Some of the day’s best reads:
- Peter Beinart on CPAC: “If you missed the big Conservative Political Action Committee powwow over the weekend in Washington, you missed some pretty dumb speeches.”
- Chad Aldeman of Ed Sector’s Quick and the Ed blog on “No Child Left Behind” reauthorization: “The ‘proposals’ put forward so far by the Department of Education and at yesterday’s announcement are light on details, so this post is my attempt at rectifying some of the major issues around No Child Left Behind.”
- Marc Gunther on small nuclear reactors: “[I]f we want to stop burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, to generate baseload electricity, we need to explore the nuclear option. That means finding ways to bring down the costs. One option? Build smaller nukes.”
- WaPo’s Andrew Higgins on Afghanistan’s biggest private bank: “The close ties between Kabul Bank and Karzai’s circle reflect a defining feature of the shaky post-Taliban order in which Washington has invested more than $40 billion and the lives of more than 900 U.S. service members: a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.”
- Nate Silver on the similarities and differences between 1994 and 2010: “I think any serious attempt to evaluate the root causes behind the Democrats’ catastrophic electoral losses in the 1994 and their potential issues later this year would reveal as many differences as similarities between the two cycles.”
