Folks like me write and say a lot of things in columns, blog posts, TV hits, and tweets. Some of our assertions are false, and many of our predictions are wrong. Last year I tried to kindle a blogger tradition of an annual confession of sorts: The worst instances of my error over the past year. For 2010, I listed my three worst errors/bad predictions. This year, I’m going with one serious lapse in fact-checking standards, and one prediction that looks like it will be proven very wrong next week.

Paul Krugman didn’t really lament the lack of earthquake damage. We had an earthquake. I made a good joke on Twitter grounded in the odd Keynesian notions of New York Times hate columnist Paul Krugman: “Krugman says it wasn’t big enough.” Then someone who had made a hoax Krugman account on Google Plus made it look like Krugman was actually extolling the virtues of earthquake damage. I then tweeted that Krugman seriously was saying it wasn’t big enough. Dave Weigel rightly smacked me on this one. I apologized at the time. It was embarassing.