Matt's got a good post on why Katrina isn't the sort of expenditure you want to pay for through cuts,, but through deficit spending, and why Bush's fiscal philosophy has really cut off the option.

Jonathan Kozol, in an interview with Campus Progress, touches on something I've been thinking a lot about:

Some young people will tentatively say to me, “well maybe I oughtta get involved.” Well I say, “You don’t have any choice; you’re involved already. Even if you never do anything about this, you’ve benefited from an unjust system. You’re already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start. If we did not have an apartheid school system in America, what is the chance you’d walk into this college so easily? It would have been a lot harder because there would have been a far larger applicant pool of highly capable minority kids to compete with you.

Red State's got a Ginsburg-Roberts comparison that doesn't quite mean what they think it means:

Ginsburg: 17 Hours of Questioning

Breyer: 18 Hours of Questioning

Rehnquist (for Chief Justice): 12 Hours of Questioning

Roberts: 22 Hours of Questioning

Ginsburg: 216 Questions

Roberts: 510 Questions

This piece by Noam Scheiber on Bush's extended cronyism makes a very good point:

It's the second kind of cronyism--call it "outer-circle cronyism"--that's truly destructive. The focus here isn't so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially.