Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Gena Rowlands, 82. One of the many terrific things about Columbo is that lots of the Cassavetes gang wound up in them. She's terrific in the one that she's in. Not, perhaps, as great as she is in A Woman Under the Influence, but nevertheless. I especially like when Val Avery shows up (he's Artie Jessup in the one where the police commissioner kills his wife, but he's in four Columbos in all).

Anyway, I better get to the good stuff:

1. Larry Bartels, on the "white working class" and who they vote for.

2. Dean Baker fisks a truly awful Robert Samuelson column about the ACA. Brutal.

3. "The Smoke-Filled Room" is an excellent name for political scientist blog. This brand-new one is by a team of grad students at Yale. I'll be checking in on it. First up: Louis Wasser on what's up in Egypt (via Voeten).

4. I don't link to Matthew Shugart enough. Here he is on the California top two ballot (including a picture of what it actually looked like.

5. And I may or may not wind up ever posting about The Wire, which I just finished a few months ago, but I'm definitely going to be reading Alyssa Rosenberg's rewatching of the famous HBO series. Here's the first entry, for the first three episodes.