Thursday's Daily Brief

Thursday, February 24, 2011 Arianna Huffington: The Incredible Shrinking Budget Debate: Why the Only Choice We're Being Offered Is Between Bad and Worse Arianna Huffington: We are now locked in the great budget battle of 2011. Who will win, the president or House Republicans? It's impossible to say yet, but I do know who is going to lose: us. In fact, we've already lost. This is due, in part, to the fact that our country no longer seems capable of coming up with anything other than what Tom Friedman once called "suboptimal" solutions to our problems. Just look at this so-called "debate" we're having. It is concentrated almost entirely on the debt side of the equation and barely at all on ways to grow the economy. How has the playing field of what is acceptable in this debate been so shrunken that the only two competing proposals still allowed on the field are the president's cuts and the House GOP's draconian cuts? It turns out this was no accident. POLITICS Wisconsin Assembly Reaches Deal On Anti-Union Bill WORLD Assange Loses Extradition Fight Over Rape Allegations BUSINESS Multibillion-Dollar Settlement Of Mortgage Cases In The Works WORLD Gadhafi Hold Whittled Away As Libya Revolt Spreads TECHNOLOGY Apple Unveils New MacBook Pros BLOG POSTS Paula Kerger: Zeroing Out Public Broadcasting Does Not Add up To disregard the immense value of public broadcasting at this decisive moment in our history would be an object lesson in "penny wise and pound foolish." Jeff Jarvis: The Distraction Trope In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland is the latest curmudgeon to recycle Nick Carr's distraction trope, microwave it, and serve it with gravy. Is Twitter bringing down Western Civilization? Bollocks, I say. Raymond J. Learsy: The Looming Economic Crisis, the Price of Oil, and Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve The looming economic crises caused by the massive jump in oil prices must certainly be classified a national emergency. But there is an easy way to avoid that -- as long as our leaders ignore the oil lobbyists. Robin Quivers: Oprah Goes Vegan Oprah recently did a show about 378 members of her staff going vegan for a week. What small improvements did a vegan diet make to the staffers' health in that short period of time? MacKenzie Allen: Why This Cop Asked the President About Legalizing Drugs You might not think a 65-year-old retired cop would take to the Internet to ask the president of the United States to consider legalizing drugs, but that's just what I did recently. His answer pleasantly surprised me.

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