The best of the best

• Ezra Klein does a beautiful job investigating the flawed (if somewhat defensible) economic assumptions of the incoming Obama administration in 2008-09 and asks whether things could have gone differently.
• Steven Greene: "[George] Will is not particularly bright. He’s just got a good vocabulary and wears bow ties. That’s enough to fool most people."
• Christie and Palin decided not to run for president? Jonathan Bernstein thinks they actually were running (see here and here), and got selected out by the invisible primary.
• Greg Koger provides some context for what happened in the Senate last week. See also Sarah Binder, a.k.a. The Senate Whisperer.
• John Sides provides a Moneyball-esque perspective to campaign finance.
• Great interview with Steven Pinker about declining violence worldwide. Interesting quote: "Even if you subtract all the killings with firearms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans still kill at a higher rate than Europeans."
• Via Chris Federico, a Soviet-era ad for Aeroflot. It's not obvious to me why a government enterprise with no competitor needed to advertise, nor why the Russians couldn't find any better dancers.
• How to carve a Death Star Jack-o-lantern and turn your dog into an ATAT.
• White people had a hard week.