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.”
