The first item is a reminder that it is not just Democrats who have been getting hell at their town hall meetings. A CNN report describes and town hall meeting with John McCain. "For more than an hour, the former GOP nominee alternated between cracking some well-worn jokes from his two presidential campaigns and listening to the concerns of his constituents, one of whom demanded that McCain 'nuke' the health care plan entirely. 'No compromises, no compromises, no compromises,' chanted one woman, a self-described former Democrat. 'Senator, nuke it now!'" Senator McCain's constituents know him well, so they know that they need to repeat "no compromises" at least three times.
The pressure on Republicans is having its effect.
Though McCain firmly rejected the idea of a government-run insurance option, saying it would eventually drive private insurers out of business and lead to a full government takeover of health care, he echoed his 2008 campaign platform and said it would be irresponsible to simply "do nothing"—especially with the threat of Medicare and Social Security going broke.
"So let's go back with constructive, free-market incentives to improve the quality of health care and the affordability and availability," he said.
McCain "free-market incentives"—a proposal recycled from last year's campaign, judging from the bullet points visible in the photo at the top of this report—are a mixed bag. But they are a whole lot better than what Obama is offering.
The other article is a sharp observation by John Tamny over at RealClearMarkets on the significance of Ben Bernanke's tenure at the Fed, which everyone is discussing now that President Obama has re-nominated him for another term at his post. Bernanke is being credited by some for "saving" the financial markets by sponsoring the mega-bailout. But Tamny takes a longer view, pointing out that Bernanke has of course said that his actions last year essentially saved capitalism, but the more realistic assessment is that they discredited it. While enough's been written in this column about how TARP emasculated a banking system that is now a weakened ward of the state, not enough has been written about how the bailout of irresponsible financial institutions made capitalism less credible in the eyes of voters.
People who call themselves capitalists frequently complain about President Obama's anti-market instincts, but what will forever remain unknown is if Obama would currently be occupying the White House had the political party most associated with capitalism not retreated from it so grandly in 2008, Bernanke one of the more notable retreaters.
He then offers what I think is a very good demolition of the view that the financial markets would somehow have disappeared or ceased to function without the bailouts.
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