Pornography for Progressives

Spoiler alert for any rabid right-wingers who may have wandered in here: What follows could be bad for your blood pressure.

Amid all of today's babble and bluster, it's like a short stay at a sanity spa to listen to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who might have been President, talking to Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor/New York Times columnist, about politics past and present. They were brought together by the British paper, the Guardian, to discuss Krugman's new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal."

Along the way, they touched on Aristotle, Keynes, Lincoln, health care, Iraq and the 2008 elections. For those who want to remember what public discourse could be, a small sample:

Cuomo: You said we're going to have a lot of rich people who inherited wealth and power...Then you're going to have a lot of miserably poor people who want to kill the rich people because of jealousy and so you need to have that buffer between the two of them that aspires to a better life by figuring out ways to get themselves more property and more wages, and...the first real middle class for a democracy was ours, the first real middle class that worked.

Krugman: (I)n the 18th century, you could say America was the first truly middle class society and then we lost it for a while there, during industrialization. Then we got it back because we had the political movement that made getting it back its goal, and now we've lost it largely again because we had a political movement that made getting rid of it its goal.

You can read or see/hear the rest of it here.