A good series of videos from the Aspen Ideas Festival featuring David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Matthew Yglesias, moderated by Marc Ambinder that explore the current state of affairs of American politics and where things might be headed.
Part 1:

At heart, I want to believe that there can be a positive conception of government that goes [...]

From Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul,
The great irony, of course, is that a country with a government dedicated to doing as little as possible became the most prosperous, powerful, and culturally dynamic place on earth. Less turned out to be much, much more. Leave people alone, and you’ll be amazed at what they can do.

I [...]

While I don’t want to say anything bad about Jesse Helms in the wake of his recent passing, it did occur to me that the fading out of the spotlight of many divisive and hard line old guard members of the conservative elite is providing the opportunity for a generational passing of the torch. It [...]

Reading the following excerpt from Daniel Larison’s blog, Eunomia, today gently but powerfully tweaked something that I’ve been thinking about lately. Larison writes (emphasis mine),

I would add that the reflex of some Obama supporters to justify his reversal on the FISA legislation in terms of prudence and/or the political need to “move to the center” [...]

I wanted to take a moment here to distinguish myself from some of the widespread Obama bashing that is going on right now. Andrew Sullivan notes three high profile bloggers/commentators who are not so happy with Obama right now.
Glenn Greenwald gripes,

Feeding distortions against someone like Wesley Clark in order to please Joe Klein and his [...]

It was listening to the audio of the below clip with Lindsey Graham and Joe Biden on Meet the Press today that, for whatever reason, caused me to tune in to Obama’s public financing decision so late in the game. Being able to watch the body language of Graham and Biden only reinforced what I [...]

You must be doing something right. Grand New Party authours Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam wind up in Rush Limbaugh’s cross hairs over the ideas they have presented around saving the GOP.
Money quote from Rush,

So what do we have? We have a prominent conservative, so-called, writing conservatism in the New York Times, promoting a [...]

From the Telegraph,

It has long been known that Mr Clinton is angry at the way his own reputation was tarnished during the primary battle when several of his comments were interpreted as racist.
But his lingering fury has shocked his friends. The Democrat told the Telegraph: “He’s been angry for a while. But everyone thought he [...]

Diehard Hillary Clinton supporter and blogger Larry Johnson, among other folks, has often referred to Obama supporters as: Obamabots - non-thinking, simple-minded, follower sheep who have no idea who Barack Obama is or what he stands for, have gotten bedazzled by the bright lights of his campaign and couldn’t bring themselves to disagree with anything [...]

Seems like the cool thing to do on your blog is to give away awards of your own creation. In that vein, I’m happy to announce the Politics of Scrabble’s first, and likely only, award: The Nader Award. This Award goes to public figures whose personal sense of ideology has so cut them off from [...]