My profession has a lot of annual rituals, some obvious and some not, and one of them happened the week before last: the annual job list went live (and, in another annual ritual, came precariously close to crashing for the first afternoon).

So, Saturday night the news was that Christine O'Donnell "dabbled into witchcraft" before becoming a hard-line evangelical Christian. And you know what? I wasn't surprised at all. Surely I wasn't surprised that a candidate like O'Donnell was attracted to the supernatural, since all of her politics are about magical thinking. I shrugged it off, and Sunday morning I went to church.

We're always told that economics is a complicated science, which is true, but also that bottom-line practical economics is very simple. But the simple rules we've all learned seem to have landed us into an incomprehensible mess. Let me try to recap what's happened.

Obviously, every business needs to make a profit to survive. This is done by keeping costs lower than revenues. If you're selling something, you need to make more money selling it than you spend in making or buying the product and in paying your workers.

Hi, all. We have some new readers and new reader bloggers today, for a sad reason. Some people are coming here out of fear that Talking Points Memo may shut down its reader blogs.

Everybody here at Dagblog would like to see the TPMCafe stay open. Most of us met each other, as bloggers, at that page, and we would like to see it thrive.

But whatever the fate for TPMCafe, we would like you to know that you are all welcome here, and that we will always be glad to see you.