Ezra Klein

No tab dump today. It's Thanksgiving! Barring any unforeseen news breaks, this blog will return Monday. In the meantime, I'm thankful for all of you, my long-suffering, much-appreciated readers.

I'm a well-known turkey skeptic, but this reader's Thanksgiving menu is enough to convert me:

For the last three years, turkey has gone from the least interesting part of our meal to the star.

We get a heritage bird from a local farm – red bourbon, I think. About 10 pounds. We use a Weber Grill recipe, of all things – we brine the turkey overnight in apple juice, salt, thyme and sage. Then we roast it on the grill over applewood, breast down in seasoned chicken broth for an hour so that the breast essentially braises, then right side up for an hour. It keeps the white meat amazingly juicy and the broth makes the best gravy I have ever had in my life – rich and appley (I add some cider and mushrooms), with a slight hint of smokiness. It’s sensational.

Along with it we have the usual – stuffing (this year we are catering to a newly gluten-intolerant person – me -- with cornbread stuffing, but still rich with butter, herbs, onion, and mushrooms) mashed potatoes, loaded with butter and whole milk and the right amount of salt and pepper (why are mashed potatoes chronically underseasoned??), braised endives in broth with prosciutto, and finished it with cream; cranberry confit (pearl onions, sugar, balsamic vinegar, red wine, garlic, thyme and cranberries cooked til they pop), and candied sweets – simple and old fashioned (farmers market sweet potatoes boiled, peeled and bathed in caramelized brown sugar and butter.)

No dessert – it would be redundant (and hardly fair to the dessert.)

Can I come?

Over at U.S. News and World Report, Robert Schlesinger attaches some more numbers to the rise of the filibuster:

The fact of the matter is that the frequency of filibusters has increased by a factor of 50 since the days of (then-Democrat) Strom Thurmond jaw-jacking for 24 hours to stop a civil rights bill. So too has the general use of delaying tactics on major pieces of legislation. Consider some data points.

According to research by UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. That number has grown steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. More broadly, according to Sinclair, while 8 percent of major legislation in the 1960s was subject to "extended-debate-related problems" like filibusters, 70 percent of major bills were so targeted during the 110th Congress.

Read that again: from 8 percent -- pretty infrequently -- to 70 percent, or rule of the day. (These data come from Sinclair and from her chapter in CQ Press's Congress Reconsidered.)

I can't emphasize this enough: Things are not as they have always been. The filibuster has transformed, and the Senate has followed suit, and it all happened accidentally, not with anyone debating the consequences and implications of adding a supermajority requirement to the American legislative process.

In the comments beneath my column applying behavioral economics to Thanksgiving, a couple of folks accuse me of trying to pretty much ban eating during the holiday, which is pretty obviously not the point of the column. In any case, it's a good excuse to post my Thanksgiving menu, and invite you all to do the same.

• The turkey is probably the least interesting part. I got a good, 15-pound bird, and I'm brining it in accordance with Alton Brown's instructions. I'll throw some aromatics in the cavity, rub the thing down with butter, and stick it in the oven. I'm thinking about cooking the legs separately, but I haven't decided yet. Anyone have experience with that?
• Wild rice, sausage and fennel stuffing, for the carnivores. I'm using sweet Italian sausage, against my better instincts. Why doesn't everyone prefer the hot stuff? Recipe here.
• Mushroom, fennel, and parmesan stuffing for vegetarians. The consensus seems to be that olive bread works best here, so that's what I got. That whimpering sound you hear is tradition, who's crying quietly in the corner. Recipe here.
• Mashed potatoes.
• Alton Brown's green bean casserole, though I'm using French's fried onions rather than making the onions myself. I love French's fried onions.
• Corn pudding.
• Sweet potatoes baked in a mixture of sour cream and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Recipe here.

Desserts I'm leaving to other people. So what's on your menu? If some particularly good ones come in, I may post them on the front page.

Photo credit: The Washington Post

It didn't fit in the last post, but I also wanted to quote this bit from David Leonhardt's column:

Complaining that Congress and the White House aren’t doing enough to reduce the deficit is always a popular pundit game. So it’s no surprise that the last few weeks have been filled with knowing claims that health reform will fail to control spiraling health costs.

Sometimes, however, Washington really does succeed in reducing the deficit. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower both did it. President Bill Clinton and Congress eliminated the deficit. Their 1993 budget bill was derided by some of the same people now criticizing health reform as an economy wrecker. Instead, that budget bill created the first significant surpluses since the late 1940s (and helped make possible the 1990s economic boom).

Worth keeping in mind. Critics are right, of course, that Congress might not stick to the deficit reduction built into the health-care bill. In that way, cost controls are uncertain even when they are present. But they are a lot less uncertain than the outcome of inaction. Cost controls might not work when you try them, but they definitely don't work when you don't.

David Leonhardt has a great column today on all the cost-cutting opportunities still in the Senate bill. Liberals have a tendency to focus on the money that can be saved by a strong public plan, and it's true that that's a potential avenue for savings, but it's not the only one. Extending the new Medicare Commission to apply to hospitals in the first 10 years (they are, strangely, exempted, a quirk that many speculate was part of the deal with the hospital industry) would be a step forward. So too would be retargeting the Medicare Commission to a lower rate of spending growth (Leonhardt points out that it's been moved to track the rest of the health-care system, which is considerably less ambitious), increasing the penalties for hospital-related infections.

Indeed, the bill is chock-full of cost control opportunities of every shape and size, opportunities that the administration would happily support (they have always been far more committed to cost control than the average member of Congress). The conservative Democrats -- or, for that matter, the many Republicans -- who oppose this bill because they believe it insufficiently committed to deficit reduction have the opportunity to leverage their vote to do more to reduce the deficit than any single senator has in a generation, and possibly in the history of the republic.

But that is where things get tricky: There is a difference between someone who wants to reduce the national debt and someone who wants to use the debt as an excuse for casting a particular vote. It can be hard to identify such people in advance. But it will not be hard to identify them once debate on the health-care bill opens.

Commenter WoodbridgeVA adds an important piece to the filibuster story:

The major change in Senate rules that made possible the modern filibuster occurred under the leadership of Robert Byrd during his first stint as Majority Leader. Byrd introduced the concept of "dual tracking" under which the Senate could have two or more bills under floor consideration at any one time. Prior to this change, a filibuster ended floor consideration of all other bills until the one being filibustered had been disposed of. No appropriations, no nominations, no unanimous consent agreements, no nothing. All Senate business came to a dead halt during a filibuster, which raised the stakes on the members conducting the filibuster exponentially. The pressure that would be brought to bear if the entire Senate ground to a halt was one of the reasons filibusters were so rare.

Once Byrd changed the rules to allow dual tracking, filibusters became almost pain free. A Senator simply had to announce they intended to filibuster and the Majority Leader would use his dual track authority to move to other business and get around the road block. Over time, most leaders simply did a whip check and declined to schedule a bill if a filibuster was possible..

The dual-track authority is a fairly big piece of the puzzle. But the question, in part, is why it's been allowed to stand. Both Hill experts and political scientists argue that the reason, basically, is that the Senate has things to do. The frequency of the filibuster means that ending the dual tracking would be the same as shutting down the government. It would be a high-stakes showdown over a Senate rule change, which is not something that many in the Senate have evinced much interest in attempting.

But this is how the filibuster was normalized into a 60-vote requirement. Byrd responded to the slight uptick in filibusters by making it much easier and cheaper to filibuster, rather than leading a fight to make it much harder to filibuster. But he saw that as streamlining the process. It's not like the minority was going to filibuster everything. It just wasn't done.

But senators of both parties adapted to the new rules. This was still some years before the filibuster became constant, which allowed the Senate to ease into the new regime. But as people began to understand that threatening the filibuster was a lot easier than filibustering, they began to do it more often. The majority and the minority began to think in terms of 60, and strategize in terms of 60. And then, in the '90s and oughts, when the filibuster became the only Senate rule that mattered, it wasn't such a big leap from the period right before that, and so it didn't cause a showdown, either. The story of the filibuster is a story of small changes that everybody got used to, which allowed for more small changes that everybody got used to, and so on, until the Senate had undergone a large change indeed.

Speaking of the obesity crisis, here's a Froot Loops commercial in which the point is that Froot Loops is a healthy part of a well-balanced diet.

They've got the kid dressed up as a doctor and everything. Charming!

Catherine Rampell assembles two maps that do a pretty good job explaining why obesity is, whether we like it or not, something the country needs to worry about, as opposed to something that individuals deal with entirely on their own.

First, she posts this image from a recent Center for Disease Control and Prevention report:

Then comes this map of Medicare spending rates from the Dartmouth Atlas Project:

This might also be a good time to repost an old graph showing the percentage rise in health-care costs between 2001 and 2006 for folks in different weight categories:

As long as we help pay for each other through Medicare, Medicaid, and assorted other subsidies, the aggregate health of the nation is a concern for taxpayers, not just individuals. But this isn't just about government. As long as most of us pay health-care premiums based on the average health needs of other people (and that's true for everyone receiving employer-based health coverage, and any other type of risk-pooled coverage), the health of others will be a financial concern for us.

And, er, happy Thanksgiving!

This column originally appeared in the Food section.

It happens every year. It's not that you resolve to be virtuous on Thanksgiving, just reasonable. Two plates of food, and no more. One piece of pie, and that's enough. But when you're sitting at that table, staring at that food, there is no more self-control. No more reasonable. You stop when you can hardly breathe.

Or maybe I'm projecting. This column, however, will not be about exercising self-control at the table. It's Thanksgiving! Rather, this column will be about something far more powerful: exercising some economic principles.

For a long time, economists operated under the "rational actor model." Human beings were thought to be rational creatures who correctly weighed costs and benefits and calculated the best choices for themselves. Then some economists met some human beings and realized we don't really work like that. The result has been the rise of "behavioral economics," which attempts to build the responses of actual human beings into its models.

MIT economist Dan Ariely is a pioneer in the field. His bestselling book "Predictably Irrational" is as good an introduction to the discipline as you'll find. Human beings, he argues, aren't just irrational: They are irrational in predictable ways and in predictable circumstances. That means we can plan for that irrationality beforehand, when we're still feeling rational.

I asked Ariely how he would set up his Thanksgiving feast to limit overeating without having to exercise self-control. His answer was to construct the "architecture" of the meal beforehand. Create conditions that guide people toward good choices, or even use their irrationality to your benefit.

Mark Schmitt adds another perspective on the rise of the filibuster:

In terms of culture and custom, the turning point was almost certainly the previous health-reform debate, in 1993 and 1994. That's when Bob Dole, then the majority leader, made the phrase "You need 60 votes to do anything around here" his mantra, and when -- thanks to Bill Kristol's famous memo -- the idea of blocking major legislation for political reasons, rather than trying to get it revised to reflect your own policy preferences, took hold. Maybe I put too much weight on that period because that happens to be when I worked in the Senate, but there's no doubt that at that time, a whole bunch of obstructionist techniques came out of the dusty toolbox, such as "filling the amendment tree" and, in the House, the motion to recommit a bill to conference. (I once witnessed Ted Kennedy asking staffers for advice about how to break one of these tactics, which he had never seen in 34 years in the Senate.)

Underlying that, of course, was the structural change that came with the realignment from a four-party system, in which each party had a liberal and conservative wing, to two ideological parties. (A center-left party and a far right party.) As frustrating as today's conservative Democrats like Mary Landrieu are, none of them are more conservative than any Republican, and no Republican is more liberal than even the most conservative Democrat. As a result, a filibuster can be organized and enforced by a party leader, whereas in the past, there was considerable ideological overlap, so both sides of a fight would be cross-partisan, and thus loose and shifting.

In the old Senate (up to the early 1990s), there were dozens of possible configurations that could produce legislation that won broad majority support. You could see it quite visibly in the Senate Finance Committee when Lloyd Bentsen of Texas was the chair -- from the center of that horseshoe dais, he might put together a coalition on the center-left one day, and one on the center-right the next, and if he played the politics right, the vote in committee would typically be something like 17-4, with a similar majority on the floor. My boss, as one of the more liberal members, was sometimes in the majority coalition and sometimes a dissenter -- it changed all the time. As debate began, it was hard to predict the final vote.

But to watch Max Baucus maneuver in the same committee last month, you had to sympathize with how little he had to work with: Forty percent of his members were completely opting out -- any amendments they offered were purely symbolic or intended to support a talking point in opposition. The only coalitions available were a totally Democratic one and one that included Olympia Snowe. On the Senate floor, it's the same thing -- with a hundred senators, there are in theory, some mathematically unimaginable number of coalitions. But in reality, there are only two: Keep every single Democrat, including red-staters up for re-election and the now unabashedly malevolent Joe Lieberman, or lose one and get Olympia Snowe.

This is one of the explanations I favor for the rise of the filibuster: The Republican minority of the mid-'90s proved that a filibuster strategy was good politics. Kill the majority party's legislative agenda and you kill their standing in the eyes of the public, as well. America doesn't like losers, and the press has a useful tendency to blame legislative failure on the party that failed to pass the bill rather than the party that actually killed it.

That chart -- or, more accurately, collection of charts -- comes from Jackie Calmes and Michael Cooper, who pulled together a bunch of private forecasts to find what the analysts trusted by the all-powerful market thought the stimulus's effect had been. The answer was unambiguous: It cushioned, but did not wipe out, the effects of the recession. And that's not Democrats talking or Republicans talking. It's private analysts who, as Brad DeLong points out, are paid to deliver accurate information to their clients.

The electorate, of course, rewards actual conditions, not conditions relative to a hypothetical scenario in which ameliorative policies weren't adopted. But it's evidence that there's no actionable coherence clause in American politics that critics of the stimulus can argue against the effort on the grounds that joblessness is too high. If you think joblessness is too high and something should be done to lower it, then you think we should have more stimulus, not less.

One of the challenges in arguing about the use of the filibuster is that the filibuster has changed drastically in recent decades, but it's done so quietly. Quietly enough that people don't really understand that it's changed at all. That leads to an understandable complacency: If we've always had the filibuster, and we've done pretty well thus far, then maybe the filibuster isn't worth mucking with.

But though we've long had the filibuster, we have not long had a Senate that used it to impose a 60-vote requirement on all controversial legislation. Dramatizing the difference between the filibuster that was used to express opposition and filibuster that is used to impose a supermajority voting requirement is a bit difficult. But David Broockman, a senior at Yale, sent along a letter he came across in the LBJ presidential library that does it better than any document I've seen.

The letter was written by Mike Manatos, who served as Senate liaison for Johnson, and addressed to Larry O'Brien, who directed Johnson's campaign. It was written Dec. 8, 1964, just days after the election. Manatos is giving O'Brian an overview of how the Senate elections improved the chances of passing Medicare. He writes:

Of the 49 votes cast on behalf of Medicare (Gore amendment) on September 2, 1964, we lost two supporters in the last election -- Senators Keating and Salinger.

However, we picked up five new supporters -- Senators Bass, Harris, Kennedy (Robt.), Montoya, and Tydings.

We also had three supporters who missed the vote this year -- Senators Bayh, Hartke, and Kennedy (Ted).

Thus if all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45.

Of course, if we could persuade Senator Russell (who is on the brink) to support Medicare this year our margin should be even greater.

"We would win by a vote of 55 to 45." Phil Schiliro would not write that letter to David Plouffe today. There would be no vote of 55 to 45, because the filibuster would forestall the vote. The fact that 55 Democrats support a controversial bill would be immaterial unless there was some strategy for attracting five more senators to the side of the administration.

But in Johnson's time, it wasn't that way. And good thing, too. Until 1975, it took 67 votes, not 60, to break a filibuster. If the Senate had operated under a de facto 67 votes rule, little would have been done, because so much could have been stopped. Medicare eventually passed with 68 votes, but that was in part because it was going to pass, and bills that pass attract more votes than they would otherwise get. (It's also, as political scientists argue, because the country was less polarized, and the minority did not see blocking legislation as its primary path to power, or as the primary demand of its base.)

There are many examples along the lines of Medicare. The political scientist David Mayhew points to FDR's court-packing scheme as another instance in which a filibuster would have been assured today, but played no role at the time. “General opinion is that the [bill] will pass,” wrote the conservative Portland Herald Press, “and sooner than expected, since votes to pass it seem apparent, and the opposition cannot filibuster forever.”

The filibuster of yesteryear, in other words, was not a supermajority requirement. It was closer to a tantrum. That's not to say it was never used to prevent a vote: Southerners did exactly that to block the Civil Rights Act, and Johnson was forced to find 67 votes to break their effort. But such measures were left for extraordinary moments, not built into the everyday workings of the body. The use of the filibuster has changed, and with it, so too has the Senate. If that transformation is a good thing, then the practice's supporters can make their argument. But the radicals aren't the ones who want to undo stealth rewriting of the legislative process. It's those who want to ignore it.

1) I didn't know this many tax policy resources could exist in one place at one time.

2) The winning entry in the Washington Post's pundit contest.

3) Could Wall Street actually lose in Congress?

4) Rep. Dave Obey is very good at calling people's bluffs.

5) Why are we permitting a bad economy to get worse?

Recipe of the day: Mark Bittman looks back on his past Thanksgiving recipes.

In the filibuster thread this morning, commenter Spotatl asked, "If you really just dislike the filibuster overall and not just because the democrats currently have the majority you would support doing away with it in 7 years when no one has any idea who is going to be in control?"

Yes! Indeed, that's exactly the strategy I've suggested in the past. Make it 10 years, if you like. Anything else will be perceived, quite rightly, as a power grab, and whatever my opinion on the desirability of that power grab, it's impossible to imagine it happening. Breaking a filibuster, after all, requires 60 votes. Changing a Senate rule requires 67.

More to the point, it's important for Congress to begin thinking that way again. For the filibuster to end, Congress is going to have to rediscover its institutional voice. Democrats hate the filibuster when they're in power, and Republicans loathe it when they're in power, but it won't end until Congress decides it an enemy of Congress, rather than of whichever party happens to be in the majority at that moment.

People occasionally let slip that the filibuster is one of the checks and balances written into the Constitution. It isn't, of course. And its centrality to the process is a symptom of the failure of the checks and balances envisioned in our founding document. Congress was supposed to be stronger than the executive branch, and in competition with it. As such, it was considered very important, and very obvious, that Congress would work diligently to maximize its own power and authority. Congress would never permit some loophole to render it an ineffective branch, dependent entirely on rare supermajorities and presidential momentum to pass legislation.

But in recent years, American politics has become entirely about the president. Congressional elections are referendums on the president. Republicans lost in 2006 because Bush was unpopular, not because Harry Reid was beloved. Democrats understand that their fortunes are lashed to Obama's success, and Republicans have been clear that their return to power runs through his failure. Congress defines itself in relation to the president. That makes the filibuster very important to whichever party isn't in charge of the White House. It means the minority party has a continual stake in Congress not really working, because that means the president can't really succeed.

That's bad for the president, of course, but over time, it's also bad for Congress and bad for democracy. It means power devolves from the legislature and towards unelected, unaccountable organizations like the Federal Reserve, the EPA, the super MedPAC commission, or the courts. It means that the American people become frustrated with politics because the lever they think gets things done -- the presidency -- seems continually ineffective. It means that Congress falls out of practice at generating solutions to problems, and you develop the strange situation in which it appears to serve the president's agenda, as opposed to the president waiting for congressional action (people would find it peculiar, for instance, if Congress was carrying on with a serious health-care reform effort if Barack Obama was not also engaged in the subject).

The filibuster will end when Congress decides that it wants to be an effective, powerful institution again. But that's the only incentive Congress has to end it. So long as it's simply a question of partisan power, someone will always be in the minority, and so someone will always see the filibuster as serving their interests.

It's common these days to hear conservative Democrats say that they view procedural votes as indistinguishable from actual votes. Voting against a bill, and voting against allowing a vote on the bill, are exactly the same, they say. Bruce Bartlett e-mails to say that that wasn't always true, at least not when Republicans were in charge.

When I worked in the Senate there was a widely held, possibly universal, view at least on the Republican side that you never voted against a member of your own side on a procedural motion. You could vote as you wished on final passage of a bill or amendment, but you never voted to table a measure offered by a member of your own party. Everyone understood that one’s vote on a procedural matter didn’t necessarily indicate one’s substantive view on an issue. That was reflected only on final passage.

Today it seems as if this is very much a minority view. I don’t know why, but I suspect that the easy availability of votes online and the proliferation of groups doing vote ratings have a lot to do with it. People may also be more sophisticated about congressional procedure and now understand, as they may not earlier, that a yes vote to table is actually a no vote on the legislation itself.

Perhaps this is an area where partisan pundits on both sides could help their own side. If they helped bring back the understanding that it’s necessary to enforce party discipline on procedural votes as long as the freedom to vote one’s conscience on final passage is maintained then I think Congress would work better for everyone except ideologues. It seems to me that ideologues are per se the enemies of partisans.

Any other old congressional hands have a perspective on this? My e-mail is atop the page.

Dana Milbank's column on the new mammography standards seems strangely sanguine about letting Congress shut down independent scientific processes just because it doesn't like the result. But for all his criticism of the panel, he doesn't really question the science. Instead, he quotes Nancy Brinker, who heads Race for the Cure, saying, "Let me say it as clearly as I can, as a breast cancer survivor whose breast cancer was found with a mammogram at the age of 37. … Mammography saves lives."

But then why not triple mammograms?

One thing you're seeing here is a strong bias not just in favor of treatment, but in favor of the status quo on treatment. The evidence says we should have fewer mammograms than we do. However, those additional mammograms save some additional lives, and that's a powerful argument in the public sphere. People are more afraid of being the extremely rare individual to die because they didn't get an early screening than of being the fairly common individual who has to get a slew of invasive tests and endure weeks of terror because they got a false positive, or worse, gets serious and dangerous surgery based on a faulty test.

But no one is arguing that we should double, or triple, the frequency of mammograms. Why? Because it's not feasible, I guess. But if we're already admitting that there's some frequency that's not desirable, why settle on the status quo? My hunch is that it's comforting to believe that we've figured this one out already, and for groups that don't want to see a reduction in mammography, at least the status quo lays out ground they can defend. But I'd be very skeptical of arguments that seem to justify a virtually unlimited amount of mammograms, as opposed to arguments that have something to say about the correct level.

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are chewing over the hefty bipartisan support Bush got for his various domestic initiatives. The roll call is impressive: No Child Left Behind, the 2001 tax cut, the post-9/11 war resolution, Sarbanes-Oxley, McCain-Feingold, the Iraq war resolution, the 2003 tax cut, the Medicare prescription drug bill and the bankruptcy bill.

To make a bit of a heretical point, most of those cases prove that Bush's domestic agenda was a capitulation to liberalism, not that Democrats were spineless wimps. NCLB and the Medicare prescription drug bill were both longtime Democratic ideas. The problem with NCLB was implementation, and while the problem with Medicare Part D was that its design was a giveaway to drug companies, it was also hundreds and hundreds of billions funneled towards the largest expansions of Medicare since the program's creation. Health-care reform, in particular, would likely be impossible if the prescription drug benefit hadn't been accomplished. There'd be no way to add that money to the bottom line of the bill and pay for everything. Democrats owe Bush a debt of gratitude for tossing that onto the deficit.

Sarbanes-Oxley and McCain-Feingold were, again, bills doing basically progressive things. As I understand it, Bush didn't actually support either bill, but he decided against actually vetoing them. On some level, they represented the administration submitting to Congress and pubic opinion.

The war stuff is, well, the war stuff. Liberalism may have trumped conservatism in the Bush era, but neoconservatism was clearly dominant over both. The tax cuts were free money, and the bankruptcy bill was indefensible. But on the whole, Bush's domestic record is more a tale of co-opting liberal ideas and adding money for corporations than it is a tale of achieving longtime conservative ends.

By contrast, Barack Obama really is pursuing longtime progressive agenda items. There's no analogue to welfare reform on his docket. The administration's grim determination to leverage their uncommonly large majority to achieve things like health-care reform and cap-and-trade is, I think, somewhat underappreciated. The fact that they're not dogmatically liberal in the details can distract from the aggressive liberalism of their vision.

Photo credit: By Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Although the Texas Governor is weaker in his or her own state compared to most other governors in theirs, and that the Governor might be weaker than the Lieutenant Governor, the Governor of Texas is still possibly more powerful than a freshman U.S. Senator. The Governor has a power of veto that allows him or her to strongly push for legislation ideas, and the governor is still a management position. The Governor of Texas appoints people to countless amounts of important statewide offices, too.

Also, as far as Democrats are concerned, the Texas political landscape is in a lot more trouble than the national one. Oh, and it will be easier for a Democrat to win a state government race in Texas than a Senate race where the D would be died to Obama.

That's commenter Michael JJH, explaining why Houston mayor Kevin White looks likely to pursue the governor's house rather than Kay Bailey Hutchison's seat in the Senate.

Noam Scheiber defends Timothy Geithner against those demanding his resignation. Scheiber is right on the merits, I think, but the politics matter. Whether Geithner did his best against a bad hand, he created a public relations disaster by bailing out Wall Street and returning it to wild profitability without doing something, anything, to satiate the public's desire for retribution against the guys who almost ruined the economy. The downside of not denying the public a piece of Wall Street's scalp is that vulnerable members of Congress now have little chance but to demand Geithner's.

And this isn't just Geithner's problem, incidentally. It's true for the whole administration. The bailouts were necessary, but they were also understandably unpopular, and there's been virtually nothing done to balance the scales. No windfall profits tax, or transaction tax. No breaking up big banks, or capping salaries across the board. Financial regulation has been sold as a constructive discussion with the banks rather than a punitive measure to prevent future wrongdoing. The absurd result is that Republicans are playing the populist card (while quietly blocking financial regulation) and frustrated congresspeople are turning on the administration, because the administration has kept them from turning on the banks.