Joan Walsh on the Austin plane crash:
At the end of the day, literally, it's not clear there are any larger lessons to be drawn. Ideology aside, Stack tried to make himself out as a casualty of our economic system, and Lord knows, there are plenty of them out there. Yet he still owned a private plane, learned how to fly it, and the house he allegedly set on fire looked pretty nice. Sometimes crazy people are mostly crazy, and a crime is just a crime. We may find bigger answers one of these days, but so far we didn't find them on Thursday.
Nicholas Kristof:
Our health care has been memorably compared, by Jonathan Rauch of The National Journal, to the airline system. That made me wonder: What if the news industry were like our unreformed health care system ... ?...
Columnists in other countries simply scribble illegibly in notebooks, but here in the United States we administer CAT scans to interviewees, just to rule out the chance that our subject is dead. Expensive, yes — but we Americans must never settle for second-best.
Jeffrey Rosen:
He's too detached and cerebral . Too deferential to Congress. Too willing to compromise . And he's too much of a law professor and not enough of a commander in chief, as Sarah Palin recently admonished.
These are some of the qualities for which the president, rightly or wrongly, is criticized. They are also the qualities that make him well suited for another steady job on the federal payroll: Barack Obama, Supreme Court justice.
Think about it...
A column predicated on what Sarah Palin thinks is not off to a good start. And whether Obama would make a good SCOTUS is irrelevant. Other than that, it's a good read.
Kathleen Parker:
All those other rising stars? So yesterday. Sarah? Scott who?
You'd think from all the print, chatter and buzz that Marco -- the name fans seem to prefer -- had charted the Silk Road. On a slightly smaller scale, he launched the annual Conservative Political Action Conference parade of stars Thursday with a rousing speech that brought giddy conservatives to their feet.
That would be CPAC, who voted for Ron Paul (31%) in the straw election over Romney (21%) and with Palin a distant third (7%) and Pawlenty behind her (6%). Now there's a well grounded group of people.
Ezra Klein:
The White House health-care summit on Thursday is supposed to mark a return to politics as it should be practiced -- the president leading the legislative process, the two parties talking things out, bipartisanship flowering, order restored.
Chances are, however, it won't work out that way. The summit is a result of, not the solution to, the problems afflicting national politics. And for all the rhetoric about bipartisanship, it's probably going to make the partisan sniping worse.
I hope so. It should, because it's designed to break the logjam and get reform passed, not as a counseling session for grieving Republicans. (see also blue aardvark's diary for more comment.)
Charlie Cook (National Journal interview):
This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn't big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn't want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.
And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn't worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn't a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.
And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we've seen in modern political history.
Jury's still out on that one. Missing the boat on a stimulus package that wasn't big enough and too tied in with TARP and auto bailouts? Check. But the tea reading on health care may still be colossally wrong.