Abbreviated Daily Reading: June 15, 2012

It's a St. Louis Brewers' Heritage Festival kind of Daily Reading (meaning a short Daily Reading)
Sometimes, after all, I do things besides reading online news. Like drinking fine micro-brews from every corner of the greatest city on earth. [My favorite.]



A rhetorical analysis of Obama's economy address is coming tomorrow, with the second edition of Pat Nolan's Comparative Journalism Hour on tap for Sunday. 

But still a lot of good stuff today: 

Read of the day: Bruce Bartlett: Reagan could not lead today's GOP. I've been on the GOP-is-off-the-tracks bandwagon (mixing metaphors ftw) ever since my earliest forays into political writing. 


Chait has my favorite reaction to the big immigration news today: 

I’m sure that politics were a driving consideration for Obama’s decision. But it’s not the only consideration, and it’s not the only thing to care about. The most important thing is that some one million young people  will now have a chance to live their lives in this country free of the terror that their parents’ actions (actions borne of nothing worse than a desire for freedom and opportunity) will not expose them to the horrors of deportation. They may not be American citizens, but most of us consider them our fellow Americans, and can regard the measure of relief they now have gained with relief of our own, and joy.

Catherine Rampell on public perceptions of China's economic power. 


Howard French says it's time to take Africa more seriously: 

What stands out most about the articles, instead, is the way that this news has cast the African continent as a place where serious American interests are at play. Such things are all too rare for the mainstream media. Far more typically, the media chronicles African political upheaval, violence and suffering as distant and almost random incidents or miscellany with little connection to life outside of the continent.

The Africa of our day-to-day coverage is dominated, in other words, by vivid splashes of color, by scene and emotion, and it is largely bereft of form or of pattern, and of politics and ideas that could help connect one development to another or connect the whole to the rest of the world. Some of this may be changing slowly with the recent sharp rise of China's profile throughout the continent, which has drawn a belated response from a United States suddenly eager to avoid watching the continent get snatched away from the West, as some fear.

Sarah Kliff: maybe electronic medical records aren't a silver bullet after all.  


I agree with Ezra Klein. Our political journalism community has a lot of work to do. 


Warren Buffet is every populist's favorite capitalist.