The following is an excerpt from Elbert Ventura’s review of Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue in the newest issue of Democracy journal:

Flipping through The New York Times on the morning of February 16, 1966, a reader would have come across a startling photo: a stern-faced soldier, standing against a pitch-black backdrop, crowned by the bold declaration “I quit!” The soldier was Donald Duncan, a decorated Green Beret who had just returned from Vietnam. The small print announced Duncan’s opposition to the war after an 18-month tour. “I couldn’t kid myself any longer that my country was acting rationally, or even morally,” he said. But the photo wasn’t telling his story. It was selling it–it appeared in a full-page ad promoting the newest scoop fromRamparts magazine.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) supports filibuster reform.
• Steve Lombardo on the midterms: “It’s clear that an electoral wave has been building since last fall. The problem for Republicans is that at some point a wave must crest. And so the question that begs to be asked is this: are we seeing the crest of the wave now or is it still gaining strength and getting bigger?”
• Edmund L. Andrews on Paul Krugman and “fiscal scare tactics”: “Perhaps because he’s convinced this is a political battle, he resorts to gimmicky arguments to make a simplistic case that there really isn’t much of a deficit problem at all.”
• Mark Schmitt on progressives and Rahm Emanuel: “[T]here have always been conservative Democrats and vulnerable, cautious Democrats, and the bigger the Democratic majority, the more of them there will be. That’s political life, not Rahm Emanuel’s invention.”
• Econompic Data on the improved labor market.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Jonathan Bernstein on counting House votes for health reform: “What I do think is worthwhile is thinking about the general situation, which remains about the same: there are about fifty Members of the House whose preferred outcome is bill passes, they vote no, and whose second choice outcome is probably to have the bill pass with their support.”
• Clive Crook on ideas to raise tax revenues: “There are countless stupid ways to raise more tax revenue but really just three intelligent ways. First, introduce a carbon tax; second, broaden the base of the income tax; third, design a national sales or value-added tax.”
• The NRDC on California’s leadership on energy efficiency: “California has shown once again that it’s faster, cheaper, and cleaner to save energy than to produce it.”
• William Galston on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget: “Despite drastic reductions in both discretionary domestic spending and entitlement programs whose wisdom and political viability is questionable at best, the roadmap contemplates budget deficits of 5 percent as late as 2037 and produces its first balanced budget in 2063.”
• Nate Silver on Charlie Crist’s political future: “Few politicians have had a rougher twelve months than Florida’s Charlie Crist, who began the period as the popular governor if America’s fourth-largest state, and now finds himself, as Public Policy polling’s Dean Debnam put it, as someone who ‘[couldn't] win a Republican primary for Dog Catcher.’”

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Christian Wolmar on the administration’s flawed high-speed rail plan: “Yet the $8 billion set aside for high-speed rail in his 2009 stimulus package, split among 31 states, includes only two genuine high-speed rail projects — in Florida and California. And even that money will do little more than kick-start the schemes.”
• Resources for the Future has a new study (PDF) on cost estimates on environmental regulation: “We found that EPA and other regulatory agencies tend to overestimate the total costs of regulations; their estimations of the per-unit of pollution eliminated by regulations tend to be more accurate, however.”
• Dan Yurman on building grassroots support for nuclear loan guarantees: “By the time Congress gets around to voting on the new $36 billion in loan guarantees, the 2010 mid-term elections will be fast approaching. This is a big enough item that grass roots groups have an opportunity to ask candidates for office where they stand on the measure.”
• Peter Beinart on the Iraqi elections: “The crucial statistic about the future of Iraqi democracy is this: On Election Day 2010, Iraq hosted 90,000 American troops. By law, the next time Iraqis hold a national election that number will be zero.”
• Truman National Security Project’s Rob Diamond on Glenn Beck and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation: “The Special Operations Warrior Foundation is now serving as a financial front man for the right-wing, Fox News demagogue that is Glenn Beck.”

In case you missed them, here are Progressive Fix’s highlights from the past week:

• PPI Policy Memo, “The Dragon’s Dilemma: A Closer Look at China’s Defense Budget and Priorities,” Michael S. Chase

Widely dismissed as a “junkyard army” for many years, the Chinese military is now raising quite a few eyebrows with its growing capability. In recent years, China has deployed increasingly potent anti-access capabilities, including modern surface ships, advanced submarines, fourth-generation fighter aircraft, and conventional cruise and ballistic missiles. China is also enhancing its C4ISR*, space and cyber warfare capabilities; developing an anti-ship ballistic missile designed to target U.S. aircraft carriers; and modernizing its nuclear forces. Read more…

Some of the day’s best reads:

• David Leonhardt explains the jobs numbers: “My guess is that recovery has indeed lost some steam in the last couple of months.”
• Theda Skocpol on progressives and health reform: “President Obama is finally leading. The rest of us need to follow.”
• The Quick and the Ed on Race to the Top: “Fifteen states and Washington DC made it to the finals of the first round of the Race to the Top…”
• Ezra Klein interviews Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO): “The polarization that exists on the floor of the Senate does not reflect the American people.”
• Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke on democracy promotion in the Middle East: “Promoting democratic reform, this time not just with rhetoric but with action, should be given higher priority in the current administration, even though early indications suggest the opposite may be happening. Despite all its bad press, democracy promotion remains, in the long run, the most effective way to undermine terrorism and political violence in the Middle East.”

Some of the day’s best reads:

• E.J. Dionne on the GOP and reconciliation: “For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president’s determination to press ahead and get health-care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief.”
• Stan Collender on reducing the deficit: “[I]nsisting that the only way to reduce the deficit is to cut spending is also deceptive and insidious. If you suspend your ideology and personal preferences for a moment, it’s actually quite easy to see how wrong it is to say that the deficit is solely a spending problem.”
• The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson on Obama and bipartisanship: “Closing the door on the bipartisan phantom was Obama’s coda on health care reform.”
• Reuters on a new EU biofuels study: “Biodiesel and other “green” fuels that Europeans put in their cars can have unintended consequences for tropical forests and wetlands, European Union reports show — the first evidence of EU misgivings.”
• Ed Kilgore on Rahm Emanuel and the Beltway proxy wars: “Without question, internecine strife in the White House is a perpetual favorite of the beltway media. But the important thing for Democrats is to avoid the mistake of feeding this dangerous beast by making administration personalities proxies in fights over ideology, strategy or tactics, or scapegoats for disappointments and frustrations.”

We always knew it would be a heavy lift. When Scott Brown swept away the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate – by taking Ted Kennedy’s seat no less – it seemed like a puckish and malevolent act by the legislative gods. Now, as the endgame draws near, the degree of difficulty only continues to go up.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Clive Crook on Obama’s pragmatism: “By conviction, he is no moderate. At the same time, he is pragmatic, an incrementalist, not one to let the best be the enemy of the good.”
• ITIF’s Daniel Castro on the administration’s open government initiative: “The sheer volume of data now available to citizens is unprecedented and the variety of government blogs on the Internet give average citizens more insights into the inner workings of their government than ever before. But whether the Open Government Directive has created a more participatory or collaborative government has yet to be determined.”
• Michael Tomasky on Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY): “The Democrats are, substantively, the party of government. They’re the party that wants to tell people we can make government work for you. We want you to believe in the public sector. That party, it seems to me, bears an extra burden to make sure that the public sector operates with transparency and according to some rules. “
• William Galston on health care and the GOP: “So today’s conservatives have a choice: They can contest health reform and the rest of the Democratic agenda on its merits, or they can go down the populist road that Sarah Palin and her followers represent. But let’s call that populism by its rightful name—namely, shameless flattery of the people and the manipulation of public fears and prejudices for short-term political advantage.”
• Erik Voeten on UN peacekeepers: “As of January 2010, there were 99,943 UN peacekeepers active in 15 missions around the world.”

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), who had held up Senate passage of a $10 billion short-term benefits extension for days, finally relented yesterday and allowed the measure to come for a vote. Bunning’s objection to unanimous consent to pass the package resulted in the elapsing of funding for a host of federal programs, including infrastructure projects, unemployment benefits, and Medicare payments.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Jonathan Zasloff on medical malpractice reform: “My proposal here is to combine a cap with allowing prevailing parties to get their attorneys’ fees, as civil rights plaintiffs’ lawyers have done for years, on the federal level since passage of the Civil Rights Attorneys’ Fees Award Act of 1976.”
• Tom Rooney on China’s lead over the U.S. in solar power: “The Chinese, with their extensive government support of initiatives like these, are winning. So are the Germans, Japanese, French and Canadians. The U.S. has yet to take the field.”
• Mark Muro on the stimulus as policy lab: “[T]hough the stimulus package gets no respect…it’s possible now to see that for all of its shortcomings…ARRA really did serve as a test-bed for a new generation of federal policies. From ARPA-E to RTT to I3 and Sustainable Communities, the FY 2011 budget request proposes to institutionalize a series of new policy approaches that to a surprising degree were hidden in plain sight in the much-maligned Recovery Act.”
• Ezra Klein interviews Sen. Kent Conrad on the use of budget reconciliation for health care reform: “I never thought reconciliation would work for a comprehensive bill. But we don’t need to use reconciliation for the comprehensive bill. That bill passed with the supermajority, with 60 votes, not using reconciliation….But there’s a potential role for reconciliation in what we call a sidecar. It’s there to improve or perfect the package, and it only will include items that score for budgetary purposes.”
• Ed Sector has a new study on the voluntary accountability efforts by higher ed institutions: “For these efforts and others like them to improve consumer choice and exert meaningful pressure on schools to improve, they need to be more complete, comparison-friendly, and designed to highlight institutional differences. If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality.”

The White House today released a letter from President Obama pointing a way forward for passing health care reform. True to the course that he set at the Blair House summit last week, he stressed the areas of agreement between the two parties, even as he acknowledged some unbridgeable differences.

A considerable portion of the letter — and the part that has gotten everyone’s attention — goes into detail about four GOP ideas that the president said he would like to see in any final package.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• William Galston on House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and fiscal discipline: “In a superb speech at the Brookings Institution this afternoon, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called on the United States—elected representatives and average citizens alike—to ‘rededicate ourselves to the painful, unglamorous, and indispensible work of fiscal discipline.’”
• RFF’s Alan Krupnick on natural gas vehicles: “To what extent is a transition to NGVs feasible, and what would be the implications for oil dependence, the environment, and the net costs of transportation?”
• The latest Democracy Corps survey on the “rising American electorate” (unmarried women, people of color, and young people).
• Ezra Klein on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) critique of the Obama health plan: “Ryan’s critique scores some clean points and also deploys a couple of dirty tricks, but it doesn’t damage the bill’s claim to reduce deficits and doesn’t even engage whether the bill controls costs.”
• Former Senate parliamentarian Robert Dove says that budget reconciliation is neither illegitimate nor unprecedented.

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

In case you missed them, here are Progressive Fix’s highlights from the past week:

• PPI Policy Memo, “Charting a Course for a National Infrastructure Revival,” Norman Anderson

For our country to be globally competitive, we will need to nearly triple our level of infrastructure investment each year over the next 10 years, from the current $150 billion level to at least $400 billion per year. And we will need to think differently about infrastructure, designing projects and promoting firms that are carbon neutral, highly innovative, and transformative. Read more…

Some of the day’s best reads:

• William Galston on innovation and competition: “We’re not investing adequately or strategically in our nation’s future, and we’ll pay a huge price if we don’t change course.”
• NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein on charter schools: “For education truly to be the great equalizer requires that all students have access to high-quality schools. By creating options in long underserved neighborhoods, charters are helping to level the playing field.”
• Marc Gunther on Wal-Mart’s decision to reduce carbon emissions from its global supply chain: “[T]he companies that supply WMT — that is, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Clorox, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, General Mills, Sony, Apple, HP, Dell and hundreds more, all of whom must be wondering about their carbon emissions right now — will be asked to make things more efficiently, use less energy, buy more recycled content and the like.”
• Ben Casnocha on culture and entrepreneurship: “The single best reason to be long on the future of the U.S. is it has a culture of entrepreneurship. It was born this way.”
• Financial Times‘ Sheila McNulty on why environmentalists need to support nuclear power: “While everyone would love to think of the future powered on ideal energy sources such as wind and solar, the reality is that these power sources require backup generation. As of now, they only account for a few percentage points of US power supply. They are a long way from reaching the scale and level of sophistication required to power the world. The advantages of nuclear will remain attractive for quite some time. “

In education circles, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the nation’s largest charter management organization, is considered one of the great success stories in the charter school movement. But as Quick and the Ed’s Chad Aldeman points out, even though an observer of a KIPP classroom can immediately tell the difference, quantitative analyses of KIPP’s real-world effects have been sparse and low-level — which is why the National Bureau of Economic Research’s new study (PDF) of a KIPP charter school in Lynn, Massachusetts, the sole KIPP school in New England, is noteworthy.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Peter Beinart urges Democrats to pass health reform through reconciliation: “The GOP actually has a point here: There is something undemocratic about passing laws that a majority of Americans oppose. We just don’t happen to live in a democracy; we live in a democratic republic.”
• The Hill on Charlie Crist sounding more and more like an independent: “The campaign is definitely headed in a different direction, which is to be understood, what with its declining poll numbers. The question is what kind of direction.”
• Politico on the left’s suspicions over a deficit reduction commission: “Liberals aren’t entirely enthralled by the concept of a deficit commission, let alone one that gives a voice to a prominent conservative such as former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson.”
• Political scientist John Sides on conservatives and government spending: “Conservatives agree that the government spends too much. But ask them what to cut…”
• A Denver Post photo essay on the U.S. offensive in Marjah.

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a Canadian research organization, came out with an interesting new study (PDF) that makes a strong pocketbook case for high-quality public transit.

The study looked at seven major U.S. cities with high-quality public transit systems: Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Some of the day’s best reads:

• Mike Mandel on why the innovation economy isn’t creating more jobs: “I suggest that outside of a few high-profile exceptions, a wide range of potential breakthrough innovations have fallen short of promise since 1998. That has produced many fewer jobs in the U.S., and diluted America’s comparative advantage abroad.”
• Sen. Mark Udall interviewed by David Roberts of Grist on energy policy: “I think it’s crucial to price carbon.”
• Brendan Nyhan has a table showing bills that have been passed via reconciliation since 1980.
• Peter Hakim on Brazil’s rise and what it means for the hemisphere: “Brazil is now a regional pole of power in the Western Hemisphere and occupies a particularly central role in South America, where on many issues it has displaced the U.S. as the dominant presence.”
• Ezra Klein previews tomorrow’s health care summit.