Perfect Rachel

This is nearly perfect: "All of the most principled Republicans and conservatives I have ever known say they relish the prospect of a big ideas debate in this country. They relish the chance to give Americans a choice between their vision of politics and the liberal vision of politics. ... We are finally getting down to that clear choice. ... It has never been clearer in my lifetime"

Maddow: Government is for fixing problems
March 22: Rachel Re: Rachel Maddow points out the way that the health reform debate clarifies the difference between conservatives and liberals and asks, "Do you want a government that does something or don't you?" Hell no you can't, or Yes we can?

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Case in point ...
Yglesias: The Success of Environmental Regulation

In the 1970s, many scientists felt that the planet was on an unsustainable course in terms of pollution. Which is how we had the blossoming of the environmentalist movement. The creation fo the Earth Day holiday. The growth of “green” parties in Europe’s multi-party system and the rising influence of environmental interest groups in the United States. We passed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency. And as Mark Perry from the conservative American Enterprise Institute points out these environmental policies worked and the air is now far cleaner:

Except because Perry, like most conservatives, is completely unwilling to admit that liberals have ever been right about anything somehow reads this as evidence that environmentalists were wrong. You see, according to Perry we had all these proclamations of ecological doom and yet things have gotten better—silly greens!

In the real world, what happened is that we passed environmental laws, and conservatives argued that they would destroy the economy. And yet here’s the economy, undestroyed. And here’s the environment, cleaned up.