The Hollywood Liberal

Ezra Klein: Why Obama weighed in on behalf of Michael Vick
The weirdest story of the morning is President Obama’s call to Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the NFL Eagles. Two things apparently happened during the call: Obama praised the team for giving Michael Vick a second chance, and then he asked some questions about the Eagles’ plans to use alternative-en…

Obama’s budget proposal will be delayed a bit
President Obama now expects to release his fiscal 2012 budget in mid-February, about a week later than the timetable set out under the Budget Act of 1974, administration officials said Tuesday.

Ezra Klein: Republican senator for filibuster reform
Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who beat Sen. Bob Bennett in the primary, says that the filibuster “ought not apply with respect to judicial nominees.” This position goes back to 2005, when Sen. Bill Frist attempted to eliminate the so-called “judicial filibuster” (which is really just a normal fil…

The West and the Tyranny of Public Debt
Jacques Attali, Newsweek
The history of public debt is the very history of national power: how it has been won and how it has been lost. Dreams and impatience have always driven men in power to draw on the resources of others—be it slaves, the inhabitants of occupied lands, or their own children yet to be born—in order to carry out their schemes, to consolidate power, to grow their own fortunes. But never, outside periods of total war, has the debt of the world’s most powerful states grown so immense. Never has it so heavily threatened their political systems and standards of…

Freedom to Fail
Peter Suderman, Reason
Jonathan Franzen may be the country’s most popular literary novelist. In Freedom, his aptly titled new book, he takes on the question of American liberty: what it means and what it’s worth. He stumbles over some political stereotypes along the way, but in the end Franzen’s fatalistic message has an optimistic edge: that there just might be something noble about our freedom to fail.

Opposition to the Euro Grows in Germany
Peter Muller, Der Spiegel
Surveys show that many Germans are worried about the future of the euro, but the country's political parties are not taking their fears seriously. The number of grassroots initiatives against the common currency is increasing, and political observers say a Tea Party-style anti-euro movement could do well.As a playwright, Rolf Hochhuth knows how to use timing to achieve the greatest possible impact. In the 1960s, he criticized the pope for remaining silent about the Holocaust.

Sotomayor Guides Court’s Liberal Wing
Adam Liptak, New York Times
At her confirmation hearings last year, Sonia Sotomayor spent a lot of time assuring senators that empathy would play no part in her work on the Supreme Court.That was a sort of rebuke to President Obama, who had said that empathy was precisely the quality that separated legal technicians like Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. from great justices.Justice Sotomayor would have none of it.