In the Wall Street Journal, of all places! What happened? They couldn’t get John Yoo to write something on short notice?

In his most recent New York Times column, David Brooks falls into a common trap of political reporting, mixing concerns of policy and campaigning. Brooks writes:

Democrats can win elections in this climate if they defuse the Big Government/Small Government ideological debate. With his Third Way approach, Bill Clinton established that he was not a Big Government liberal. Once he crossed that threshold, he could get voters to think about his individual policies, which were actually quite popular.

I am fascinated by this result from the latest HuffPo-Patch poll of Republican party elites in the early primary and caucus states:

Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen argue that Italy’s economic problems have a lot to do with the country’s reliance on small businesses.

Matt:

Jared Bernstein cautions against the over-lionization of small businesses in the New York Times. I agree. The best evidence for skepticism continues, I think, to me the fact that if small firms were so fantastic Italy and Greece would be the economic superstars of the western world … you can have an economy like Italy’s with lots of barriers to competition so that poorly managed firms stay in business with low productivity

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome the following post-election report on Sunday’s Swiss Parliamentary election from Sean Müller and Paolo Dardanelli, both of the University of Kent.

[NOTE: An incorrect, slightly different version of this post was originally posted. This version now reflects the correct version. Apologies – JT.]

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Seema Mehta presents an amazing list of errors in recent speeches of congressmember and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

What’s scary here is not so much that there’s a U.S. congresswoman running around who can’t seem to distinguish between truth and fiction—-after all, my very own congressman is reportedly a criminal, and I can only assume that he’s been too busy with his criminal enterprises to have paid much attention to politics for the past few decades—-but rather the rules of how her campaign is covered.

One of the themes of my new book, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, is that Americans are largely unaware of many public policies, even if they benefit from them themselves.