When I wrote my angry rant yesterday, I had been hoping that Slate's Dahlia Lithwick would have written something about the case involving prosecutors and absolute immunity.  Now she has.  I'll just give you her takeaway line:

The question for the court today is whether it is ultimately more worried about chilling prosecutors who want to introduce possibly fabricated evidence or giving them good reason—and the absolute freedom—to do so.

Meanwhile, also in Slate, Tim Noah takes up the issue of pro-life House Democrats trying to derail health reform.  I like this part:

Granted, money is fungible. Federal money that a private health insurance plan doesn't spend on abortions frees up nonfederal money that it does. But as Time's Amy Sullivan recently noted, not even Focus on Family meets Stupak's exacting standard. Principal, the health insurer for the Christian-right group's employees, covers abortions. "Even if the specific plan Focus uses for its employees doesn't include abortion coverage—and I'm assuming it doesn't—the organization and its employees still pay premiums to a company that funds abortions," Sullivan wrote. "If health reform proposals have a fungibility problem, then Focus does as well."

Paul Krugman has been making the case (quite effectively, in my opinion) for some time that we need more economic stimulus. In Salon, Robert Reich has a nice column discussing the political imperative of this on the Blue Dogs, who are always whining about budget deficits in totally nonsensical ways (of course, all else being equal you'd prefer a deficit to a surplus, but right now, all else is definitely not equal).  It is their own re-elections most imperiled by a lack of a stimulus.  Only question is if they are smart enough to realize that (I suspect not).  Anyway, Reich nicely lays out the case:

 

Let's be clear about this. The national rate of unemployment will almost surely hit 10 percent; we'll know Friday whether it already has. This is more a psychological and political threshold than an economic one (it doesn't include everyone who's too discouraged to look for work, or working part time who'd rather be working full time, or working fewer hours in an ostensible full-time job, or otherwise fully employed but being paid less; the Bureau of Labor Statistics' payroll survey, also due Friday, provides a more accurate picture). But it nonetheless represents a degree of hardship this country hasn't seen in decades.

Public approval of Obama’s handling of the economy has slipped to 46 percent in an Oct. 30-Nov. 1 CNN poll, from 59 percent in March. Remember, Obama was elected in part because the public didn't have confidence in McCain's ability to manage the economy. In exit polls last November, almost two-thirds of voters listed the economy as the nation's top issue. If the job numbers don't start moving in the right direction, not only will Obama's poll ratings continue to drop but congressional Dems will all be in trouble.

That should be Obama's selling point to the Blue Dogs. He should tell them the economy needs a bigger stimulus in order to show improved job numbers by the mid-term elections. And he should make sure they understand that they're more politically endangered next November if the the job numbers aren't moving in the right direction by then than if they vote for a larger stimulus now.

That's the case.  Let's see if Obama makes it and the Blue Dogs listen.