1. More on the key issue of election reform: New York University law professor and Obama campaign adviser Richard Pildes on this year’s Election Day glitches and worse.
2. Steve Benen takes aim at Scott Walker’s anti-voting agenda.
3. Speaking of Scott Walker: A really nice post by Peyton Craighill and Scott Clement on Barack Obama and the union vote in Ohio and Wisconsin — and everywhere else.
4. Really? More unskewing? Dave Weigel has the story of the latest Republican fantasy.
5. Or, as Brendan Nyhan puts it: #marketsineverything, fiction division. That is: As long as Republicans would rather buy nonsense, someone will be willing to sell it to them.
6. Greg Koger knows more about filibusters than basically, anyone — so you should definitely read his critique of the Merkley talking-filibuster proposal. He has mixed feelings, but I think he’s too optimistic. The key question: Would Republican senators have been eager or afraid to raise the profile of their opposition to bills such as the stimulus or Dodd-Frank? He thinks district pressure would push against them; I think they’re largely responsive to GOP-aligned media and would welcome the opportunity.
7. Kevin Drum considers one reform, which would switch the vote requirement from the majority (to get 60 votes) to the minority (to have enough votes to block). I agree with his bottom line, which is that it’s stupid to run the Senate based on physical stamina. Figure out what you want, and then figure out rules to make it happen.
8. I strongly agree with Ed Kilgore: You can’t take the politics out of politics.
9. See also Atrios: “Stop advocating for politicians to find ways to remove democratic accountability. In our system they already have enough ways of doing that.”
10. Oh, deficit hawks. Most of them? As phony as ever. Matt Yglesias nails it: “The dishonesty with which the ‘Fix The Debt’ campaign is dealing with the fiscal cliff is really breathtaking.”
11. Yes, most of us don’t want to spend Thanksgiving week reading through new federal regulations, even incredibly important ones that will determine what the fully implemented Affordable Care Act will do. That’s why Sarah Kliff reads them for us and points out the key bits.
12. And Matthew Dickinson on presidential incumbency. That’s right; the main reasons Barack Obama won were that he was an incumbent and the economy was growing, at least a bit.
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