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- The takeaway point from a new analysis of the government's response to the economic collapse in 2008 isn't that any of the individual programs were instrumental in preventing an economic depression but that taken together they were. I don't expect this to change anyone's opinion about government intervention, but it's worth considering what the alternatives would have been. Do nothing? A five-year spending freeze? More upper income tax cuts? Intervention might not have been bold enough, but at least it was an actual response to a crisis.
- It's something of a watershed moment when someone with the Beltway cred of Mark Halperin proclaims that it's conservatives who are the driving force of media firestorms. My advice for traditional media is to simply ignore Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, etc. and let them talk among themselves so people with a genuine interest in getting information from legitimate news sources can avoid the distraction the freak-show right-wingers provide on a near-daily basis.
- Hendrick Hertzberg concludes, after viewing a recent debate with Electoral College crusader Tara Ross, that "the arguments sound feeble because they are feeble." I don't think the motivation is too hard to devine. Ross, like most American conservatives, believes so strongly in American Exceptionalism that tampering with any of our constitutional arrangements, no matter how archaic or unnecessary, will somehow lessen us. Thus the impulse to make feeble post-hoc arguments defending said archaic arrangements.
- Remainders: Opposition to filibuster reform is largely coming from veteran senators who remember a long-gone Senate; Roger Simon ought to take a moment to look up "irony" in the dictionary; and are Americans willing to accept higher taxes in the abstract?
--Mori Dinauer
