Our top five reads of the day:

• Ronald Brownstein makes the case for more attention to energy efficiency: “Through all the complex options and projections, one big message stands out: Systematic efforts to increase the nation’s energy efficiency could deliver a big economic and environmental payoff. And that means that efficiency deserves a bigger role in the energy debate than it has received.”
• Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) lays out some ideas to fix Congress: “Congress has been broken and fixed before; it’s always been the butt of jokes. What worries me is that the United States, as the world’s only superpower, cannot afford a congressional breakdown now. Worse, as an aging superpower, we may be losing our capacity for self-renewal.” (and political scientists respond)
• John Avlon sees signs that the era of angry partisan talk radio may be ending: “One day we just might look back on the past two decades and see the hyper-partisan group-think that has disproportionately dominated talk radio as odd. The signs are all around us, from the PPM ratings that give a better idea of what people actually listen to during their day, to the implosion of Air America’s “Limbaugh of the Left” model while the thoughtfulness of NPR enjoys great and growing listener loyalty.
• Tanya Snyder assesses the new Rockefeller/Lautenberg infrastructure bank proposal: “Yesterday’s Rockefeller/Lautenberg proposal closely mirrors the administration plan, with one key difference: Obama’s plan would authorize $5 billion a year for the next six years for an infrastructure bank. The Senators keep the same yearly dollar amount but cap their plan for a new infrastructure investment fund – which they avoid calling a bank – at two years, shrewdly sunsetting the bill soon after Obama’s first term ends, just in case he’s not re-elected.”
• Rebecca Winthrop and Anda Adams think aid to Pakistan is a good investment: “The citizens of Pakistan deserve a clear message from the United States that it is truly interested in their well-being, including meeting the demand for reforming education. Development assistance to improve education in Pakistan, if done effectively, is one major area that can support and improve the livelihoods of Pakistanis. These core elements of non-military development are where the U.S. government should be investing its resources to establish a stable and long-term relationship with Pakistan.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• William Galston thinks Obama will have raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 too: “Unless Obama is prepared to tolerate huge deficits indefinitely, or to emulate arch-conservatives and curb the budget deficit with spending cuts only, he will have to break his unsustainable tax pledge at some point. The only question is when.”
• Matt Miller is impressed with the audacity of John Boehner’s hypocrisy: “How can a party that just passed a budget blueprint with historic new levels of debt and virtually no middle-class entitlement reform in the next decade try, with a straight face, to pin the blame for a debt-limit increase on the president? The only plausible answer is that they think it will “work” politically. That means they think the press is too docile and stenographic to expose the con. And that the public is too dumb or tuned out to care, even if the press does its duty. One of the saddest commentaries on the quality of our civic culture today is that political operatives know these are both fairly good assumptions.”
• Andrew Colopy and Diana Lind think high-speed rail needs a new ad campaign: “The art and design community needs to step up and produce this work, but those calling for high-speed rail need to partner with those able to build a campaign that is robust — not with jargon and numbers, but with images and, most importantly, new ideas. Our nation’s highways are nearing the end of their useful life, and airports are seeking expansions to cope with congestion; if we don’t recognize high-speed rail as a valuable third infrastructure option, we’ll be stuck with 20th-century solutions.”
• Andrew Rotherham urges educators and policymakers to pay more attention to Hispanic students: “We hear a lot of talk from our national leaders about how our schools must do better to keep the country economically competitive. Given the numbers, doing a better job with Hispanic students is a key part of any competitiveness strategy. In fact, if we’re serious about producing many more scientists, engineers, and innovators than we do today, currently underserved populations are the obvious place to look. More fundamentally—given our national creed—if we want to do more than pay lip service to diversity and opportunity for all, this is a vital place to start.”
• Anna Badhken reports on the nonexistent effect that the death of bin Laden is having on the Taliban in Afghanistan: “Ten years after the massacre, the Taliban are ruling entire districts in Jowzjan. They ride motorcycles fully armed through the province in daytime, set up impromptu checkpoints to levy taxes on travelers, and terrorize the province’s meager police force. Likewise, the killing of Osama bin Laden, seen in Washington as a significant landmark that may somehow affect fighting in Afghanistan, has no more significance than any other war death in this loess vastness: just another element in the composite of violence that makes up the battered landscape of this graveyard of empires.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• The New York Times criticizes Florida Gov Rick Scott for rejecting $2.4 billion in federal high-speed rail money: “Florida voters might want to think about that decision as they sit in traffic jams, burning up $4-a-gallon gasoline. In fact, some of them clearly have thought about it because Mr. Scott now has some of the worst approval ratings of a Florida official in the last decade.”
• Richard Anderson reports on the Asian explosion of spending on renewables: “China is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on renewable energy projects – almost twice the next biggest spender in this field, the US – while South Korea’s clean energy capacity more than tripled in 2009.”
• Alexander Gallo and Scott Helfstein game out what might happen to Al Qaeda now: “Without bin Laden, these local and regional groups will likely splinter. This may produce something of a Wild West climate, in which groups claiming to operate under al Qaeda’s banner launch attacks without having any formal connection to or approval from al Qaeda’s leadership. Franchises such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) may bypass the central organization and form independent ties. These organizations may also turn away from global jihad and refocus on their original local missions.”
• Stan Collender draws lessons from Mark Warner’s success in cutting the Virginia state budget as governor: “Voters respected the cuts when it became clear that they could still do what they needed and that the reductions were having the desired effect on the state’s bottom line. It also set the stage for less popular changes, such as revenue increases, because there was a general recognition that the cuts had gone far enough.”
• Annie Lowery thinks we should make it easier for high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States: “The pro-super-immigrant data abounds. According to the Hamilton Project, immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a business than U.S.-born citizens. Immigrants with college degrees are three times as likely to file patents as the domestically born. And all that entrepreneurial gusto really adds up. Economist Jennifer Hunt of McGill estimates that the contributions of immigrants with college degrees increased the U.S.’s GDP per capita by between 1.4 and 2.4 percent in the 1990s.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• William Galston draws some lessons out of the new Pew political typology report: “Taken as a whole, the Pew survey suggests that each political party faces a challenge next year. If hard-core conservatives dominate the Republican presidential nominating process, the eventual candidate may be forced to endorse positions on important issues that a majority of the electorate rejects. On the other hand, unless Obama can alter some of the impressions that independents and even some Democrats have formed during his first two years, his support may well be less broad-based and enthusiastic than it was in 2008.”
• Joshua Green wonders why we have a separate vote on the debt ceiling at all: “Why not just agree that the debt ceiling will rise to accommodate what Congress agrees to spend? After all, decisions about spending should be hashed out in the budget. That’s the point of having them. Breaking the process into two steps only creates the possibility of default, which would harm everyone.”
• Eric Jaffe looks at where the $2 billion in HSR money originally intended for Florida is going: “The big winner was Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor. The Department of Transportation only recently made the country’s most popular rail section eligible for high-speed funding. The upshot of this decision is nearly $800 million spread across five projects in the corridor; the bulk will go toward a modest speed increase in stretches between New York and Washington.”
• Americans for Energy Leadership, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and the Breakthrough Institute team up to respond to a Heritage Foundation energy proposal: “In the high-stakes federal budget debate, getting the facts right is critical. That is why the Heritage Foundation’s recent error-riddled report — which proposed a near-dismantling of the U.S. energy innovation system — demanded an immediate response, which Americans for Energy Leadership has provided with our colleagues at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Breakthrough Institute”
• John Lee explains why China is nervous about the U.S.: “Instead of taking full advantage of America’s terrorism obsession, Beijing has watched resentfully as the United States has built a hierarchical democratic order in which Asian states willingly aid in preserving American pre-eminence. In such an order, China remains a strategic loner in Asia, with Myanmar and North Korea as its only true friends.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Jonathan Chait lambastes the Republicans for still failing to offer an alternative on health care: “Days two through 106 have passed with no sign of an alternative plan. Congress held hearings lambasting the Affordable Care Act, but made not even a token attempt to craft a substitute. Repeal-and-replace simply morphed into repeal-and-more-repeal.”
• Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney investigate the impact of air pollution on employment and productivity: “America’s current energy policy imposes a range of costs on the U.S. economy through its effects on our health and productivity, national security, and the environment.”
• James Traub is ready for Obama to move on foreign policy as threat avoidance to viewing it as a realm of opportunity: “Obama can embrace the forces of change less hesitantly than he has, can push harder in stalemated countries like Yemen and Bahrain. He can look beyond the Middle East to talk about enhanced relations with the rising powers — especially the democratic powers — of Asia and Latin America. He can confront head-on the all-important issue of America’s global competitiveness. He can talk about his old friend the U.N., and maybe even spare a helicopter or two for peacekeeping forces. Obama can, as he said in August 2007, “turn the page.””
• E.J. Dionne Jr. draws some lessons from the success of the Detroit bailout: “It’s axiomatic that government isn’t perfect and that we’re better off having a large private sector. It ought to be axiomatic that the private market isn’t perfect, either, and that we need government to step in when the market fails. The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign both teach the same lesson: The era of anti-government extremism is ending.”
• Peter Beinart wades into the Tony Kushner controversy: “There are only two intellectually honest positions. Either you believe so strongly in a Jewish democratic state that you actively oppose everyone who opposes that vision, or you widen the public discussion to include both those who want a democratic state that is non-Jewish and those who want a Jewish state that is non-democratic. Either would be better than what we have now: organizations like Hillel and figures such as Wiesenfeld who pay lip service to democratic Israel but only defend Jewish Israel. If Tony Kushner lays bare that hypocrisy, he will have more than earned his honorary degree.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• The Pew Research Center for People & the Press releases a new political typology report: “For political leaders in both parties, the challenge is not only one of appeasing ideological and moderate “wings” within their coalitions, but rather holding together remarkably disparate groups, many of whom have strong disagreements with core principles that have defined each party’s political character in recent years.”
• Aaron David Miller looks at the dangers of the Hamas-Fatah agreement: “The Fatah-Hamas accord is unlikely to produce either unity or improve prospects for peacemaking; indeed, along the way it could actually make serious negotiations and a settlement harder to achieve.”
• Maureen Magee reports on High Tech High International, a finalist in the White House’s Race to the Top Commencement Challenge: “Part of a network of Point Loma-based charters, High Tech High International also boasts seemingly impossible statistics, including a 99 percent graduation rate for seniors last year, all of whom were accepted to college (80 percent to four-year universities).”
• Michael Hirsh tries to understand Pakistan’s double game: “CIA officials have known for years that when it came to the really big game, such as bin Laden, Pakistani authorities were unlikely to be cooperative: They feared that backlash from the Muslim world and their own society would be too great if they were seen as playing stooges to the Americans and violating Pashtun tribal loyalties.”
• Roger C. Altman and Richard N. Haass have one idea for a compromise on reducing the debt: “There can be a minibargain covering three categories: discretionary spending, including defense; entitlements, especially Medicare; and tax expenditures. Equal amounts could be cut from each category for a total $1.5 trillion deficit reduction over 10 years. This is 40 percent of what is eventually needed.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Peter Bergen explains why we should stay in Afghanistan: “When I look at the hopeful signs that are starting to emerge from the country, and when I consider these indicators in tandem with the likely consequences of a hasty exit, I do think the wise choice now is for the United States to stay.”
• Tanya Snyder analyzes the President’s draft transportation bill: “It contains policies that would transform the highway-centric status quo, and reformers appreciate the administration’s decision to present an agenda that is such a quantum leap over previous funding levels, performance metrics, organizational structures, and priorities. However, don’t expect it to be central to the debate in Congress. By refusing to adjust to a still-struggling economy, high gas prices, and a deficit-obsessed Congress, the president has rendered his own plan moot.”
• Ahed Al Hendi explores the possibility that the army could break from the regime in Syria: “The fact that the Alawites occupy many top positions in the army could actually undermine the regime. And the people respect the army in Syria; the Syrian national anthem, for instance, which has been sung at the protests, highly praises the military. The army was not involved in Assad’s daily oppression (except for the aforementioned Republican Guard and the Fourth Division).”
• Steven Pearlstein looks at the political difficulties of solving the budget: “I don’t know about you, but the prospect of an endless summer of budget posturing and brinksmanship is probably more than I can take. Can’t we just hand this whole thing over to the Navy SEALs?”
• Mona Mourshed, Chinezi Chijioke, and Michael Barber look around the world to figure out how school systems can go from modest to great: “What our analysis reveals is that despite their different contexts, all improving school systems appear to adopt a similar set of interventions, one that is appropriate to their stage of the journey. This to not to say that context is not important, but it is secondary to getting the fundamentals right. This report attempts to disaggregate the various elements of what makes a school systems improve, to parse exactly what one system can learn from another, and how to adjust these elements to the specific, local context.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• George Packer muses on the death of Osama Bin Laden: “Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the President uses the death of bin Laden to justify accelerating America’s disengagement from a conflict for which he’s never felt much enthusiasm, regardless of the state of hostilities between the vicious Taliban and the venal Afghan government—which is what the war is mainly about.”
• Shuja Nawaz raises new questions about the U.S.-Pakistan relationship: “Indeed, the United States tends to see the greater application of military and political pressure as the key to forcing Pakistan to act, for example, against the Taliban sanctuaries in its territory. This is a mistake. Pressuring Pakistan’s civilian government does not work, because the government is not in a position to guide policy. Applying pressure on the military does not work either, because it only deepens the military’s resistance and does not change its calculation that regional interests are better served by aligning with insurgents as a hedge against India’s growing role in Afghanistan.”
• David Kocieniewski surveys the rickety U.S. corporate tax code: “The paradox of the United States tax code — high rates with a bounty of subsidies, shelters and special breaks — has made American multinationals “world leaders in tax avoidance,” according to Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California who was head of the Congressional joint committee on taxes. This has profound implications for businesses, the economy and the federal budget.”
• David Roberts offers a four-point plan for managing climate change: “If we hope to manage both climate change and energy access for poor and developing nations, we will have to use far less energy overall, generate far more from low-carbon sources, and use biophysical resources far more efficiently and effectively. We will need large-scale changes that ramp up quickly and are sustained over many decades: changes in energy, land use, transportation, manufacturing, and food production. How can we start and sustain those changes?”
• Thomas J. Kane, Eric S. Taylor, John H. Tyler and Amy L. Wooten argue that classroom observations can identify the best teachers: “The results presented here constitute the strongest evidence to date on the relationship between teachers’ observed classroom practices and the achievement gains made by their students. The nature of the relationship between practices and achievement supports teacher evaluation and development systems that make use of multiple measures. Even if one is solely interested in raising student achievement, effectiveness measures based on classroom practice provide critical information to teachers and administrators on what actions they can take to achieve this goal.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Paul Berman unpacks the symbolism of the death of Osama bin Laden: “But let us also recognize that, beyond the details of an efficient operation, the symbolism is hard to mistake. And, since the present war is ultimately a war of ideas, let us not fail to recognize that symbolism is ultimately crucial. The symbolism of this present raid says: Relentlessness expresses history. History is not on bin Laden’s side.”
• Peter Beinart hopes we can now declare an end in the war on terror: “President Obama now has his best chance since taking office to acknowledge some simple, long-overdue truths. Terrorism does not represent the greatest threat to American security; debt does, and our anti-terror efforts are exacerbating the problem.”
• E.J. Dionne tries to dispense with the silliness surrounding the debt ceiling vote: “Congress should simply pass the increase in the debt ceiling and then move on to debate specific measures to bring the deficit down that are not limited to cuts. You can’t find a more certifiably pro-business, centrist deficit hawk than Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), and he was typically direct in saying that the debt limit “is not something we should mess with.””
• The Economist takes stock of America’s inadequate infrastructure: “Total public spending on transport and water infrastructure has fallen steadily since the 1960s and now stands at 2.4% of GDP. Europe, by contrast, invests 5% of GDP in its infrastructure, while China is racing into the future at 9%. America’s spending as a share of GDP has not come close to European levels for over 50 years. Over that time funds for both capital investments and operations and maintenance have steadily dropped”
• Maureen Cottrell, a science teacher at iHigh Virtual Academy, explains how virtual charter schools work: “In the traditional classroom, I’d often have to slow down my teaching to the pace of the majority. I’d get to the end of the unit and realize I hadn’t even started on nuclear chemistry. So I’d start cutting units. That’s not in place with an online system. Nothing gets cut out. We cover all the topics in a chemistry setting. The pace is rigorous; it’s a lot of work, a lot of written work, a lot of helping and tutoring. It also levels the playing field when there’s one system teachers are using. It’s not like one high school is going to offer an easier chemistry class than another school [if it's an online curriculum].”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Ronald Brownstein sees a paradox for Obama’s re-election: “Many of the groups that Obama needs to turn out most enthusiastically in 2012—particularly young people, African-Americans, and Latinos—are still suffering the most as the economy crawls back from the Great Recession. That dynamic looms like a crack in the foundation for Obama’s reelection, which relies on those groups surging to the polls in 2012 after their participation sagged even more than usual in the 2010 midterms.”
• Graeme Robertson puts the recent democracy uprising in global perspective: “The recent upheavals in the Middle East, though inspiring, have happened against a gloomy backdrop. Freedom House reported that in 2010, for the fifth year in a row, countries with improving political and civil rights were outnumbered by ones where they were getting worse — the longest such run since the organization started collecting data in 1972.
• Yonah Freemark calls on infrastructure advocates to speak up: “Those in favor of increased infrastructure investments must make a stronger argument demonstrating why investments today can result in more positive effects in the future. From my perspective, redefining transportation policy with an emphasis on efforts to improve our cities through densification and the choice of alternatives to the automobile will represent an important and realistic effort to improve the country’s transport system. Yet that cannot occur without serious support from public sector actors who appear to have left the country.”
• Peter H. Gleick thinks tornadoes should be a reminder of climate change: “The science community knows that we’re affecting the climate; in turn, that will affect the weather; and that, in turn, will affect humans: with death, injury, and destruction. There is a cost to tackling climate change, but there is a real, growing, and far larger cost of continuing to deny it.”
• Jonathan Kay provides a roadmap to conspiracy theorists: “What distinguishes them from the rest of us isn’t a big bankroll or a particular political persuasion — it’s a twisted relationship with reality. Conspiracy theorists retreat into fantasy worlds, bending fact and history to meet their psychological needs and emotional motivations. Here’s a taxonomy of true fake believers:”’

Our top five reads of the day:

• Dana Milbank talks to some academics about the “integrative complexity” of President Obama’s intellect: “Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, found that politicians on the center-left (where Obama dwells) tend to have the highest degree of integrative complexity, followed by politicians on the center-right. Politicians on the far left and far right are the most simple.”
• John Avlon has no patience for the birthers: “History will be more unforgiving and see the birther conspiracy more clearly than we have in our contemporary debates. It will be hard to miss the fact that so much time and energy was spent trying to prove the illegitimacy and un-American-ness of our first black president. It will seem shameful. And it is.”
• Emily Badger assesses a new administration idea to require federal contractors to disclose their donations: “In this sense, the idea is sort of clever, with the government using its authority over the federal procurement process to push back against a Supreme Court decision on campaign finance. But, as with all else tying back to Citizens United, this thread is deeply controversial, too. The White House says the idea is fundamentally about transparency — and who’s opposed to that?”
• Andrew Rotherham parses a new study about KIPP: “Is 33 percent an enormous achievement given the challenging environments that KIPP operates in? Or, conversely, should KIPP be achieving better results given the intensive support KIPP students receive?”
• Derek Thompson explores the impact of gas price shocks: “The best way to insulate yourself from gas shocks is probably to not drive 40 minutes to and from work every weekday. For millions of families who have settled, or want to settle, in the suburbs, that answer won’t do. Then again, that suburban envy was cultivated in a era of cheap gasoline. That era might be over. In the short term, prices can punish us. In the long term, they can shape us.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Rick Perlstein traces the rise of lying in politics: “And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it’s not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It’s just about anyone—a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera—who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.”
• Jeffrey Goldberg argues that Israel needs to pay more attention to the concerns of Washington: “Yes, Israel is in some ways a strategic ally of the United States, and yes, its scientists create all sorts of products valued in America; but it is impossible to argue that America needs Israel more than Israel needs America. So when an American president who is obviously pro-Israel (no U.S. president has worked more assiduously to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” than has Obama) believes it important to make progress on the creation of a Palestinian state, it is best for Israel to take him seriously.”
• John Sides responds to Michael Kazin’s assertion that independents are a confused horde: “Kazin misses two important points about independents. First, like many others, he overestimates the proportion of the population that is truly independent, writing “After all, loyal Democrats and Republicans still compose at least two-thirds of the electorate.” It would be more correct to say that loyal partisans compose about 90% of the electorate. Second, he seems to imply that independents choose political leaders for no good reason or even no reason at all, simply because majorities agree with the claims of both parties. Of course, without delving below simple percentages — 50% of independents said “X,” 50% of independents said “Not X” — we can’t really know how many specific independents took contradictory positions. I’ve looked in the poll results and don’t see that information.”
• The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Teacher Quality evaluates methods of teacher evaluation: “This report addresses the comparison of teacher evaluation systems in the context of a particular administrative and legislative challenge: How a state or the federal government could achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for the recognition of exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those districts. We address and provide practical procedures for determining the reliability of local teacher evaluation systems. We then demonstrate that the reliability of the evaluation system determines the proportion of teachers that a system can identify as exceptional.”
• Dan Balz explains Haley Barbour’s decision not to run: “But friends of Barbour, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share insight about his decision, said he had come to the conclusion that Republicans can win only if they are totally focused on serious issues and not distracted by some of the side issues, such as Obama’s birthplace, that have arisen in the early going.

Our top five reads of the day:

• Michael Kazin thinks most political independents are also political ignorants: “To a sympathetic eye, this result might connote a pleasant openness to contrasting opinions, perhaps a desire to give each group of partisans the benefit of the doubt. But I think it demonstrates a basic thoughtlessness. At a time of economic peril, when one party wants to protect the essential structure of our limited welfare state and the other party seeks to destroy it, most independents, according to this poll, appear to be seduced by the last thing they have heard.”
• Ezra Klein compares Obama’s policies to moderate Republican positions from the 1990s: “If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.”
• Jay Ulfelder assesses the possibilities for democracy taking hold in the Middle East and North Africa: “Even with all of these grimmer possibilities on the table, however, at least a few of these uprisings will probably produce new regimes that are at least minimally democratic. Assuming that happens, what are the chances that those new democratic regimes will endure? Taking patterns from attempts at democracy elsewhere in the world during the past half-century as a rough guide, I would offer four generic predictions.”
• Katherine Sierra outlines the challenges for a Green Climate Fund: “Given the fiscal pressures in contributing countries, a design that provides assurances that investments will provide value for money will be critical. In recipient countries, a design that is sensitive to development priorities and that builds on country systems will be similarly critical.”
• Derek Thompson doesn’t think our ways of dealing with debt make much sense: “When your household gets a credit card bill, do you: (a) Convene the entire family to vote on paying it off; (b) Threaten not to pay unless you get special remote control privileges for the week; (c) Pay the damn bill. If you answered something other than (c), you should probably explore your financial and familial relationships with a professional, because something is wrong. But think about how the federal government deals with debt. Our legislators passes laws. They incur debt. They get the bill. And then, against all reason, they vote on it.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• David Ignatius explores the possibilities for what comes after revolution in the Middle East: “I don’t mean to predict that the Arab Spring will turn to winter. In truth, we don’t know where this process is heading; there are too many inflection points and uncertainties. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had it right when he said in March that this is “dark territory“; it’s impossible to read the overhead imagery, so to speak, and know what’s down there in terms of outcomes. In what follows, I want to offer a skeptical analytical look — not predicting failure, but warning of obstacles ahead.”
• Former Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wy.) links campaign finance reform and fiscal reform: “Righting our fiscal ship of state is too important to allow our elected leaders to continue accepting donations from those whose selfish interests conflict with sound fiscal policy. We must assemble a broad, bipartisan movement to demand responsible stewardship of our public resources through fiscal and campaign finance reform. Our future really does depend on it.”
• Michael Stubel reports on the first of four “Conversations on Civility”: “The political environment, increasingly fraught with polarization and inaction, is in dire need of reasonable debate. In an effort to rejuvenate the discussion about what ails our system and what can be done to reverse course, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and The Aspen Institute held the first in a four-part series, Conversations on Civility: Making Our Democracy Work.”
• Fouad Ajami looks at the tragedy of the Assad dynasty: “Bashar is both this system’s jailer and its captive. The years he spent in London, the polish of his foreign education, are on the margin of things. He and the clans—and the intelligence warlords and business/extortion syndicates around him—know no other system, no other way.”
• Robert Cruickshank responds Richard White’s attack on HSR: “And of course, nowhere is White offering a balance sheet that shows the benefits from HSR – jobs created, companies founded, tax revenues from economic activity generated, money saved from not having to buy oil, carbon emissions reduced from not having to burn oil.”

Our top five reads of the day:

* Daniel Yurman pulls together four perspectives on how to deal with irrational fears of radiation: “In this multi-author guest blog post, an ecologist, a chemist, an energy expert, and a public affairs consultant offer ideas about what to do about making radiation numbers more understandable and, in doing so, foster better public understanding about what they mean.”
* Matt Hourihan reports on how ARPA-E survived the budget wars, and what it means: “It’s tremendous that ARPA-E will live to apply its agile, hard-charging management model to this new set of disruptive technology challenges. In the near term, amid serious deficit challenges and a hostile budget environment in Congress, proponents of innovation can celebrate the fact that ARPA-E has avoided the budget axe. This is largely a testament to the program’s growing profile, which is in turn driven partly by recognition that it is very good at what it does.”
* Parag Khanna sees signs of a new pan-Arabism as a positive development: “The next great step toward a new Arab renaissance will come through physically overcoming the region’s arbitrary political borders, most of which derive from European colonial callousness. As the European Union itself demonstrates, the only way to achieve genuine collective security and a political-economic order greater than the sum of its parts is to physically build it.”
* Howard Gleckman is not happy with the politicking of the debt ceiling: “S&P described the nation’s fiscal problem as almost entirely political, and not based on economic fundamentals. In this, at least, it is correct though it hardly deserves credit for the insight. It is painfully obvious that the public doesn’t want to lose government programs or pay higher taxes. And in that environment, politicians much prefer jockeying for political advantage than doing the dirty and likely unappreciated work of seriously addressing the deficit. Thus, we face the prospect of months of irresponsible but politically fruitful pandering over the debt bill.
* Donald J. Hernandez shows that third grade reading skills matter a lot: “Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Students who fail to reach this critical milestone often falter in the later grades and drop out before earning a high school diploma. Now, researchers have confirmed this link in the first national study to calculate high school graduation rates for children at different reading skill levels and with different poverty rates.”

It’s Earth Day, but as far as problems go, the environment now ranks last among 15 issues that the public thinks Congress and the President should deal with this year. Only 24 percent of Americans think the environment is an “extremely important” issue. On this score, the environment comes in behind “the situation in Iraq” (27 percent), “taxes” (27 percent), and “illegal immigration” (30 percent) and “gas and home heating prices” (31 percent).

Moreover, when it comes to the trade-off between the economy and the environment, meanwhile, the economy now wins hands down: 54 percent to 36 percent. This is actually a relatively new development. Prior to 2008, the public had never prioritized the economy over the environment. As recently as 2007, the public supported giving the environment priority over the economy 55 percent to 37 percent, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s public opinion was consistently 65-to-25 in favor of environment over the economy, with slight dips in environmental friendliness during recessions.

Our top five reads of the day:

• The New York Times thinks cuts to high-speed rail funding are short-sighted: “The agreement between Congress and the White House to virtually eliminate money for high-speed rail is harebrained. France, China, Brazil, even Russia, understand that high-speed rail is central to future development. Not Washington.”
• Emily Esfahani Smith profiles Terry Moe, who has a new book on how informational technology is changing the face of education: “One major impact: the eventual dissolution of teachers unions, the largest and most powerful impediment to school reform. The other impact? Well, do not be alarmed if your child comes home from school and gleefully announces that he spent his day playing “games” on a school computer.”
• Arnold Schwarzenegger defends the Clean Air Act: “I love American success stories. Start-up companies that change the marketplace, inventors who create new technologies, and, of course, immigrants who make it big in Hollywood. That’s why I love the Clean Air Act, one of the most successful laws in American history. Over the last 40 years, it has made our air dramatically cleaner, saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and substantially boosted our economy.”
• The Committee for a Responsible Budget likes Obama’s new deficit reduction framework: “By presenting his own framework for deficit reduction, the President has done a substantial service in moving the ball forward. Not only is the President’s Framework a significant improvement over his February budget proposal – to the tune of $2.5 trillion– but it also represents a balanced approach to begin improving the nation’s finances. This is a move we strongly praise.”
• Andrew Rotherham looks at some teacher effectiveness studies that have not received the attention they deserve: “Teacher effectiveness matters more to student learning than anything else schools do, and there are substantial differences between teachers. Those two points often get lost in the din about teachers unions or tenure. Underneath all that noise, however, researchers are quietly looking at teacher quality. Two new studies that didn’t get a lot of attention challenge beliefs of reformers, teachers unions, and reform critics.

In today’s Washington Post, David A. Fahrentold marvels at what he calls the “Line Items That Won’t Die” – federal programs that benefit narrow interests, but somehow manage to keep getting funded: “One spends federal money to store cotton bales. Another offers scholars a chance to study Asian-American relations. Two others pay to market U.S. oranges in Asia and clean up abandoned coal mines.”

Fahrenthold attributes their success to having Congressional champions. The study of Asian-American relations, for example, takes place at a Honolulu nonprofit called the East-West Center, and enjoys the support of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who also happens to be chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

But there’s also a broader story: the simple fact that when a government program benefits a narrow constituency, it’s very easy for that constituency to organize and make demands on legislators about why this program is worth keeping. The larger public, meanwhile is rarely aware, and even if it were aware, is unlikely to do anything.

Our top five reads of the day:

• Alan Abramowitz thinks Democrats might have a chance of retaking the House in 2012: “What we can say, at this point, is that if Barack Obama wins a decisive victory over his Republican challenger in the presidential election, Democrats have a realistic chance of regaining control of the House. That is because even after redistricting Republicans will be defending a large number of seats in districts that were carried by President Obama in 2008, the 2012 electorate is likely to look much more like the 2008 electorate than like the 2010 electorate and straight-ticket voting is now much more prevalent than it was 30 or 40 years ago.”
• Peyton M. Craighill and Jon Cohen report on public opinion on nuclear power after Fukushima “A slim majority of Americans see nuclear power plants as a safe energy source, but nearly two-thirds reject the idea of building new reactors in the United States at this time, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”
• James Downie examines how Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) moved to the center: “In recent months, while other Republican senators have shored up their conservative bonafides, Chambliss has moved to the center on budgetary issues, risking his re-election, Republican solidarity on Capitol Hill, and the wrath of the anti-tax lobby.”
• David Roberts ponders why Germans are happy to pay more for cleaner energy: “So one of the most startling things I learned in Germany last week is that the country’s renewable energy law — the EEG — is now and has always been popular with the public. Why is that startling? Because the EEG explicitly charges German ratepayers an extra fee. It’s right there on their electricity bills! In fact, the utilities, which are not big fans of the EEG, work to make the fee as prominent as possible. Today it amounts to about 15 percent of the bill, which isn’t huge (about four beers a month, I was told) but isn’t nothing either.”
• Derek Thompson explores how the Americans biggest companies are growing without adding workers: “America’s largest companies are making much more money with much fewer workers. In the last two years, the Dow has recovered three-quarters of its losses while our employment ratio remains at an historic low. But the profit-hiring gap isn’t a temporary side-effect of the post-recession economy. It’s a function of the economy, period.”

Our top five reads of the day:

• Judy Wills explains why video games might make a good learning tool: “The popularity of video games is not the enemy of education, but rather a model for best teaching strategies. Games insert players at their achievable challenge level and reward player effort and practice with acknowledgement of incremental goal progress, not just final product. The fuel for this process is the pleasure experience related to the release of dopamine.”
• David Brooks thinks Donald Trump’s popularity is due the way he embodies the Gospel of Success: “He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life. I would never vote for him, but I would never want to live in a country without people like him.”
• Len Burman is nervous that the market for U.S. debt is on the edge: “The bottom line is that the news about the S&P report scared me. Yeah, it is probably a false alarm. It might even serve the salutary purpose of frightening the political establishment into working together to prevent a debt crisis. But it might also mark the point at which the bubble in the market for Treasury securities bursts.”
• Richard Florida explains why better immigration policy would help American competitiveness: “Nations that welcome the best and most diverse talent win, while those that close their borders to it fall further and further behind. The ability not just to attract immigrants but to integrate and effectively harness their skills is a key axis of global economic success, now and even more so in the future.”
• The Breakthrough Institute wants Obama to go back to investing in winning the future: “It’s not too late for President Obama to return to the clear path to “winning the future” articulated in his State of the Union. But righting the nation’s economic trajectory demands a concerted and consistent effort to help Americans understand and embrace the difference between spending and investment, and to recognize that a growing economy fueled by new innovations, new technologies, and new industries is an essential component of any strategy to tame the debt.”