Abbreviated pundit round-up: Republicans on the verge of wising up? Democrats short-sheeting labor?

Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes several paragraphs of eyerolls over the Republican Ignorance Caucus:

To be sure, [House majority leader Eric] Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy discussion. But he didn't succeed ' and that was no accident. For these days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that's not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach 'critical thinking skills,' because, it said, such efforts 'have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.'

The Editorial Board of The New York Times states in Quietly Killing a Consumer Watchdog:

The consumer bureau has taken seriously its mandate to protect the public from the kinds of abuses that helped lead to the 2009 recession, and it has not been intimidated by the financial industry's army of lobbyists. That's what worries Republicans. They can't prevent the bureau from regulating their financial supporters. Having failed to block the creation of the bureau in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, they are now trying to take away its power by filibuster, and they may well succeed.[...]

The consumer bureau was enacted by law, and now Republicans are using backdoor methods to destroy it. There is no greater argument for Senate Democrats to ban filibusters of presidential nominees, particularly when the future of an entire agency is at stake.

Larry Summers at the Washington Post gives us some more of his spectacularly lame economic advice in The growth agenda we need in which he argues for accelerating growth of the natural gas industry to replace coal-fired plants while tossing in a clueless sneer about "fashionable efforts to promote renewables."

Check out other punditry on the bottom side of the orange Kosagon.