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- Barack Obama has scheduled an address before a joint session of Congress for September 9, presumably to make clear what he wants out of health care reform legislation. According to Politico's deep well of anonymous White House sources, the president is considering ditching the public option "to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done." Never mind the conservative movement's lockstep opposition to everything you stand for, you have to make sure you put those wild-eyed liberals in their place.
- I'm glad The Wall Street Journal is pointing out that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is having a beneficial effect on the economy. The only question, as Ezra Klein asks, is how much. But if you're in the House Republican leadership, you demonstrate your formidable grasp of economic policy by arguing for canceling the rest of the stimulus to start paying off the national debt.
- I appreciate that Jim Manzi thinks the social cost of carbon pricing makes cap-and-trade not worth the effort. That's his right. But he has to go a step further, claiming that "socialism" is "implicit" in those social costs and then alludes to Hayek for good measure: "His prediction that the welfare state would lead to serfdom, however, has (thus far) not been correct. I don’t think that a carbon tax will be the one event that will push the free world into socialist slavery. But it does seem clear that the same dynamics he described decades ago have re-emerged, simply with a different theoretical justification."
- For those of you not keeping up on the latest conspiracy theories coming out of the right wing, here's an update: Comrade Pelosi is banning patriotic call-hold music; Stephen Chu is a "radical global warming activist"; the Obama administration is going to start spying on social networking sites; and K-Lo finds evidence that the U.S. is succumbing to the inevitable UN world government.
- Remainders: What does Olympia Snowe want?; Newsweek points out that opponents of health care reform are mostly liars; Dick Cheney for president!; The former governor of Alaska's path to the presidency could involve being a source of mockery; and Jon Henke discovers how reasonable, gracious, and sane the wingnut base really is.
--Mori Dinauer
