Of course I doubt John Thune would vote for a breeder nominee either:

[C]onservative leaders have warned the nomination of a gay or lesbian justice could complicate Obama’s effort to confirm a replacement for Souter, and another Republican senator on Wednesday warned a gay nominee would be too polarizing.

“I know the administration is being pushed, but I think it would be a bridge too far right now,” said GOP Chief Deputy Whip John Thune. “It seems to me this first pick is going to be a kind of important one, and my hope is that he’ll play it a little more down the middle. A lot of people would react very negatively.”

I assume that Obama will get 38 or 39 “no” votes no matter who he picks, so I don’t think any of this should be taken very seriously. But it’s nice to see some old-fashioned, un-subtle bigotry.

I think the headline “U.S. Presses Visiting Pakistani Leader on Taliban Threat” pretty much sums up what’s gone wrong in the US-Pakistan relationship. The Pakistani Taliban are waging a war whose aim is to overthrow the government of Pakistan. And yet somewhere we’re the ones pressing the Pakistanis about the need to focus on the threat? It’s weird:

The Obama administration sought Wednesday to ratchet up pressure on the Pakistani government to crack down on the Taliban in the western part of the country, as congressional leaders and administration officials expressed increased concern over the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, where insurgents have taken over territory just 60 miles from the capital.

This is backwards. Or upside-down. It should be that the Pakistan government is very concerned about the Taliban and asking us for aid and support in fighting them. In order to persuade us to do that, Pakistani officials should be explaining that the threat to Pakistan is also a threat to the United States. The current dynamic is perverse. I don’t know exactly what the issue is, but it doesn’t make sense for the American government to be acting as if this is a bigger deal for us than it is for the Pakistanis.

Ezra Klein joins in with Kristen Sheeran and Mindy Lubber to remind Robert Samuelson and the Washington Post op-ed team that you can’t talk about how costly it will be to mitigate climate change without also talking about how costly it will be to let a climate crisis wash over us.

Another point I would make is that as costly as it is to act today to reduce carbon emissions, it’ll be much more costly to start doing it ten years from now.

Think back to 1990. Both the 1990 budget and the 1993 budget contained unpopular tax increases. Suppose that instead of those unpopular tax increases, those budgets had created and then raised a carbon tax. Well, that would have been unpopular. But what was actually done was unpopular too. And consider where we’d be today, climate-wise. Well, we’d probably still need to do a comprehensive overhaul of our energy policy. And we’d probably still need to change things around and have a cap-and-trade system since to really cope with the climate problem you need to cap the overall level of emissions. But in a whole bunch of ways we’d be in much better shape than we are today. For one thing, in this alternative reality our 2009 emissions would be lower, so lowering them to a sustainable level wouldn’t require such steep cuts. But for another thing, the total level of carbon in the atmosphere would be lower and the current average temperature would be lower, so for both of those reasons the sustainable level of ongoing emissions would be higher than it currently is.

In other words, we’d be looking at smaller cuts from a lower level.

Meanwhile, our past 18 years worth of investment in infrastructure would look somewhat different. The new houses constructed would, on average, be a little bit smaller a little bit closer together and there’d have been a little bit more attention to insulation. These slightly smaller houses would have been slightly cheaper, and people would have spent more money on something else. The result would not only be a dynamic in which current emissions were lower, but also a dynamic in which people found it easier to adjust to more drastic emissions curbs.

All things considered, we’d be in much better shape. And much the same is true about the case for acting quickly versus getting scared by the costs and doing nothing. Just pretending that the climate crisis isn’t real doesn’t change the fact that it is real. And since it’s real, we’ll have to do something. But if we think the changes we need to make today are difficult, they’re nothing compared to what the needed changes will look like in 2020 if we keep on the business as usual path.

Seyward Darby at TNR takes note of a recent report “Stimulating Excellence: Unleashing the Power of Innovation in Education” that was done as a joint project by CAP and the American Enterprise Institute. The term “odd couple” comes up.

It is worth saying that though CAP and AEI are typically on different sides of issues, it’s not really all that odd to see CAP and AEI having some similar views on K-12 education. It’s simply not an issue where the main disagreements track the partisan divide all that closely. The controversial No Child Left Behind law was very much a joint project of Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and George Miller (D-CA) and the Bush administration. And at the same time, the opposition—from supporters of local control of schools, from teacher’s unions, from many rural states with few non-white schoolchildren, etc.—is very much a bipartisan phenomenon. That structure has basically been replicated in the think tank world with both CAP and AEI generally supportive of the that basic trajectory of policymaking while the Economic Policy Institute and the Cato Institute have been generally hostile. This is, in other words, the latest manifestation of a longstanding alignment of groups.

Meanwhile, I can’t mention education innovation without plugging “Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation” by Sara Mead & Andy Rotherham.