×
- This Jay Rosen piece on the ideology of the American press is worth a read. "It's complicated," he writes, and indeed his multi-dimensional analysis -- in which I cannot find anything to disagree with -- does not lead to a pithy conclusion. I've said before that regardless of their political orientation, the press is biased toward authority, but that is a different matter than their ideological beliefs.
- Since the U.S. Senate appears content to let high, long-term unemployment be the new norm, we need to look at alternatives to a jobs bill. One option I'm a big fan of is investing in community colleges -- hopefully the ideas discussed in this Washington Monthly/New America Foundation forum will percolate into Congress.
- I'm not going to wade into fights between Jon Chait and libertarians, but his thoughts on "libertarian sanctimony" rang true: "[Nick] Gillespie is giving voice to a frequent belief that because their movement is orthogonal to the partisan divide in this country, libertarians are inherently more intellectually honest than [liberals or conservatives]."
- Remainders: The Joe Barton position on BP is just the cruder version of the Republican position on BP; Al Franken on judicial activism; never forget that large swathes of the conservative movement are motivated by total contempt for poor people; it's incredible how willing humanity is to lay waste to the world for money; and are economics students more likely to become Republicans or are Republicans more likely to study economics?
--Mori Dinauer
