every industry except education? In a recesion, is it worth it to save the job of a bad teacher?

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