Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to the great Barry Lamar Bonds, 49. Probably still would be a league-average hitter, if they hadn't blackballed him. Certainly as great a player as any of us has seen. And was just good at so many things on the field, beyond his too-good-for-the-game hitting during the late career surge.

Some good stuff:

1. Huh. Chris Cillizza is now willing to write that House Republicans are primarily responsible for the lack of compromise in Congress. Interesting (via...sorry, someone caught this and put it on twitter, but I didn't save it).

2. A new paper by Anthony Johnstone on campaign finance disclosure, with the abstract at Election Law Blog.

3. Another abstract: Melissa Miller and Jeffrey Peak on gender and press coverage of Sarah Palin's VP campaign.

4. Of course I agree with Matt Yglesias about revolving doors and corruption. Except I mostly don't worry about it at all, not just in the circumstance he discusses. Excellent post.

5. And I have mentioned that I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best blogger out there, haven't I? Yet another good one.

Monday Cranky Blogging 3

It's been a while since the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle made me cranky, at least politically cranky...but, yup, yesterday's did the trick. It was 24 Across: "Tammany Hall corruption, e.g.?" The answer: "Evil from New York" (The question mark in the clue is pegged to the theme, which had to do with "flipped front" so that the answer was a riff on "Live from New York").

"Evil"? Really? I suppose that to some extent it's justified, since it asks about Tammany Hall corruption, as opposed to Tammany Hall or machine politics in general. But, really, the crossword writer and editor can't think of a better example of New York evil?

It's all Goo Goo nonsense, in my view. For the best understanding of "corruption," read Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. That's not to say there was no dishonest graft or other even worse behavior, but normal machine politics, including "honest" graft, is in my view probably a positive, but at any rate far from evil.

Evil? Try a progressive politician...say, Woodrow Wilson.

Scandal!

Ezra Klein returns from China to find a puzzling kerfuffle over the Sestak thing, and asks:

So what's going on?  Are people just pretending to be offended?

Short answer: yes, people are just pretending to be offended.  That's what's going on.

See a related post from Conor Friedersdorf.

Longer answer: the US has a disconnect between a political system based on parties, bargaining, deal-making, logrolling, and, more broadly, (self-) interested people and groups finding ways to work things out with each other, and a political culture that has quite a bit of disdain for all those things.  See, for example, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the dozens of movies and TV shows that have followed, all built around the idea that parties are bad, interest groups are bad, cutting deals is bad, and the only hope for democracy are radically independent people with pure motives who alone have access to what constitutes good policy.  Thanks to that disconnect, there are always plenty of perfectly ordinary things that pols do in the perfectly ordinary course of their jobs that can easily be sold to many reporters as corrupt.