Dumas Fils

Corporate buyers and households will be asked to pick between fuel cells and solar. Here’s how they stack up.

ConocoPhillips, the US’ third biggest oil company, has become the latest major company to drop out of USCAP, the US Climate Action Partnership, a ceo-led organization aimed at advancing comprehensive…

Great analysis of China’s increasingly truculent tone towards the West

I admire Mr Volcker and strongly support his desire to develop a financial sector that supports the wider economy, rather than makes vast profits out of activities so likely to destabilise it. Equally, I agree that part of the solution is indeed structural. But these proposals are, in important respects, unworkable, undesirable and irrelevant to the task at hand. The president may indeed be desperate. But much more work is needed.

This is the strongest argument in defense of the filibuster. Still, Marcus fails to address the central point, which is not whether the filibuster is a good idea in principle, but how its overuse has made this country ungovernable. The rules have to be changed.

The Againstness Epidemic has been years in the making. Individual strains of opposition have been cultivated in the petri dishes of special interest groups, religious fundamentalists, blogs, cable TV shows, talk radio, fringe subcultures (birthers, truthers, tea partiers). They feed into, and are fed by, entrenched industries of disagreeableness (fossil fuel companies, labor unions, the Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh). We live in a country in which being contrarian now means advocating a mainstream initiative.

The orthodox view among pundits is that Americans have lost faith in government. That argument masks a deeper truth: Americans have also lost faith in pundits.

Also in orthodox views.

Extremely good, medium-length summary of the what’s happened in American politics in the last couple of months. Definitely worth the read.

hitting the right notes?

Barack Obama was not as popular and powerful as he seemed on January 20, 2009, and he is not as unpopular and weak as he seems today. His first year in office demonstrated his strengths and his…

The other day, I was lighting a fire with a copy of the Times from June 27, 2009 when my eye fell on an article about Republican objections to the health-care reform bill. Back then, the public…

Fallows notes:

Counting the new Republican Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, the 41 Republicans in the Senate come from states representing just over 36.5 percent of the total US…