COFFEE BREAK 225

+ updated at 2:16pm ESDT on Friday, Novemeber 5, 2010

+ I added the following comment (slightly revised here) about the election results in a discussion on Facebook:

Krugman was right. We needed a much bigger and much better (targeted spending) stimulus bill. If the GOP blocked it, Obama could have easily blamed the GOP for the continuing high unemployment. Instead, Obama said the relatively small stimulus bill which passed would work. So, he got blamed for a bad plan and rightly so. Carville's law comes to mind: "It's the economy, stupid."

+ TruthDig offers "From Uprising to Hostile Takeover ... and Back Again" by David Sirota. Excerpt: "As I documented in my 2006 book, Hostile Takeover, our political system has been swallowed whole by moneyed interests—and whichever party is in power inevitably legislates that reality. Americans have come to fully understand this situation—and despise it. Thus, as I showed in my 2008 follow-up book, The Uprising, we are now reflexively drawn to whichever minority party candidates promise the swiftest backlash. Whether the challengers happen to be anti-Bush Democrats or anti-Obama Republicans, America is drawn to these faux rebels even though we implicitly know they will almost certainly become part of the problem once elected."

+ TruthDig offers "A Speaker Who Stood Out" by Eugene Robinson (a column in the Washington Post). Excerpt: "The GOP was only able to make Pelosi an issue because she was so effective as speaker. Obama came to office with a long, ambitious agenda. Pelosi had a big majority to work with in the House, but it was ideologically diverse—Blue Dogs, progressives, everything in between. Somehow, she managed to deliver."