If the US fought for the post-carbon economy the way it fights for nebulous state-building goals in foreign wars, the future would be brighter, cleaner, safer and cheaper, with more jobs and perhaps – because it would need to secure less of that foreign oil -fewer wars. If the country built new classrooms with the same urgency it built armored vehicles, more American teens could be choosing between colleges instead of choosing between minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs – and fewer would eventually need public assistance. If the government spent more on blackboards and less on bullets, it would create more jobs today and more innovation in the future.

Many of the design principles for the insurance market exchanges in the Affordable Care Act were based on unproven, discredited, and frankly absurd conservative notions about the economagic of free markets. But too many liberals refused to acknowledge this until they saw Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney make the same arguments.

Now that Klein isn’t trying to defend Democrats and President Obama’s poorly designed and corrupt health care law he has dramatically changed his tune.

Yesterday Obama scored another “w” with the passage of the Korea, Panama and Columbia Free Trade deals — virtually unchanged since Bush tried to push them through before he left office.

In 2008, the Columbia deal was a big campaign issue, with both Obama and Clinton denouncing any agreement until human rights conditions had been addressed. Obama declared he would oppose the Columbia deal “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

Since that time, the murder of labor leaders in Colombia has only accelerated, but the value of their lives has apparently declined. Because when the Colombia Free Trade agreement passed yesterday, it was awfully lonely in the “what about the dead labor leaders” room.

I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist Dr. Pangloss in Candide, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Ezra Klein is up with another post defending Obama with this same basic argument.

I have, and always have had, tremendous respect for Cenk Uygur. His contract with his audience is that he will never put himself in a position where he cannot say what he really thinks. And in turning down MSNBC’s offer to host a weekend show so he could give his audience a fair appraisal of what happened, he honors that contract.

Klein believes that we shouldn’t open the can of worms of a Constitutional battle that would have to play out in the courts. He believes – and said yesterday that they debt limit negotiations have failed, but he oddly tempers that despair in arguing to let the process play out. This is a very reassuring take compared to… Ezra Klein yesterday.

Ezra Klein cautions his readers not to get too attached to the idea the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on questioning the US debt might offer a way out of, or at least some leverage on, the debt limit hostage taking. And the alternative is…?

Dave Weigel caught Mitch McConnell making the novel statement that tax cuts don’t work.

It is never a good idea to get focused on the politics instead of results of your policy. When you do you wind up making bad policy and still get hammered politically.