I think Neil Sinhababu is right to think that the media’s disproportionate interest in obviously doomed presidential candidates like Jon Huntsman 2012 or Joe Lieberman 2004 has to do with the general fact “that major media outlets tend to take great interest in people who loudly criticize their own parties from the center.”

In general, it’s important to appreciate that intra-party conflict plays a very special role in the American media. Operating in a kind of truth-free zone where there’s no objective reality, the closest thing to a “fact” is when all members of one party and some members of the other party agree on something. Consequently, there’s never a greater media darling than a member of congress from a contested district who’s willing to take time out of his busy day of legislating and winning re-election to go whine about the party leadership to a reporter from Roll Call or Politico. When someone does it in the course of a national political campaign, it’s an even bigger deal!

None of this would be necessary if journalists felt more comfortable running headlines like “Rick Perry Denies Truth Of All Of Modern Biology” absent an added frisson of horse race conflict. Then you could strictly separate the issue of is Perry talking nonsense about biology (yes!) from the issue of which people could plausibly win a presidential election next year.

Erik Loomis runs down the environmental records of the presidents with the strongest records and finds that LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and even long-ago Teddy Roosevelt have accomplishments that stack up favorably besides President Obama’s.

This is, I think, an excellent encapsulation of the “levels versus rates” problem of intertemporal political comparisons. After all, the big Obama administration initiative that everyone’s upset with now is his decision to interfere with EPA rule-making and keep a Clinton-era ozone standard in place. If Obama were actually to take us back to the environmental policy status quo that existed at the end of the Johnson administration, he’d be one of the worst presidents of all time. That said, taking a pure “levels” look can be absurd. US environmental protections were probably slightly stricter at the end of the George W Bush administration than at the beginning, but it would be pretty perverse to label a president who sided with industry incumbents at basically every turn as more environmentally friendly than the Clinton administration. Still, I don’t think you can really evaluate presidents or congresses purely in terms of rates. I just don’t think it’s possible to imagine anyone living up to the pace of progress on domestic issues that was achieved in the Johnson administration. There’s nothing comparable to creating Medicare, Medicaid, ESEA, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Wilderness Act, etc. that’s out there to be done.

My colleagues have been writing some about the massive drought afflicting Texas and it really is something to behold. Out in Kerrville where I’m staying, everyone’s lawn is bone dry:

For the town this is not, per se, a giant problem. People just wish their lawns were greener. But in the countryside all around, it really is a huge problem for farmers and ranchers and shows no signs of letting up. It’s a reminder, again, that while human beings can live under all sorts of different climactic conditions we have in practice made large fixed investments in particular places anticipating particular conditions. As climate change renders these previous decisions no longer workable, the costs of adjusting are ubiquitous and large.

I’ve been talking a fair amount about the negative real interest rates on five-year and seven-year treasury bonds. I see that as of Friday, then ten-year bond has declined to a real yield of zero.

I don’t expect these facts to persuade people who view almost all government spending as consisting of low-return boondoggles to suddenly start loving it. But the fact remains that when it’s cheaper to pay for things by borrowing money than by taxing productive activity, it’s pretty foolish not to step up your borrowing. The issue we ought to be debating is whether we should increase borrowing by cutting taxes or increase borrowing by hiking spending. With the House controlled by Republicans and the White House controlled by Democrats, we’d end up compromising on a mix of the two. Instead we’re talking deficit reduction. Why?