Conservative bloggers list the 25 worst figures in American history and Barack Obama can’t even take the number one slot:

Instead, it’s still all about Jimmy Carter. Which is too bad. The Carter administration had a lot of problems but was underrated in many ways and in particular the good parts of the Carter legacy are things liberals and conservatives ought to be able to reach some intellectual consensus around. I’m glad to see that despite the right-wing’s distaste for the 14th Amendment they still put John Wilkes Booth on the list rather than Abraham Lincoln. I wonder what theory of ethics or historical causation could lead to the conclusion that Michael Moore was a more pernicious figure than, say, Nathan Bedford Forrest who I’m told is to this day a widely-honored figure in Tennessee.

The state of the economy plays an important, though not decisive, role in shaping midterm election outcomes. But it’s worth noting that though the bad state of the economy is well-symbolized by the high unemployment rate, there’s little reason to believe this is an important causal mechanism. It’s not as if a loyal Democrat gets laid off and suddenly he loves Sarah Palin. Rather, as Seth Masket wrote last year, there’s a statistically significant relationship between income and midterm election outcomes.

It’s also worth noting that to some extent you don’t need to “explain” looming giant losses for House Democrats at all. The way the districts are drawn, if half the voters vote Republican, then the GOP will win the majority of the seats. But right now the Democrats have a giant majority. So if the voters split 50-50, that will mean huge gains for the GOP. But a 50-50 vote split would be just that—a 50-50 split—not a massive repudiation of the Democrats.

You should go see The Kids Are All Right and Scott Pilgrim vs The World but especially the former. I’m right smack-dab in Scott Pilgrim‘s target demographic, and I still liked Kids a bit more and those of you who aren’t dudes with extensive 8 bit video game experience will probably tilt even stronger in that direction.

“We have the authority to kill the monkeys,” said a state health official, who asked not to be named. “We don’t know which one bit, so they all have to go.”

The animals in question are actually lemurs.

When I saw that Felix Salmon had a post titled “The Limits of Government Debt Statistics” I got afraid he’s psychically poached an idea I wanted to write. But he turned out to sort of be talking about something else. The point I wanted to make is that government budget numbers attract too much attention, and people should think harder about what the numbers mean.

So if you look at Social Security, what those numbers mean is that the share of elderly people in the population is expected to increase. There are several things that might follow from that:

1. A greater share of the incomes of future non-elderly people could be transferred to elderly people through taxes in order to finance elderly people’s consumption.
2. A greater share of the incomes of future non-elderly people could be transferred to elderly people through taxes in order to finance elderly people’s consumption through informal means, like working age people giving money or housing to their parents
3. Per capita consumption of elderly people could decline relative to average per capita consumption.
4. The average age of retirement could go up.
5. The share of GDP dedicated to government spending on the non-elderly could decline.

And of course these things could occur in various combinations. Different policy shifts can influence (though probably not determine) the degree to which those things happen. But none of them are super-appealing, and the only thing that would avoid the tradeoffs would be to try to take action to make the demographic prediction not come true through, e.g., higher immigration. That’s not to argue for any one solution or the other, but to say that it’s more enlightening to think of different policy options in terms of their impact on the world—who gets what—than to narrowly look at the Social Security actuarial balance.

The list set with regard to Medicare is harder to summarize and honestly I don’t know what it would look like. But when you see the cost curve (or proposals to bend it) it’s worth asking not just about the curve, but what does it mean. A higher share of working-age people employed as orderlies and a lower share employed as waitresses? Doctors’ incomes rising relative to non-doctors? Questions about the status of the Medicare Trust Fund are probably the least-important question you can ask about these projections.

Waking up, I’m also glad to see that the President took a strong stand in defense of religious freedom last night: “But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.”

See Glenn Greenwald for more and I agree with Mark Kleiman that on times like this when elected officials take correct-but-unpopular stands it’s important for progressives to remember to reward good behavior. That’s the necessary flipside of holding people accountable when they’re wrong.

It’s been remarkable to me how quickly after the 2005 debacle Republicans have returned to their deeply unpopular idea of gutting Social Security. But for political purposes, the contrast has been muted by some indications that the White House, via the Fiscal Commission, actually agrees with this agenda. In today’s weekly address, the president took a strong stand on the issue saying Social Security should be honored on its 75th anniversary and not privatized as per Paul Ryan and the conservative orthodoxy.