Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Walter Koenig, 76.

The good stuff:

1. I'm going to strongly recommend an optimistic piece about the Arab Spring from Heather Hurlburt. I'm not expert enough to know whether she's right, but it's a point of view that needs more attention right now.

2. See also Fred Kaplan on Libya.

3. I hope you've been reading Dan Larison, who has been excellent; here he is on the convoluted arguments that defenders of Mitt Romney have had to go through the last couple of days.

4. Team Romney bashed the press; Scot Galupo responds.

4. Matt Yglesias is correct, of course, about Paul Ryan: his budgets have never had much in the way of details. In addition to what he says, don't forget that Ryan's tax "plan" was to cut rates and then tell CBO to just assume lots of revenues from...well, we have no idea.

5. Sarah Binder watches the Fed.

6. And there were a lot of good ones on QE3, but the best I saw was from Binyamin Appelbaum: "Fed: We will provide the punch for the party. Heavy pours. And we're not going to be too careful about closing time." I guess now we'll have to see if it works.