From Mark Schmitt, ruminating on the Republican agenda now that they’ve won control of the House:
Six years ago, pollster and political scientist Stan Greenberg published a book, The Two Americas, in which he broke down the American electorate of the middle Bush era into new categories. Two of those categories — the only two I remember — were the “F-You Boys” and the “F-You Old Men.” The categories are so perfectly named that they require little explanation.
Indeed they don’t — though the rest of Mark’s piece is worth reading. Next up is from Dahlia Lithwick, about a Supreme Court case argued today:
Arizona v. Winn is about a suicide pact between two doomed lines of First Amendment jurisprudence.
I don’t have anything to say about the case itself. I just love that sentence. Finally, here is Paul Krugman on the economy:
It’s an amazing thing: Obama and company have managed to convince people that big government failed, without actually delivering big government.
This is why I’m depressed about yesterday’s election. Not because it means Obama’s domestic agenda is finished. I never figured he’d have more than two or three years to get things done anyway. No, what’s depressing is that on the single biggest domestic issue we face, the election didn’t even matter. Our economy remains anemic, and even in the best case growth will stay slow and unemployment will remain dismally high for years. In the worst case, it’s fragile enough that almost any kind of external shock — a housing bust in China, a wave of state or local defaults in the U.S., the collapse of Greece or Ireland, an oil shock brought on by God knows what — would be enough to bring it to its knees.
We know what to do about this: on the fiscal side, spend a whole bunch of money; on the monetary side, target higher inflation. There’s nothing stopping us. But we’re not going to do it. We just aren’t. And even if Democrats had retained control of Congress yesterday, we still wouldn’t have done it. Instead, we’ve resigned ourselves to simply gutting through a long, grinding period of working class stagnation and praying that nothing happens to make it even worse. Basically, we’ve given up.
I really hope I’m wrong about this. I spend a lot of time these days hoping that I’m wrong.
