What to Read Before You Unwonk for the Weekend

Want to be the nerdiest person at happy hour? Read this before you head out of the office. 

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  • Ted Widmer's op-ed on the difficulty of being in the third-year of a presidential administration is beautifully-written, chockfull of wonkalicious presidential history, and very smart. If you're going to read one article before the weekend, make it this one.
  • If you have time to read only two things before the weekend, make this one your second. A member of the one percent refuses the label of job creator, and instead bestows it upon the middle class, and he has a good argument as for why everyone should agree with him.
  • Newt Gingrich may be the current frontrunner, but he hasn't been raking in many endorsements, which have been shown to be a better predictor of victory than polls. How the primary unfolds will be a good test of this political theory.
  • Women for Herman Cain also like nannies and South African sugar. If he really wanted to salvage his campaign, he obviously should have used one of these images.
  • Things Newt Gingrich likes: being in the lead, old people, the word fundamentally.
  • The problem with Mitt Romney's primary strategy? He's wooing lukewarm conservatives that match his personality and positions instead of those who will vote in the primary (super conservatives) and the general election (moderate Republicans).
  • As Mike Konczal points out, it's great that unemployment is dropping, but it's not so great that the past year has not been defined by proactive economic action by the government. This should have happened a long time ago.
  • Also, if the United States keeps adding jobs at the same rate it currently is, it's going to take a long, long time to reach full employment.
  • Truth, courtesy of Jonathan Chait: "Republicans don't oppose taxes per se. They oppose progressive taxes."
  • Truth II, courtesy of Ezra Klein: Obama "has brought...a lot of change. Perhaps not the change people thought they were getting. And perhaps it hasn't looked the way they had hoped it would look. But, like his fundraising operation, he has been an effective president, even if his methods have not always been pretty."

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