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- Greg Sargent has been assiduously following a hollow new meme: that Barack Obama needs to show more emotion when dealing with the Gulf catastrophe because only then will people feel like something's being done. One might note that this isn't even a real criticism of the administration's role in the disaster -- indeed, vital regulatory organs were not relieved of their Bush-era atrophy with any sense of urgency. Rather, this lack of an "emotive" Obama is the height of superficial political analysis coupled with an unwavering belief in the power of the presidency to make stuff happen.
- I've noted here before that one of the underreported benefits of the rise of political blogging is that it has increased access to political-science research, and now, via the pioneers at The Monkey Cage, we're starting to see the fruits of this development. But with political scientists jumping into the same medium as political reporters, a new challenge is implicit: "If much of what’s important about politics is either stable and predictable or unknowable, what’s the value of the sort of news -- a hyperactive chronicle of the day’s events, coupled with instant speculation about their meaning -- that has become a staple of modern political reporting?"
- Jonathan Bernstein inaugurates a series of posts on the U.S. Senate with an important and ordinarily obscured fact: "It's worth pointing out that the origins of the type of bicameral Congress we ended up with are in self-interest, not in political theory. The Senate was the price that the people who wanted a strong central government had to pay, nothing more. 'State's Rights' is, and has always been, a slogan used by people with a variety of agendas, not a well-thought-out position in republican theory." It's tempting to see the origins of our government strictly in the terms of the Federalist Papers, but at the end of the day politics trumped philosophy.
- Holiday Remainders: Large pieces of domestic legislation, no matter how sweeping, are rarely equal; I wonder what color the sky is in The Weekly Standard's alternative universe; career futurists should not speculate about politics; Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Science fiction opinion-journalism, the kind practiced in this instance by Lanny Davis, is concerned with the theory of parallel worlds;" and it really shouldn't be difficult to define what makes a country a "superpower."
--Mori Dinauer
