Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Wednesday... what's in store today?

Sam Stein:

Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood hit back hard on Monday to charges from White House critics that President Barack Obama's economic policies -- focused on leveraging government spending to stimulate demand -- had exacerbated the recession and constituted a form of socialism.

Nate Silver: How's Obama doing? Not so bad, actually.

Thomas Friedman:

Meanwhile, the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto G.O.P. boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to declare about President Obama to Politico: “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.” The G.O.P. is actually debating whether it wants our president to fail. Rather than help the president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls. It would be as if on the morning after 9/11, Democrats said they wanted no part of any war against Al Qaeda — “George Bush, you’re on your own.”

Thomas K. McCraw:

It is now necessary for Obama to take the model one step further. In addition to spending, there was a less visible but equally important element of FDR's program: stringent financial regulation to drive what the president called "unscrupulous money-changers" from the temple.

NY Times:

We welcome President Obama’s decision to lift the Bush administration’s restrictions on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. His move ends a long, bleak period in which the moral objections of religious conservatives were allowed to constrain the progress of a medically important science.

William Saletan:

On Monday, President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. If you support this research, congratulations: You won. Now for your next challenge: Don't lose your soul.

Always good advice. So, let's not and move on.

Michael Spencer:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Who knew?