Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Alex Pareene muses that Lawrence Summers would be an entirely worthy nominee to oversee U.S. monetary policy - for a very specific set of criteria:

Laws and policies he championed directly led to the financial crisis, and the same laws and policies caused that crisis to kick off a global recession that we still have not crawled out of. He is more responsible than almost anyone else alive — it’s him, Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, basically — for the severity of the crisis. I can’t think of a better time to inexplicably reward Summers for his disastrous record than today, as news outlets everywhere revisit those miserable days of five years ago and sort through the aftermath. The ascension should happen as soon as possible. Think of it as a sort of birthday president for the crisis.
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The timing has never been better to reaffirm that in America, a lucky few are able to be wrong — disastrously wrong, in ways that cause a great deal of harm and suffering — about everything and be forever rewarded for it. Larry Summers is basically the mascot of the last few terrible decades, and today is the day that should be officially recognized.

- And Peter Beinart sees Bill de Blasio's primary victory as evidence that voters are very much willing to throw their support behind genuinely progressive options, rather than looking for somebody who caters primarily to the Very Serious People.

- Speaking of unabashed progressive heroes, Peter O'Neil excerpts Graeme Truelove's take on Svend Robinson's legacy. And the would-be MPs currently pursuing nominations in the upcoming set of by-elections would do well to follow his example.

- Finally, Armine Yalnizyan offers her take on how the Cons have permanently damaged our ability to assess the state of Canada's housing market - and how the limited data available through the National Household Survey offers plenty of reason for concern.