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Brad DeLong continued his recent foray into media criticism with a post dedicated to Michael Massing from the New York Review of Books. Massing's critique of Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald raises DeLong's hackles (hackles that are, in all fairness, oft-raised by the traditional media establishment). At one turn, said DeLong, Massing seems to praise Greenwald for his bold refusal to be balanced.

Brad DeLong has posted several excerpts—ranging from Nikola Tesla's 1919 "My Inventions" to Paul Krugman's post on the Blue Dogs and health care.

Much as the term bellwether indicates a marker of future trends, a bellwether stock is one that is roundly believed to predict market trends.

Because I recently berated Hardee's for its terrible, offensive TV ads, the Parents Television Council apparently thought that perhaps I would make a good ally. I wouldn't, not by a longshot.

Brad DeLong posted his daily links, but, as of 4 p.m. today, that was about it.

Brad DeLong made the bold suggestion that it's "not yet time to worry about the long-term fiscal outlook" in the United States. We still have two years to start concerning ourselves with sustainability of the U.S. budget, DeLonghe said. To freak out early, he argued, "paralyzes needed action without paying any dividends." Shouting fire in a movie theater has never been my forte, but, if it's all the same to DeLong, I'm going to go ahead and keep panicking anyway.

John Duerden, the CEO of Crocs (CROX), must have been peeved to see the front page of the Washington Post's business section yesterday led by this story: "Once-Trendy Crocs Could Be On Last Legs." The article foreshadowed doom for the company known for making rainbow-colored footwear:

Brad DeLong posted an item today confronting one of life's greatest frustrations: interpreting statistics from the Labor Department. The figure in question is the number of U.S. workers who filed new jobless claims last week. The number is low—if you can call the seasonally adjusted figure 522,000 low—enough. In fact, it's the smallest number of new unemployment claims since January. Great news, right? Well, not so fast.

Brad DeLong posted some industrial production figures straight from the Fed itself. And ... yeah, it's bad.

TBM is very proud today to have published Marc Gunther's scoop about Wal-Mart's plans to develop a "sustainability index," which will measure the environmental impact of everything the retail giant sells. It's a move that could well shape the future of retail, not just in this country but through much of the developed world and, as Gunther points out, it raises some provocative questions about Wal-Mart's (WMT) role as a kind of pseudo-regulator.

Brad DeLong made a pithy observation about work force retention and productivity during the recession. While employers have cut their staff numbers, productivity has in fact gone up. "It is really beginning to look as though businesses take recessions as opportunities to greatly slim down their workforces without making the workers they retain too angry and depressed," DeLong wrote.