I stumbled across a site called SOPAOpera that's keeping track of who is and isn't supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the PROTECT-IP Act, SOPA's counterpart in the Senate.  The site also tracks how much money congresscritters have received from the entertainment and tech industries respectively.  SOPAOpera lists the data source as OpenSecrets, which indexes FEC data.

One interesting thing about the current American political climate is that you only ever seem to hear the phrase "class war" coming out of the mouths of those on the political right.  Predictably, talk of raising taxes on millionaires, which I regard as a political slam dunk that probably should have been a center-piece of Democratic politicking for some time now, has also raised cries of class warfare from the right of the political spectrum.

Via Mark Thoma, I have learned that Maxine Udall, Girl Economist, (born Alison Snow Jones) has passed away.

She was one of my favorite people in the econ blogosphere because she combined very sharp economic accumen with deep thinking about the moral implications of economic policy.  Really, the best kind of economist.

She was a contributor to TPM Cafe and was linked to by Paul Krugman on a number of occasions.

I think that it's fair to say we would all be in better shape if the current manifestion of conservatism in America looked less like Sarah Palin and more like David Frum.  I really disliked his views of 9/11 and the Iraq War.  He's also credited with coining the phrase "axis of evil."  And he was not a crossover conservative in 2008, voting for McCain despite his opinion that Sarah Palin was unqualified.