Our top five reads of the day:

• Michael Tomasky wonders why liberal donors haven’t been more aggressive in countering the tea party: “The stupid, feckless Democrats, from Obama on down, have to do something about this. And liberal donors, too. They are not responding to this moment at all. No one is creating groups and efforts to counter the tea party. That takes money and imagination and initiative.”
• Jon Avlon digs into American history and sees many echoes of Glenn Beck: “Here’s the good news: We have faced down forces of demagoguery before. The damage they do can be limited by our determination to call them out, standing up to extremes wherever we see them, stopping the politics of incitement before it leads to something ugly and indelible.”
• Wendy Kopp sees progress in education reform, but argues more hard work lies ahead: “Despite my optimism about the potential to change educational outcomes, I worry that we underestimate the work that lies ahead. Without the willpower, capacity and patience to carry out the hard work, good policies are mere pieces of paper.”
• Bill Gates (via Andrew Revkin) defends his call for massive investment in energy R&D: “Our renewable portfolio, as it exists now, is not good enough to get us where we need to be. Without R&D investments, we are not going to be able to address climate problems in time. “
• Hooman Majd tackles the claim that sanctions are sowing discord among Iranian leaders: At a base level, it ignores the long history of clashes and rivalry between strong personalities in government and among the ayatollahs. Moreover, history has shown that outside threats tend to create unity rather than divisions among Tehran’s leadership; that unity does not need to be coerced.

Will the Tea Party endure? If so, for how long?

Steve Clemons writes:

I hope David Frum is right and that the Tea Party movement, which is growing in numbers and ferocity, will hit its limit, experience an Icarus moment, and plunge back into the fringe of American politics where pugnacious, jingoistic, narrow band nationalism has always lurked.

Our top five reads of the day:

• Khaled Elgindy calls for more attention to the internal Palestinian division and the regional dimension of the peace process: “For the peace process to be truly comprehensive, however, it must also address the need for a unified Palestinian polity as well as allow for progress on the regional level. Such a “grand bargain” is admittedly an ambitious undertaking—requiring not only that all key actors get something but that each has a stake in the others getting something as well—and may in fact be too difficult to achieve.”
• David Leonhardt examines whether to make teacher performance metrics public, as the Los Angeles Times did: “Some teachers, no doubt, are being done a disservice. Then again, so were a whole lot of students.”
• Jean Pisani-Ferry warns of the dangers of historical analogizing in charting a path to economic recovery: “History can be an essential compass when past experience provides unambiguous headings. But an undisciplined appeal to history risks becoming a confusing way to express opinions. Governance by analogy can easily lead to muddled governance.”
• Mark Muro and Sarah Rahman (.pdf) call for the federal government to begin constructing and funding an Intermountain West network energy research and innovation centers: “Organized around existing capacities in a hub-spoke structure that links fundamental science with innovation and commercialization, these research centers would engage universities, industries and labs to work around specific energy themes to rapidly deploy new technologies to the marketplace, build the region’s knowledge-base, and stimulate economic development.”
• E.J. Dionne Jr. hopes Obama can turn the page after the Iraq speech: “the real test of whether Obama succeeded will not be the reception of this single address but whether it becomes the prelude to an invigorated presidency that uses the end of combat operations in Iraq to rekindle the aspirations for change that won him power in the first place.”

Over at the American Conservative Magazine, William S. Lind makes a powerful conservative case for renewed investment in public transit: “For cities, conservatives’ banner should be read, ‘Bring Back the Streetcars!’”

A couple of points are worth highlighting:

Our top five reads of the day:

• Kevin Carey makes the case for a new batch of public universities to explore new approaches: “Most industries are constantly enlivened by new entrants that design their processes and cultures in ways that reflect the latest available technology and wisdom and serve the needs of today’s customers. As the amount of time since most colleges and universities were created continues to lengthen, higher education will increasingly suffer from the lack of such competition and renewal in the traditional public and private non-profit sector.”
• Juliette Jowit reports on former climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg’s new recommendation to spend $100 billion a year on climate: “Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as “cloud whitening” to reflect the sun’s heat back into the outer atmosphere.”
• Mark Thoma calls for a fiscal policy that can avoid congressional gridlock –automatic stabilizers: “Automatic stabilizers are a tried and true means of stabilizing the economy. Increased reliance upon this type of stabilization could help solve the political problems that prevent Congress from responding effectively when the economy is most in need of help.”
• Steve Clemons explores the progress towards and makes the case for the U.S. providing more flood relief to Pakistan: “Now that we are spending monthly figures in Afghanistan that surpass $100 billion per year, it seems to me that a well-managed $1 billion investment in Pakistan would do much to improve the political environment in Afghanistan and Pakistan — large portions of the peoples of which respectively mistrust the U.S.”
• Jon Hilkevitch reports on a battle in the Illinois State Legislature over high-speed rail: “Bullet trains routinely operate at 150 to 220 mph. It’s the performance level Illinois should be shooting for, said state Sen. Martin Sandoval, D- Chicago, who is chairman of the Illinois Senate Transportation Committee.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Mike Mandel laments the wasteful asset allocation of the 2000s: “Here’s a chart that to me sums up the past decade. This was supposed to be the Information Revolution…but what we mostly did was build homes.”
• The Economist examines the conundrums of cutting military spending: “Mr Gates is grappling with the conundrum faced by many of his predecessors: the rising costs of military manpower and equipment, which strain even America’s gargantuan $700 billion defence budget (almost as much as the defence spending of the rest of the world put together). Just to keep up America’s existing combat units, he notes, costs 2-3% more each year.”
• E.J. Dionne Jr. urges President Obama to be a better salesman for a coherent governing philosophy: “In a democracy, separating governing from “politicking” is impossible. “Politicking” is nothing less than the ongoing effort to convince free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context.”
• Derek Thompson makes an argument for Social Security Reform now: “Social Security isn’t unique. It taxes something we think is good (wages) to pay for something we also think is good (seniors’ benefits), just like the rest of the federal budget. We’re not going to find a full-body solution to our debt problem in December, or in 2011, or in 2012. We should not even try. But we have to start somewhere. Let’s start with the backbone.”
• Jonathan Weber explores the obstacles standing in the way of high-speed rail in California: “High-speed rail is at a critical juncture, and poses a test for Bay Area communities, and indeed for the state as a whole: Do we still have the political mettle, the financial wherewithal and the engineering competence to execute something on this scale?”

Among the literature I picked up on Saturday while attending the “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall (purely to indulge my curiosity) was a three-by-five card asking me: “ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN THE REBIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION?” The card directs me to a website, the1789project.com, where I can pledge money to a PAC that will only support candidates who adhere to the Constitution.

Another card tells me: “Politicians are destroying our country. We have the solution. Join us. We seek the modern day incarnations of Madison, Franklin, and Jefferson.” The card is for the “Get Out of Our House” project, or GOOOH. The plan, according to the website, is “to remove all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and replace them with everyday Americans just like you.” Wow. Just like me? I can only dream.

Some of the week’s best reads from Progressive Fix:

Scott Thomasson: Beware of Tax Zombies … “There comes a point when the zeal for progressivity can overtake reasonable concerns about encouraging economic growth, and this year is not the time to let that happen. Questions of distributional justice are important, and the Bush tax cuts did a lot to worsen inequality in our country that need to be remedied, but let’s keep the bigger picture in mind here.”

Lee Drutman: Is the Partisan Majority Dead? … “One wonders: have we entered a new era in which it is impossible for the majority of any modern nation to come together behind one banner? Is the modern partisan majority dead? And if so, what do we do about it?”

Will Marshall: Combating Al Qaeda as Franchise … “Our government also needs an explicit strategy for shoring up failing or fragile states that are particularly vulnerable to extremist violence. It’s no accident that al Qaeda and its offshoots flourish in ungoverned spaces within countries like Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Jim Arkedis: Zardari Plays the Terrorism Card … “Zardari made a calculated pitch framed in stark terms: help us or the terrorists win. The thing is, he might just have a point. The flood might not be the radical’s ideal hope, but there is certainly an opportunity to further divide Pakistani’s allegiances.”

Nathan Richardson: The McClellan Principle … “At its core, the argument claims that any uncertainty about climate change means we should either give up, or at least wait indefinitely for better evidence. I call it the “McClellan principle.” Like the Civil War general, proponents of the argument counsel doing nothing until absolutely certain of success.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Susan Jacoby uses the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to urge liberals to think more carefully about their sometimes unquestioning faith in multiculturalism: “I find myself in a lonely place in relation to many liberals, political and religious, because I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights.
• Tom Friedman reviews “Waiting for Superman” and praises the hard work of serious education reformers who aren’t waiting for superman: “We know what works, and it’s not a miracle cure. It is the whatever-it-takes-tenacity of the Geoffrey Canadas; it is the no-excuses-seriousness of the KIPP school (Knowledge is Power Program) founders; it is the lead-follow-or-get-out-of-the-way ferocity of the Washington and New York City school chancellors, Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.”
• Mohamed A. El-Erian argues that additional stimulus is pointless because current recession is not cyclical – it’s structural: “What is critical to keep in mind is that this situation is part of a broad, multiyear process driven by national and global realignments. It’s a secular phenomenon that needs to be better understood and navigated — by recognizing its structural dimensions and by urgently broadening the excessively cyclical policy mindsets that abound.”
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory finds some good news on national energy consumption: “The significant decrease in coal used to produce electricity can be attributed to three factors: overall lower electricity demand, a fuel shift to natural gas, and an offset created by more wind power production.”
• Paul Kedrosky makes a pretty word cloud summarizing Ben Bernanke’s Jackson Hole speech: “Just because I know most of you can’t bear the thought of reading Ben Bernanke’s entire speech today in Jackson Hole, here is the word cloud version. It’s just as opaque, but much nicer colors.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• William Galston makes the case for a national infrastructure bank: “Either we accept years of sluggish growth and high unemployment, or we shift to a new model that mobilizes the record level of private capital now sitting on the sidelines for public investments that will boost economic activity and employment in the short term, and economic productivity and growth in the long term, while generating rates of return sufficient to interest investors.”
• Matt Bai reports on Earl Blumenauer’s liberal case for budget cuts: “Mr. Blumenauer doesn’t argue that government does too much, or that programs like Social Security and Medicare aren’t vital. Rather, in two recent conversations about the nation’s finances, Mr. Blumenauer argued that if Democrats really want to protect a vast array of federal programs from repeated Republican onslaughts, then they need to bring the costs of the programs in line with reality.”
• Jesse Jenkins and Devon Sweezey read the new White House report – “The Recovery Act: Transforming the American Economy Through Innovation” – and see a need for more forward thinking: “To achieve the White House’s long-term objectives – driving down the costs of emerging clean energy technologies such as solar power and advanced batteries and building globally competitive American clean energy industries – will require a long-term, comprehensive clean economy strategy and sustained investments in innovation, advanced manufacturing, and competitive market deployment.
• Jack d’Annibale wonders where Democratic leadership is on the lower Manhattan Islamic center debate: “It is mind-boggling that Democrats – given President Obama’s record on matters of vital national interest – are not driving the debate on Park51. The truth that Democrats must start shouting from the rooftops is that the debate is not only about fighting intolerance; it’s about protecting America.”
• The McKinsey Global Survey finds that companies are continuing to struggle with fostering innovation, even as they prioritize it more and more: “Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.”

Last weekend, Australia held a national election. And for the first time in 70 years, the land down under is now facing a hung parliament.

While Australia struggles to figure out how to govern itself, it’s worth reflecting on a larger trend: there is now a hung parliament in every major nation that is governed by a winner-take-all, “Westminster model” parliament (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s India, U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). And just about every other major industrial democracy relies on some version of proportional representation, resulting in multi-party governing coalitions of varying stability.

Our top five reads of the day:

• Matt Miller looks ahead to a bleak political future if Republicans make big gains in the mid-term elections: “I wish I could say “I have a dream,” what with the anniversary of Dr. King’s famous speech coming this weekend. But it’s more like a grim vision. A vision of nearly zero progress on the major challenges facing the country between Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2010 and Jan. 20, 2013.”
• Orville Schell wonders what will happen if China wants to get more return on its $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves than dollar assets provide: “If the Obama administration and EU officials cannot figure out the proper mix between economic engagement and protecting national security, investment capital from China will go elsewhere. That is a strategy that will leave the US and the EU weaker, not stronger.
• Chris Farrell explores the challenges of tax reform and poses some solutions: “Reform is hard since far too many industries and individuals actually support the current setup, either because reform would hurt their pocketbooks by removing things like mortgage-interest deductibility or because they are adroit at ordering their finances around existing incentives (and disincentives). Washington lawmakers from both parties like handing out tax goodies to favored constituents in return for power and votes.”
• Jason Pontin interviews Bill Gates about many things, including how to get more innovation: “the way capitalism works is that it systematically underfunds innovation, because the innovators can’t reap the full benefits. But there’s actually a net benefit to society being more R&D-oriented.”
• John Dickerson tackles the silliness of John Boehner’s argument that Democrats are making the business environment more uncertain “Uncertainty is at the heart of business activity, say administration officials. There is more after a recession, and there is particular uncertainty now because the economy is struggling to emerge from a crisis unlike anything seen since the Great Depression. What Boehner is trying to do is blame the Democrats who are handing out umbrellas for the rain that’s falling.

David Brooks’ column today tackles what he sees as a pervasive intellectual laziness in modern political discourse, emerging in good part out of confirmation bias run amok and coddled by a culture that errs on the side of affirmation as opposed to challenge.

Our top five reads of the day:

• George Friedman sees little possibility for progress in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks: “There have been so many peace talks between the two sides and so many failures that it is difficult for a rational person to see much hope in them. Moreover, the failures have not occurred for trivial reasons. They have occurred because of profound divergences in the interests and outlooks of each side.”
• Joel Kotkin gives five reasons why China may not overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy after all: “Countries generally do not experience hyper-growth — the starting point for many predictions — for long. Eventually costs rise, internal pressures grow and natural limitations brake and can even throw the economy into reverse.
• Ben Miller and Phuong Ly shine a light on the country’s worst colleges: “we need to hold dropout factories like Chicago State accountable in the same way the Obama administration proposes to hold underperforming high schools accountable: transform them—or shut them down.
• Scott Turow muses on the schizophrenic ways our laws treat campaign contributions as both free speech and bribery in light of the Blagojevich verdict: “I suspect the jury’s indecision might have been a reaction at some level to the hypocritical mess our campaign financing system has become, especially in light of recent Suprem
• Tim Hurst reads the new report of the Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage so you don’t have to: “One of the most critical findings of the report is that widespread cost-effective deployment of CCS will occur only if the technology is commercially available at economically competitive prices and supported by national policy frameworks, such as a cap on carbon pollution, or a carbon tax.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• John F. Harris and James Hohmann document a growing frustration over Obama’s inability to lay out a compelling narrative: “In interviews, a variety of political activists, operatives and commentators from across the party’s ideological spectrum presented similar descriptions of Obama’s predicament: By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy — and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented “pragmatism” — he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.”
• E.J. Dionne is worried about the extremism on the right and what it means for the upcoming elections: “What the current right has on offer is far worse than anything Bush put forward, which means that this election isn’t even about whether we’ll go back into the ditch. It’s about whether a movement that’s gone over a cliff will be rewarded for doing so. A victory for this style of conservatism will be a defeat for the kind of conservatism the country needs. And that’s a worthy matter to put to the voters.”
• Peter Skerry argues that the controversy over the Lower Manhattan Islamic center highlights a need for American Muslims to confront some hard questions among themselves: “A more compelling argument for building the mosque is to get beyond the current controversy, because it empowers the most opportunistic elements in the Muslim community and fosters an us-versus-them mentality that stalls a much-needed debate among Muslims about their place in American society.”
• Nicholas R. Goebel investigates the comments on the Republican Party’s “America Speaking Out” website and finds surprising support for a raft of centrist ideas: “According to the responses and polls on AmericaSpeakingOut.com, these citizens do not want to ruin government and make it irrelevant as Tea Partiers promote. Rather they want to use government to improve society. “
• Dave Wiegel reports on Cato’s “purge” of two not-orthodox-enough libertarian scholars: “You have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals.”

Michael Mandel has an op-ed explaining his plan for “smart regulation” up over at CNN.com today.

Mandel starts by noting that the one sector of the economy where there has been real growth of late is the digital communications sector. And given how hard new jobs are to come by in this current economy, Mandel figures we ought to keep growth going where we can by limiting the temptation to write too many new rules in the telecom sector.

Our top five reads of the day:

• Steven Pearlstein makes the case for more competition in stock offering underwriting services : “In theory, it should be possible to raise money without paying such a hefty toll to Wall Street’s gatekeepers. In some countries, new stock issues are sold through auctions that eliminate the need for large sales forces and their commissions.”
• Paul Tough calls for experimentation and innovation in education reform: “So, at this moment of uncertainty and experimentation, should the federal government wait, as critics of Promise Neighborhoods suggest, until ironclad evidence for one big solution exists? Or should it create a competitive research-and-development marketplace to make bets on innovations, the way the government did during the space race and in the early days of the Internet, and allow the most successful strategies to rise to the top?”
• Jay Gulledge explores the scientific connection between recent weather events and climate change: “As usual, there is no definitive answer about these specific events, but direct observations show that extreme weather events have become more frequent in the past half-century, and in the extreme cases that have been studied, the mechanisms are those that one would expect from global warming.”
• Howard Gleckman reads the latest CBO update and surveys the challenging fiscal environment and possible solutions: “It is easy to imagine what this middle ground looks like: Congress could extend some of the Bush tax cuts for only a year or two and use that time to begin the work of restructuring the tax code, key to creating a revenue system that can support the government we seem to want. At the same time, it could adopt steps to gradually control long-term spending. The harder part is imaging the political will that will get us there.
• Matt Miller writes Paul Ryan a letter: “For now, the Ryan “plan” racks up far too much debt even as it poses a false choice between a return to “rugged individualism” and a slide toward a European-style welfare state — when in fact there’s a way to responsibly chart an American-style course that blends liberty, growth and justice in an aging America.”

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

• “4419,” by Will Marshall

As U.S. troops head home ahead of President Obama’s Sept. 1 deadline for ending major combat operations in Iraq, it’s worth asking: What did all this sacrifice achieve?

• “Beware the ‘JetBlue Election’” by Lee Drutman

The temptation for challenger candidates, of course, will be to stoke such sentiment in hopes that they will be the ones to profit from it. But such challengers ought to be careful what they stir up and what they promise. Those who come to Washington on the bold premise that they will be the ones to shake the place out of its alleged abominations are likely to face a sorely disappointed electorate when things don’t, in fact, change immediately (see Obama, Barack).

• “More Clarity on Uncertainty” by Scott Thomasson

We are facing real economic uncertainties, and the fact that Republicans are mischaracterizing them so shamelessly does not relieve the president and Democrats from the obligation to show more leadership.

Today’s New York Times “Idea of the Day Blog” features this sensationalist headline: “Lobbying Often Yields Nothing” — followed by this provocative summary

The real outcome of most Washington lobbying is … nothing. Until the right party or person comes to power. So finds a 10-year study.

Actually… according to Lobbying and Policy Change (the landmark book by five political scientists that the post references), 40 percent of the time, lobbyists succeeded. So yes, technically, 60 percent of the time is most of the time and so it is correct to say that most of the time lobbying yields nothing.

But, to me, 40 percent is actually an astonishing success rate.

Our top five reads of the day:

• Michael Mandel explores the Defense implications of misleading manufacturing capacity data: “While Washington may have the ability to impose a national emergency on American plants, the U.S. has no such power over suppliers in China, Mexico, Japan, or any other country. We can’t order Chinese plants onto emergency footing.”
• Ali Soufan sees a national security justification for allowing the Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan to move forward: “But from a national security perspective, our leaders need to understand that no one is likely to be happier with the opposition to building a mosque than Osama Bin Laden. His next video script has just written itself.”
• Jesse Jenkins wonders what happened to Obama’s $150 billion clean energy R&D investment pledge: “A number of (as yet unfulfilled) energy and environmental policy pledges have been removed from the WhiteHouse.gov page in recent weeks. Chief among them: President Obama’s pledge to “invest $150 billion over ten years in energy research and development to transition to a clean energy economy,” once a central plank in Obama’s presidential campaign, and a feature of his first national budget proposal (in FY2009).”
• Matthew Wald reports on new government funding for an alternative to oil-based gasoline and diesel fuels: “Now the federal government is plunging in, in what the energy secretary, Steven Chu, calls the hunt for miracles. The work is part of the mission of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, which is intended to finance high-risk, high-reward projects”
• Lawrence Korb and Loren Thompson suggest how American foreign policy should adjust to inevitable cuts in unsustainable military funding: “Now Washington must become more selective in its commitments, even as threats grow more diverse. It appears the only way this can be accomplished without encouraging aggression is to expect more of allies and friends.”