Good to see Republicans blow the political messaging for a change.

Larry Summers doesn’t just have dirty hands — he helped steward the Phil Gramm-led repeal of Glass-Steagall through Congress, and convinced Clinton to go along with it.

The Kaldor-Hicks criterion has real-world implications. They aren’t good.

Given an understanding that politics is not much more than war without weapons (usually), it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a lot of ill will involved.

George Will threw some ill-informed mud at President Obama’s economic agenda this morning. Fortunately for Will, his pieces run in the fact-free zone of the Washington Post.

Somewhere between 9/11 and now, we forgot that wars are not supposed to be generations-long struggles. They’re supposed to chart a clear-if-difficult path to a victory, measured in a safer and more just peace at a reasonable cost. Struggle — a burden actually borne by a much smaller proportion of the populace than those who find that burden cleansing to the American spirit — is not supposed to be an indication of a war’s merits. A war without end used to be the height of a country’s madness.

It should now be clear that the real reason the sheriffs want this data is that it exists and everyone else has it.

Happy Morning. Emptywheel’s on Virtually Speaking with Froomkin. And you can watch Monday’s movie right here.

I wonder if anyone will ask Boehner about this? What do you make of the lineup? Crowley’s bragging up the both-sides-of-the-aisle debate of her show but it looks unbalanced to me.

Droopy in Outfoxed. This Metro Goldwyn Meyer cartoon was released on November 5, 1949.

9/11 changed nothing. It should have, but it did not. It encouraged the most foolish and reactionary forces in American governance to launch brainless military expeditions. It perpetuated a persistent “us v them” strain in American political discourse that can be cheaply exploited by lunatic hucksters.