From the perspective of economic literacy, last week’s [Levin's hearings] had to be, well, not memorable, or inmemorable (as infamous is to famous)… The hearings exposed an unnerving ignorance of fundamental principles of market economics by folks who have a hand in remapping rules of finance that will be with us for a while. Flip assertions about what is and is not socially valuable reflect a confusion about our market economy that is as fundamental as knowing that George Washington was the first president of the United States.

He also labels one graph, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” referring to the high unemployment rate in Levin’s home state of Michigan.

Sounds to me like Glassman should take his own snooty advice. J.P. Morgan suffered massive losses due to its exposure to the subprime mortgage market it ostensibly did not understand. It received a $25 billion bailout from the American taxpayer. So, his moaning that “low level of economic literacy is plaguing financial reform” rings false in my ears. It was Wall Street’s “low level of economic literacy” that necessitated financial reform in the first place.

Late last year, the State Department teamed with Facebook and HowCast to sponsor a New York summit called the Alliance of Youth Movements, where young people from countries like Lebanon, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey and Saudi Arabia discussed how to use social media to enhance their organizing and activism. The summit led, naturally, to the establishment of an online hub for stored activist-tool knowledge. (In a conspicuous coincidence, there’s a video up on the homepage about how to circumvent government-established Internet censorship.) According to Jim Glassman, the former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, the summit and the hub were the result of a trip Cohen took to Colombia, where he encountered youth groups protesting the violence of the terrorist group known as the FARC. Returning to State, he pitched Glassman on contextualizing the youth activism within a broader pet idea of the then-undersecretaries, about how to foster a “countermovement to violent extremism” with minimal U.S. involvement. “We certainly never would have gotten the Alliance of Youth Movements off the ground without Jared,” Glassman says, calling Cohen “a young, extremely talented public servant” who has extensive familiarity and good contacts within the technology community.

Nor is this likely to be Cohen’s last foray into State’s strategic-communications efforts. As Laura Rozen recently reported, Cohen is doing work for Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke spent a recent round of congressional hearings wondering how it could be that the Taliban is able to freely issue radio broadcasts in western Pakistan, without its communications jammed or otherwise disrupted. Maybe counterprogramming extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be Cohen’s next low-key assignment.”He’s really someone to keep an eye on,” Glassman said, in any event.

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“Dow 36,000″ Author: Obama Tells American Businesses to Drop Dead.

Hassett and James Glassman argued that “stocks were undervalued” when the Dow Jones Index was roughly 25 percent higher than it is now.

It’s an interesting choice. McHale doesn’t have a diplomatic background. But neither did Jim Glassman, the recently departed undersecretary whom public-diplo watchers considered the office’s first success story. McHale, though, is said to be close to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and has been a big donor to Democratic politicians, shelling out over $100,000 during the 2008 campaign cycle. Marc Lynch recently made a case against her, but I’ve heard support for her from career diplomats as well.

If indeed McHale gets the job, it’ll raise the question of the which direction the Obama team wants to take public diplomacy. Under former President George W. Bush, who placed loyalist Karen Hughes in the job in 2005 — widely seen as a disaster — the undersecretary became the lead for strategic communications across the government, tasked with convening, coordinating and executing the U.S. communications strategy abroad. It’s unclear whether the Obama administration will continue that model. Denis McDonough, a close Obama adviser, has the strategic communications portfolio at the National Security Council. Will McDonough play the role in the interagency process that the undersecretary of state played in the Bush administration?

I’ll have more on all this later.