Monday, March 26, 2012

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, 72.

The good stuff:

1. Health care. Walter Dellinger has "five myths" about ACA; all about health care costs, by Sarah Kliff; and Jonathan Cohn wishes the law a happy birthday.

2. For fun: Kliff on the business of standing in line to watch the Supremes at work.

3. Andrew Sprung responds to Brendan Nyhan's piece about Etch-a-Sketch. I think Sprung has a pretty good argument for how the gaffe should be properly interpreted...but I don't agree with him about the staying power of this one. I think it puts a name on something that was out there anyway, and that's about it.

4. The conservative reaction to Barack Obama's comments on Trayvon Martin, by Adam Serwer.

5. And back to health care: Dahlia Lithwick argues that the ACA case is just a sideshow; the real work of the Roberts Court will be elsewhere, and it's going to matter.

5 comments:

  1. Court talk reminds me way late of something last week that might have mattered: the Supreme Court declared that defendants have a right to competent representation even before and outside of trials. Really, since ~97% of cases don't go to trial, it's astonishing that there were no protections before now. Here's hoping the Innocence Project & co. are all over this.

    Or maybe it doesn't matter after all, now that "Law & Order"'s off the air.

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  2. That's a great Lithwick column. Very astute to look foremost at conservative legal elites' issue agenda over the past generation, which has never included interstate commerce matters as a focus or priority, and thus it would be unlikely for them to expend significant amounts of institutional and political capital on it, relative to other dearer issues.

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  3. Obama is helping no one by claiming to empathize with a boy because of skin color.

    articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-26/news/os-trayvon-martin-zimmerman-account-20120326_1_marijuana-report-press-conference-gated-community

    RTWT

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  4. I absolutely think Obama was pouring gasoline on a fire with his 'look like' comment.

    Some people might call it a dog whistle.

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  5. I posted the above after I had just begun reading the Serwer piece. (The 'gasoline on a fire' was my own words. I didn't know Michelle Malkin had used similar language. It's one of those occasions that seems to call for the cliche. Trying to be original seems over-cute.)

    Now that I've read the whole thing, I think it's pathetic even for Serwer. It's all straw men. There's no engagement with the real issue.

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