A Halloween Story for Thanksgiving

Robert Reich chose Thanksgiving Day to post a very scary column at Huffington Post. Read it if you dare (caution: it features a former half-term governor of Alaska).

the deficit commission trial balloon

The co-chairs of the deficit commission have released a trial balloon before the commission finishes its work. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has a commment, with a nice chart to illustrate, on why they're on the wrong track.

Robert Reich explains it all for us

Via BuzzFlash, here's an informative column by Robert Reich with some history of the country's economic woes and a few novel suggestions on how we could get out of the Great Recession.

Some straight talk on taxes and congress

E. J. Dionne consistently writes good columns, but seldom as good as his latest. Highly recommended!

Boehner gets called out by Norm Ornstein

You'll love the last paragraph of this wonky opinion piece for RollCall by the wonderful Norm Ornstein. He calls out Boehner for his childish behavior. The only thing I can argue with is that he suggests that Boehner used to be a serious legislator...in what parallel universe??

David Obey's statement

As you've probably heard, Rep. David Obey has decided not to run for reelection. He issued a long statement, reproduced here by Digby, which is well worth reading.

What David Frum said

You may have read about David Frum's article characterizing health care reform passage as the Republicans' Waterloo. Oddly, every link I tried failed to work, so I tried Bing and found it. Here it is. He correctly says that the over-the-top wingnut response to Obama has badly harmed the Republican party. From his lips to God's ears!

BTW, best comment I've seen so far today was from the Huffington Post's religion editor, who quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.: "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Best of Show from the Healthcare Summit

Courtesy of the Washington Monthly blog, here's a post with a stirring clip from the summit: Sen. Durbin addressing the issue of malpractice reform.

Nooooorrrm!

If you're feeling down about congress, you may feel better if you read this post from the Washington Monthly to see what THE expert on congress, Norm Ormstein, thinks about how the Democrats have done so far.

A graph is worth a thousand words

From The Washington Monthly, here's a graph that gives a stunning summary of the Bush-years economy compared to previous decades. We knew our first MBA president didn't cover himself in glory, but a hundred Krugman columns couldn't say it this well.