Happy Birthday to Barry Andrews, 55. For some reason, I've never much listened to Shriekback. I really should, at some point. I like White Music, but I'm a very big fan of Go 2. Two stars, All Music? No way.
Aw, no one cares, I suppose. So I'll move on to the good stuff:
1. I really liked this John Sides post about the recent jobs report, and the remaining ones. I've been saying similar things, but he really nails it.
2. Joseph Cera: the "better off" question may have caused the Democratic bounce by framing the economic question in a way that favors Barack Obama.
3. Republican amnesia: wait, they can't remember why there's a scheduled sequester? Suzy Khimm, fortunately, remembers.
4. Molly Ball on Barry Goldwater's granddaughter, Obama supporter. Although it seemed to me that there was a fair amount of feuding involved in addition to policy preferences. But always happy to link an Arizona story.
5. Abby Rapoport is absolutely right: state legislative elections are really, really important. I'm afraid I rarely talk about state politics, mostly because I really don't know enough to say much about it...basically, every few months I'll toss in a reminder about how important state and local politics are, and that's about it. But it's true! Anyway, she's looking at what's at stake this year.
6. Hey, remember the war on terror? Spencer Ackerman has a quick overview of what's going on now. Helpful.
7. And if you didn't see Mike Konczal's brilliant illustration of Bernanke, QE3, NGDP targeting, and the rest of it then you really should click over now and enjoy. And learn something.
I preferred White Music to Go 2, but, still, I care.
ReplyDelete"In a rational world, as the emergency receded, so too would the institutional mechanisms of response."
ReplyDeleteI'm not really sure what Ackerman is basing that expectation on. Nothing endures like bureaucracy. Even beyond that though, no one expected the Transportation Security Administration or the Department of Homeland Security to disappear as soon as the emergency let up, nor were they intended to. Regardless of what you think of them, their purpose is to prevent incidents; dismantling them and then reconstituting them after the next emergency wouldn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Apart from the TSA, little that is in the DHS was actually new in any event, it was just repackaged and hopefully better coordinated. And the TSA, while new, was fulfilling a function performed since at least the 1970s by private security firms in reponse to hijackings, an earlier form of terrorism. Overall, Ackerman paints a picture of a receding effort within an ongoing institutional structure in response to a threat that is also probably receding but which (many people will argue) persists at some level.
It's strange how the lefty mind works. Any talk of government "receding" is met with hysterical claims like "grandma's being pushed over the cliff".
DeleteThere's no middle ground. There is no rational process. There is no reasoned decision making. There is only the Left's hysteria that we must have either an ever growing government or the abyss.
" I'm afraid I rarely talk about state politics, mostly because I really don't know enough to say much about it..." The first pundit ever to be inhibited by ignorance of subject matter.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, sounds as if this would be an under-studied specialty in political science.
Bill: for the most part, you're right. There's a bunch of people doing great work in state politics, but with 50 of them, there's tons of material to be studied.
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