1.  Mayor Bloomberg is giving 50 million to the Sierra Club so they can lobby for the destruction of the coal industry.  I'm building to a point. Stay with me.

2. Douglas Holz-Eakin gives an amazingly simple and concise explanation of why an extended failure to raise the debt ceiling would be a calamity.  It is a thing of beauty.  If I were some conservative rich guy or ran some big right-leaning 527 like American Crossroads, I'd build a $20 million or more ad campaign around Holz-Eakin (and/or James Capretta and/or Yuval Levin) giving 1-2 minute talks on defined contribution Medicare, block granting Medicaid, changing the Social Security indexing formula for high earning future retirees, or moving the health insurance system for under-65s to a combination of personally owned, renewable catastrophic care policies and government-subsidized reinsurance pools.   

And I'd run those ads on network television, BET, Univision, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report starting this Fall.  Let tens of millions of Americans see (maybe for the first time) a conservative arguing for reforms that will bring the welfare state down to a sustainable level in a clearly articulated, well thought out, and humane way. I suspect that this would do more good than $50 million in 30 second ads next October when the political commercials hit you with mind numbing repetition.  I would argue that Conservatives should invest in popularizing their best arguments early, but it is too late to be early.  That was for the last decade.  We can only hope that it is not too late to do any good.