Aaron Swartz case an issue in Massachusetts Senate race

The fundamental problem the Republicans have is that they have kind of an unstable coalition. The Democrats have a lock on the urban working class. That's close to half the country by itself, so the Republicans need a majority of everyone else in order to win. But "everyone else" is not a homogenous group. It's libertarians, religious conservatives, Wall St., rural blue collar workers, small business owners, etc. And it's shrinking as a percentage of the country, largely because "urban working class" is growing.

So the problem they have is that to get more voters, they have to gore somebody's ox. There are a huge ton of libertarian-leaning Democrats who would switch parties if the Republicans would stop pandering to religious extremists on social issues, but then they risk losing the huge voting block of religious conservatives. I personally think that could be a good strategy: Just say "screw it" and go to the left of the Democrats on social issues. If the Democrats stick with liberal social positions then the religious conservatives don't have any religious conservative candidate anymore, and they're still largely pro-free market people who may continue to vote Republican. Meanwhile if you can push the Democrats to the right on social issues then all the better, because now the Republicans can claim the growing demographic of urban voters who want liberal social positions, to say nothing of what it would do for women voters. But that's a pretty radical change.

Changing their position on immigration instead makes a lot of sense, because the growing Hispanic demographic leans pro-market and religious and is mostly disgusted with Republicans for their immigration policies. The problem is the result will be to increase polarization, because it allows the Republicans to double down on "monopolies are good + gays are bad" while making all the races closer, because it allows the Republicans to gain with Hispanics in urban areas, while giving the Democrats more votes among blue collar voters in rural areas who don't like the new immigration policy. And having a larger number of contentious races with more polarization is not likely to be good for the country.

I personally respect her. But eBay was on a path to success even before she showed up. And the eBay culture that developed has some notable imperfections.

More recently her tenure at HP has been disappointing. I personally am sympathetic to the theory that the depth of HPs problems were not fully understood by the stock market, and a period of severe disappointment was inevitable before they got back on track. But I can understand someone blaming that on her. (And indeed, unless something positive happens with the stock price, I'm not sure how much more time she'll get to right that ship.)

If 2007 was "drunken sailor" level spending, surely you'd agree to a budget with that level of spending + population growth/inflation? That's way below where we are now.

I agree that Bush spent more than was prudent. But it's nuts to think that's an argument that President Obama hasn't demonstrated much worse spending discipline. Stimulus levels were sold as a way to jumpstart the economy, not as a permanent level hundreds of billions higher than what Bush ever dreamed of spending. You can argue that we still need that level of spending, but you shouldn't argue that somehow it's not historically high.

Who's arguing for lower spending now? Who was arguing for it in 1995 (and got it!)? Do you really think if the GOP could snap its fingers and pass something like the Ryan budget they wouldn't? Where's the comparable low-spending Democratic budget?

Maybe high spending and/or high taxes are great things, but when it comes to spending discipline, right now, there is a difference in the parties' agendas.