Sell­ing books is all about timing. Or at least, that’s what the cap­i­tal­ists trying to make book sell­ing into a prof­itable market would have you believe.  Now that Prez W has led Amer­ica into de facto social­ism, it may come as some sur­prise that enter­pris­ing pub­lish­ers are still trying to put free-​market voodoo into prac­tice by using busi­ness horse sense and ever-​churning pub­lic­ity machines to sell books–about socialism.

Ezra Klein points to the release of a new Japan­ese manga comic of Marx’s Das Kap­i­tal as a water­shed moment in the edu­ca­tion of a future gen­er­a­tion of Marx­ist socialists.  Make it palat­able, make it fun.  Make it cool.  A spoon­ful of manga makes the social theory go down—forilla.

But this is not new, per se…how could we forget Rius?

Eduardo del Rio, a.k.a. Rius, is a Mex­i­can polit­i­cal car­toon­ist who was bitten with the task of send­ing up the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment in the 1960s, which he did bless­edly well with a strip titled Los Super­ma­chos.

P’r'aps only polit­i­cal junkies and Gopher State denizens are paying atten­tion any­more, but Minnesota’s Sen­a­to­r­ial race recount has been steadily moving for­ward for the past couple of weeks. Despite the fact that county vol­un­teers are near­ing com­ple­tion of man­u­ally review­ing the nearly 3 mil­lion vote haul, there’s been pre­cious little to sate those of who have been trained into tap­ping refresh on our favorite polling web­sites like a fleet of Pavlov­ian pooches by the horse races of the past year in politics.

This morn­ing the recount stands at 78% com­ple­tion (like a tor­rent with no seed­ers), incum­bent Norm Cole­man hold­ing on to a 210-vote lead over chal­lenger Al Franken.  That’s vir­tu­ally where the race was on elec­tion night, with Cole­man hold­ing a 215-vote lead.  Franken ini­tially cut heav­ily into Coleman’s lead (by some reports bring­ing it under 100), but as the recount has pro­gressed, Cole­man has pulled fur­ther ahead.

Except he prob­a­bly hasn’t, accord­ing to both the Star Tri­bune and the best poll-​watching site in the busi­ness, FiveThirtyEight.com. Over the past few days, lawyers and recount watch­ers for both cam­paigns have esca­lated chal­lenges to bal­lots, which remove those bal­lots from con­tention for the present until the state elec­tions board can review and debate the bal­lots in ques­tion. With over 3,000 bal­lots chal­lenged, there’s a lot of wiggle room, and if Franken wins just a frac­tion more of those ballot chal­lenges (some­thing like 2/15 more than Cole­man, but I’m no math wizard), he’s the golden boy from the North. Nate Silver runs his magic num­bers and spits out a pro­jec­tion of a 27-vote margin in Franken’s favor. What­ever, he’ll prob­a­bly be right.

God bless tech­nol­ogy, though, since even if we can’t figure who’d actu­ally win, or guess, we have access to little easter eggs within the ambit of national pol­i­tics.

As part of my redesign of dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion, I decided to invite some friends to con­tribute to the blog. They’re all good and inter­est­ing writ­ers and people, and I’m very excited to have them here.

They’ll be arriv­ing piece­meal in the days and weeks to come, but I’m happy to announce that Joel Cala­han has already reported for duty. His first post is on its way…

I’ve men­tioned my appre­ci­a­tion for Yves Smith’s naked cap­i­tal­ism blog often, but for those of you who haven’t been fol­low­ing along at home, here’s a selec­tion from her com­men­taries on recent eco­nomic events.

+ On Obama’s appoint­ment of Tim Gei­th­ner as Trea­sury Sec­re­tary (Smith wanted Paul Vol­cker for rea­sons she explains here):

The prob­lem is that the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion has so low­ered stan­dards that some­one who is com­pe­tent is applauded as a good choice, as in ide­ol­ogy and past record are ignored if you have a respectable back­ground and are not a patron­age choice. Com­pe­tence is a min­i­mum stan­dard, folks. What does the can­di­date stand for? The MSM ducks that issue, choos­ing to char­ac­ter­ize Gei­th­ner as a tech­no­crat. That is incom­plete and inaccurate.

+ On the pos­si­bil­ity of a default on U.S. debt or a deval­u­a­tion of the dollar: