An informed reader writes in.

Ezra,

A few quick notes on your housing market post. I’m in the affordable housing realm—mostly rental, occasionally ownership-- so I’d like to think I know something.

Over at Swampland, Karen Tumulty distinguishes a "filibuster-proof majority," which is what FDR had, from a Senate where one party or another controlled a theoretically filibuster-proof number of seats, which is what Carter had. Specter's defection, she suggests, is akin to FDR's situation rather than Carter's.

Kathleen Sebelius is expected to win a fairly easy confirmation today. Some Senators have spoken of delay, but few suggest there's any hope of marshaling a consequential number of "no" votes. And so we will have our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Max Baucus's glowing statement follows the jump:

Thought the first: They blew through $100 million? Buh-buh-buh-buh-how? The magazine wasn't printed on gold leaf. It wasn't staffed by robots from the future. It didn't have a Mars bureau. My working assumption has been that the budget meetings went something like this:

Fareed Zakaria interviews Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who turns out to be a total downer:

Can we really prevent global warming? Or should we be thinking more about adaptation? Building coastal fortifications may be cheaper than halting the release of CO2.

I don't mean to be churlish about this, because the intellectual history in Frank Foer and Noam Scheiber's "Nudge-ocracy" is really quite good. But enough with the attempts to tie Obama to behavioral economics. The apparent influence of the nascent field on the actual policy proposals emerging from the administration is minimal.