The Conscience of a Liberal

What moves the September 15 anti-war march off the top spot in My Back Pages?

Only Paul Krugman's new blog at the Times, "The Conscience of a Liberal." On September 18, apparently, Krugman's occasional responses to his readers blossomed into a full-fledged blog.

Krugman's Times opinion pieces are a pleasure to read. Smart, progressive, and so well written. It's stuff you just don't see in the mainstream media. His first blog entry contains a helpful graph of income disparity in America since the early part of the 20th Century, along with an explanation of that disparity's political sources.

It's the kind of stuff my friend Steve Novick knows so well. In fact, I would say Steve, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Oregon, easily knows as much about economic policy as Krugman, high praise but it's no exaggeration. When I saw Krugman's chart, and read his initial blog entry, my first thought was that, thanks to Novick, I already knew what Krugman was talking about.

I guess what I'm saying is this: Oregon voters are the luckiest, because they get to elect Paul Krugman to the U.S. Senate in '08, by voting for Steve Novick.