I thought my comparison of Democratic health care legislation with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 in my Wednesday Examiner column was an original idea. After all, even David Broder and Lou Cannon weren’t around to cover Stephen Douglas’s brilliant floor managing of this disastrous legislation. But fewer of our ideas are original than we suppose. Blogger Streetwise Professor, who in non-blog life is Craig Pirrong, a professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. Streetwise Professor posted his comparison on December 17, six days before my column. I swear I didn’t read it until today, but I’ll be checking out Streetwise Professor in the future, especially when I’m have trouble coming up with an original angle for my column.
Meanwhile, Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz website, another of my favorite bloggers, noting the boiling discontent with Obama/Democratic programs, has asked readers for ideas for a Contract With America 2.0. With an assist from a post on Instapundit (in actual life University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds), he’s been getting an intriguingly large number of responses. The Kansas-Nebraska Act prompted an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to reenter politics, with well known results; it seems to have triggered something in the nature of that response from Illinois lawyer Lexington Green.
