Former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw whips up an analogy to explain why he's leery of even a deficit-neutral health care reform:

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock).

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In 2006, the Sunlight Foundation launched a campaign to get members of Congress to post their daily calendars on the Internet. "The Punch-Clock Campaign" collected pledges from ninety-two candidates for Congress, and one of them was elected. I remember when the project was described to me by one of its developers. She assumed that I would be struck by its brilliance. I was not. It seemed to me that there were too many legitimate reasons why someone might not want his or her "daily official work schedule" available to anyone with an Internet connection. Still, I didn’t challenge her. I was just coming into the "transparency movement." Surely these things would become clearer, so to speak, later on.

Alex Jones is a husky man with short sandy hair, weary eyes, baby cheeks, and the kind of deep, gravelly voice made for horror-movie trailers. And it’s horror he has in mind. "Your New World Order will fall!" he screams through a megaphone at the shiny façade of a nondescript office building. "Humanity will defeat you!"

We can now add Apple to the list of companies bidding the Chamber of Commerce farewell over the group's obstruction on climate policy. This is the Chamber's highest-profile defection to date, and one that's guaranteed to keep the story percolating in the news a bit longer.

On an oppressively hot Saturday morning last month, a handful of pro-life activists gathered outside of a Starbucks in suburban Virginia to strategize about how to influence the Democratic Party’s national platform. The meeting quickly turned into a support group of sorts, as the members justified the seeming contradiction inherent in pro-life Democrats.

"Let me begin," says White House aide David Dreyer, "by contesting the premises of your question." It's a windless evening in November, and Dreyer is in his West Wing office, listening to a new recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and defending the role of Tony Coelho, for whom Dreyer once worked, in the Democrats' electoral debacle. "First," he says, "Tony was not the party chair. He was never, to my knowledge, actually in the dnc building. Second, the role of party chair in a midterm election is relatively unimportant anyhow.