Nicholas Kristof:
But imagine if Palestinians stopped the rock-throwing and put female pacifists in the lead. What if 1,000 women sat down peacefully on a road to block access to an illegal Jewish settlement built on Palestinian farmland? What if the women allowed themselves to be tear-gassed, beaten and arrested without a single rock being thrown? Those images would be on televisions around the world — particularly if hundreds more women marched in to replace those hauled away.
"This is what Israel is most afraid of," said Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, a prominent Palestinian who is calling for a nonviolent mass movement. He says Palestinians need to create their own version of Gandhi’s famous 1930 salt march.
McClatchy:
Frustrated with limited data on the BP oil gusher, a group of independent scientists has proposed a large experiment that would give a clearer understanding of where the oil and gas are going and where they'll do the most damage.
The scientists say their mission must be undertaken immediately, before BP kills the runaway well. They propose using what's probably the world's worst oil accident to learn how crude oil and natural gas move through water when they're released at high volumes from the deep sea.
Ezra Klein:
It’s Always the Economy, Stupid
For decades now, political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can get within 2 points of the final vote, and they don’t need to know anything about the ads and the gaffes and the ground games. All they really need to know about is the economy.
Josef Joffe:
As John Kenneth Galbraith, no deficit slouch he, put it with mild irony in his classic The Great Crash, 1929: Since then, "there has been a modest accretion of economic knowledge. A developing depression would not now be met with a fixed determination to make it worse." In the fall of 2008, all governments—from Berlin to Beijing, with Washington in the lead—went into massive overspending from 3 to 5 percent of GDP. Today, the result is a double-digit U.S. shortfall that resembles Greece’s, and a German deficit approaching 6 percent, almost twice as much as permitted by the guardians of the euro.
The "fiscal orthodoxy" of the Europeans is anything but Brüning and Hoover rolled up into one. Good Keynesians, they’re merely reducing their astronomical deficits, not eradicating them. They intend not to slam on the brakes, but merely to ease up on the accelerator. It’s deep-red deficits as far as the eye can see.
The conservative viewpoint. But the best line is still Galbraith's.
Andrew Alexander (WaPo) takes us back to the 90's:
In the Internet age, readers rule. And with The Post's future so dependent on growing its Web audience, why shouldn't the customer be king?
But this relentless focus on giving readers what they want has exposed confusion and concern within The Post's newsroom about journalistic standards. Many Web-focused staffers are more inclined to post a story that is not fully verified, simply because it's the buzz on the Web and will draw traffic. Veterans, steeped in a print culture, worry that a fixation on traffic-driving celebrities will cheapen The Post brand and lessen its commitment to public service journalism. If traffic ends up guiding coverage, they wonder, will The Post choose not to pursue some important stories because they're "dull"?
Oh, wait, he just wrote that? They're in trouble. Of course, their current model is "don't just not write an unflattering story about conservatives quickly, don't write it at all." Their coverage of the Bush years was abysmal. And they still don't cover the lunatics in Congress like Steve King or Michele Bachmann in any depth.
Colorado Independent:
In a room of 600 conservative voters brought together by former Colorado Senate president John Andrews’ Centennial Institute, along with Liberty on the Rocks and Colorado Christian University, Bachmann brought the crowd to its feet more than once as she called for an end to the progressive agenda she said has taken over Washington.
"‘We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,’" Bachmann read from founding father John Jay , ending her reading with the statement, "We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves."...
Bachmann further said the military should not be used as a social experiment, called for the privatization of social security for those under 55, as well as the elimination of the capital gains tax, estate tax, alternative minimum tax, and the reduction of taxes to 20 percent for individual income and 9 percent for businesses. Finally, she called for the total repeal of "Obamacare" to thunderous applause.
Hey, WaPo, if you can't afford to send a reporter, just get 3 months worth of her speech transcripts. Do the same for Sharron Angle or Rand Paul or Steve King. Do your readers a service and restore the kind of coverage you used to get from Weigel and Froomkin before you canned them. It's not just slow, it's absent.