Punditry.....................................

Greg Mankiw on the post-partisanship presidency
"Reasonable people can disagree about whether President Obama is a good or bad president.  But the claim that he has tried to transcend partisanship and find a middle ground is just impossible to square with the facts."

George Will on bewitchment:
"Even Jonathan Swift, who said that promises and pie crusts are made to be broken, might have marveled at the limited shelf life of Barack Obama’s promise of a “balanced” deficit-reduction plan — substantial spending cuts to accompany revenue increases."

Paul Krugman on health care costs
"The point is that if you want to control Medicare costs, you can't do it by kicking a small number of relatively young seniors off the program; to control costs, you have to, you know, control costs."
  "The key is having a health insurance system that can say no - no, we won't pay premium prices fro drugs that are little if any better, we won't pay for medical procedures that yield little or no benefit."

Victor Davis Hanson on being a confused misfit:
But what we cannot stomach is all the sermonizing about “fair share” and “play by the rules” and “the one percent” from those who seek to be exempt from their own rhetoric. Can’t Warren Buffett keep quiet and just leave his $50 billion to his heirs — and let the wonderful federal government do what it must with a $30 billion estate tax on his earnings? Can Bill Gates’ people really manage the Buffett $50 billion better than HUD or HHS? And if so, why a HUD or HHS? 

Walter Russell Mead on health care by lobbyism
"The law is a blunt instrument; fixing the health care system by government fiat is like neurosurgery with a hammer. It’s going to hurt more than you think, and will harm more than it helps. Let’s hope politicians figure that out before too much damage is done."