Jonathan Bernstein, a political scientist, writes on politics in his blog, “A Plain Blog About Politics.”

Here’s his latest post –

I’ll suggest two possibilities, both trend lines that may or may not turn out to be meaningful, one good, one bad. The good one is that jobless claims are falling a bit more…the four-week average is now below 450K, and at its lowest level, an AP story I’m looking at says, since before things went really south in September 2008.

The bad one is that after a summer in which year-to-year American and coalition deaths in Afghanistan had flattened out, casualties are back up this month. November is usually the start of a winter lull in casualties, but not this year (at least so far); in fact, this November is already the worst ever for American military deaths.

That’s an intelligent perspective. What I see currently on the web are a great deal of discussion about some athlete’s car that has a fridge in it. The republic will not doubt profit immensely from the intellect posed in that direction. But I’ll hang with Bernstein.

I went through a good number of his posts. He’s cynical. I like that, of course. He’s well read. (We well read people need to hang together!) We don’t agree quite a lot.

Strangely enough, this doesn’t bother me a bit.

So, good luck to him. Give him a read or a comment.

James Pilant