Schumer pal gets 150 years
The short version of Krugman's argument re cap and trade. And here's the longer version.
White House: We are going to change your lightbulbs and lamps. Good grief.
Related: Where does American electricity come from?
What does Cameron stand for?
Lowry asks whether the O is losing his mojo. A quote:
...the danger is that the public will conclude that he's "a nice young man" -- talented and well-meaning, but ineffectual and a little naive.
Is college worth it?
Honduras: This was no coup
Some Swedes try a weird experiment on their kid
Look who is going to be "helping" with the census
George Washington's teeth. They look pretty good to me. I thought he had wooden false teeth. If you had decent teeth in middle age in those days, you were lucky.
Powerline on the Ricci case begins
Short of writing "get whitey," It's difficult to imagine how Judge Sotomayor could have fouled up the Ricci case any more than she did. Let's count the ways.
Related: Is the Ricci decision anti-business?
The O's legislative program. Or is it just Congress'? Quote:
We're going to do great damage to the economy without actually reducing greenhouse gases, and we are going to create a massive new entitlement without actually restructuring the health care system. Much more of this and we will be done, and nobody, not even the president, seems to give a rat's ass.
Megan McA on the mortgage meltdown:
John Carney has been doing a lot of blogging about the role of the CRA in the financial meltdown. That role is overstated by conservatives who are unwilling to admit that markets can have bad outcomes, but it is understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences.
The CRA did not singlehandedly cause the meltdown. But the relaxation of credit standards that allowed the meltdown did start, as far as I can tell, with the CRA. And perhaps more importantly, the CRA, and the mentality behind the CRA, made regulators extremely unwilling to intervene. Everyone wanted to make credit more widely available to the poor. Well, the poor aren't good lending risks. So if you want to give them access to credit, you need to relax your lending standards. Any attempt to tighten lending standards on the part of the government would have resulted in a massive contraction in the credit available to core Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were hoping that turning poor people into homeowners would make them more Republican.