First, Christopher Hitchens on Gordon Brown for the readers of Vanity Fair.  On the McBride affair:

But what shocked me much more was how unshocked the Labour Party was. “Put it like this,” said a stalwart old comrade of mine. “The Tories and the press are only now finding out how Brown has been bullying and threatening his own colleagues.” Fat Boy McBride, of course, was given the heave-ho as soon as his picknose activity was unmasked, and it was claimed, as is customary, that he had acted alone and without permission from his boss. I have asked around a good deal and have not met or heard from anyone—anyone—who believes that this cover story is true. Instead, and this in a party that used to pride itself on open debate, you hear dreadful whispers about carpet-biting, furniture-hurling spasms by someone whose contorted face reproduces the awful slobbering mask of a weak king.

It is hard to read the whole piece and retain much confidence in our prime minister.  Read this one about Sarah Palin if that makes you feel better. 

Palin’s speech is classic casuistry.

After girlish burbling about how “progressing our state” and serving Alaska “is the greatest honor that I could imagine,” and raving about how much she loves her job, she abruptly announced that she was making the ultimate sacrifice: dumping the state on her lieutenant.

Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it? “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town.

 Justified praise for Mark Thoma's blog in an interesting mini-essay on economics blogging. 

I thank the Browser for some of these. 

Greg Mankiw defends himself. (for the issue, read here). 

If we're really going bust/inflating like nuts, why do you get so little for lending money to the UK?

Robert Peston asks some excellent questions of the Bank's supposed new role as macroeconomic stability-enforcer. 

First, how will we know when banks are lending too much and that asset prices are rising to unsustainable levels? It's blindingly obvious with 20:20 hindsight vision that this is what happened from 2005-7. But alarm bells were not ringing sufficiently loudly for the super-brains at the Bank of Engand, the Treasury and the FSA at the time.

Second, are we absolutely sure we need a new Macro-Prudential committee armed with new tools and levers, as opposed to giving the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee a new and second target - to curb systemically excessive lending - to add to its anti-inflation mandate? As Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, has pointed out, there is an interesting logical issue here. As and when a new Macro-Prudential Committee instructs banks that they must lend less, credit will became scarcer. That will have the effect of making loans more expensive, which is another way of saying that interest rates will go up. But isn't varying interest rates what the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee is supposed to do, in order to fulfil its mission of keeping inflation in check. Of course, we've all discovered in the past couple of years that the MPC's powers to fine tune interest rates in their many and varied forms throughout the economy are more feeble than it believed.