Must Watch/Read

• Golden Retriever Fails Every Aspect of Obedience Competition
• Robert Reich, And Now the Richest .01 Percent (emphasis mine):

Of the 4,493 board members and CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations, more than four out of five contributed (many of the non-contributors were foreign nationals who were prohibited from giving).  All this money has flowed to Democrats as well as Republicans.  In fact, Democrats have increasingly relied on it. In the 2012 election cycle, the top .01 percent’s donations to Democrats were more than four times larger than all labor union donations to Democrats put together.  The richest .01 percent haven’t been donating out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve donated out of goodness to their wallets.  Their political investments have paid off in the form of lower taxes on themselves and their businesses, subsidies for their corporations, government bailouts, federal prosecutions that end in settlements where companies don’t affirm or deny the facts and where executives don’t go to jail, watered-down regulations, and non-enforcement of antitrust laws.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Enough Is Enough: The President’s Latest Wall Street Nominee [Antonio Weiss to serve as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Treasury Department]
• Matthew Yglesias, The worst two paragraphs about American politics you’ll read today

Should Read:  Obamacare Edition

• Robert Pear, Reed Abelson, and Agustin Armendariz (NYT), Cost of Coverage Under Affordable Care Act to Increase in 2015
• Dean Baker, NYT Reports That Some Health Insurers Are Raising Their Prices and Some High School Kids Are Smoking Marijuana
• Meghan O’Toole, Some Real News About Obamacare: Premium Increases Are Much Lower Than Expected
• Dean Baker, The Congressional Budget Office Has Consistently Over-Estimated the Cost of Obamacare
• Kevin Drum, People Who Use Obamacare Sure Do Like It

Science

• Buzzfeed, How To Science As Told By 17 Overly Honest Scientists
• John Markoff (NYT), Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software
• NASA, NASA Computer Model Provides a New Portrait of Carbon Dioxide
• Eliza Strickland, Winning XPrize Medical Gadget Could Run Hundreds of Lab Tests on a Single Drop of Blood
• Quartz, These close-up photos of a comet from the Rosetta-Philae mission will touch your soul
• Joe Romm, Rep. Rush Holt, PhD, Climate Hawk, To Head The World’s Largest Scientific Society

Environment and Energy

• Elizabeth Farnsworth, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?
• Brad Plumer, Why Google halted its research into renewable energy
• Ross Koningstein and David Fork, What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change [Ed.:  From an engineer’s perspective.]
• Ryan Koronowski, Landrieu’s Keystone Gambit Is A Bad Idea For So Many Reasons

Politics

• Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Manchin, The Fed Needs Governors Who Aren’t Wall Street Insiders [Ed.:  Behind Wall St. Journal paywall.]
• Paul Krugman (NYT), Inflation Truth, Really
• Josh Barro (NYT), Kansas Announces Big Budget Gap; True Gap May Be Even Larger
• Dan Balz, Two midterm elections have hollowed out the Democratic Party

Economics

• Brad DeLong, The Honest Broker: Is Growth Getting Harder? If so, Why, and What Can We Do About It?
• Steve Rattner (NYT), Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse
• Jared Bernstein, When Minsky raises an eyebrow, I pay attention. So should you.
• Paul N. Van de Water and Chye-Ching Huang, Budget and Tax Plans Should Not Rely on “Dynamic Scoring”
• Alex Bryson, John Forth, Lucy Stokes, Does it pay for firms to invest in their workers’ wellbeing?

Culture

• Wendy Kaminer, On College Campuses, The Danger Of Playing It Safe With Ideas
• Jeremy Beer, The Radical Lasch