Daily Reads: July 26, 2012

Today' best from around the web.

Frederick the Great of Prussia

Today's must read:


Enough would-be-high-minded essays, Andrew Sullivan's collection of reactions to Romney's botched UK trip is hilarious:

All in all: hilarious so far. But one serious point: the Brits bitch and moan about everything all the time. They are characterologically piss-takers and doom-mongers, fearing (and predicting) national embarrassment always around the corner. But if a non-Brit joins in the doom chorus, the ranks will close, and the anger will be intense. They expect that kind of sneer from the French, not from an American. And now the Brits have a real asshole to prove wrong: the guy who's running to be president of the US.

Read these too: 


Jonathan Chait on Bush-Romney policy parallels, and the messaging conundrum those parallels present:

But the surprising thing is that Romney didn’t even have that, or any other handy answer to the question. This is a pretty bad political messaging slip-up, but it also indicates a larger problem: Republicans haven’t really internalized the degree to which Bush’s policies truly failed to produce strong economic growth. They blame him for letting spending grow too high, and they recognize that the crash was a bad thing, but conservative rhetoric almost uniformly fails to acknowledge that even pre-crash growth under Bush was absolutely miserable.

Ezra Klein writes about an Obama Administration effort to give states more leeway in designing their welfare systems. Here's the key point: 

The metaphor we tend to use for congressional dysfunction is “gridlock.” When you have gridlock, nothing moves. But that’s not quite what we’ve seen. When Congress grinds to a halt, other governmental actors step into the breach. This isn’t a particularly good alternative: For one thing, these other actors don’t have the powers of Congress, and so they need to use roundabout, inefficient ways of achieving their goals. For another, these actors are less accountable than Congress.

But it’s important to realize that this wouldn’t happen if Congress didn’t want it to: Just as Congress could act to write a climate bill, it could also act to stop the EPA from regulating carbon. But when gridlock is driven by minority obstruction, you often have a majority that would like to see some effort made to address these problems, and if they can’t do it themselves, they’re willing to stand back and let other parts of the government do it. This is just one more reason why the increasing level of congressional dysfunction should worry those on both the left and the right: It’s leading government to work in ways the Founders never intended, and that frankly doesn’t make very much sense.

Ezra Klein earns a double dip for his observations on the peculiar link between politics and policy in contemporary Washington: 

My job means I spend a lot of time in rooms with policy experts on both sides of the aisle. I have rarely walked out of those rooms thinking that it would be difficult for the two sides to reach a private consensus. My job also means I spent a lot of time reporting on rooms where politicians on both sides of the aisle are trying to come to agreement. I have rarely reported on one of those processes where it didn’t seem like the participants could reach a consensus.

The problem comes when the door opens...As a rule, Washington isn’t riven by policy disagreements. It’s riven by political disagreements, and one in particular: The two parties disagree over who should win the next election.

Coates has a great little post on civil virtue and the early American republic. 


Brad Plumer reports on some tenuous signs that the European Central Bank may be ready to act more aggressively to stem the tide.