Jon Stewart of The Daily Show does a good job of pointing out the inconsistencies in people’s positions on two Constitutional Amendments in The Bill of Rights.

The hard part to understand is that neither side of the debate on one of the amendments is consistent with that side’s position on the other amendment.

As described in the book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, now that each side has decided how they feel about the two amendments, they need to figure out why they made the decision they made. The decision is based on your gut feeling, and then you make up rationalizations to explain it. So let’s hear the rationalization for how you decide one way one one amendment, but decide the opposite way on the other amendment. I want to hear this so I can figure out why I take the positions I do on these amendments. I at least recognize my cognitive dissonance even if I don’t know what to do with it.

This is a great outreach program of the NRA to make sure we all have equal rights, especially second amendment rights.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Larry Summers Got a Bad Rap on Stimulus: Obama is the Problem by William K. Black. The article begins as follows:

I am a strong supporter of Janet Yellen and believe her support for the fiscal and monetary policies best designed to produce a stronger, prompter recovery from the Great Recession makes her the superior replacement for Ben Bernanke.  The criticism of Larry Summers’ position on fiscal stimulus, however, was generally inaccurate.  Within the Obama/Biden administration, the best known economists (Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein) proved dramatically better economists than did the non-economists who eventually came to dominate Obama’s economic policies (Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, and William Daley).  Summers, Romer, and Bernstein were strong voices in favor of fiscal stimulus.  Summers deserves some additional praise because he had to break from his mentor’s (Bob Rubin’s) pro-austerity dogmas to reach his anti-austerian position.

I wasn’t sure if it were Summers or someone else that was giving bad advice to President Obama on the stimulus.  If William Black wants to defend Summers on this aspect of his economics advice, then I am willing to listen.  There are some links that I am going to have to follow to see if there is an explanation of just where Summers stood compared to Romer.  He might have stood correctly in opposition to Geithner, Lew, and Daley, but still be more tepid about stimulus than Romer.