Sunday links.

* If you're still reading about health care, don't miss the New York Times's hundred-year history of health care reform in America and (via the indomitable Steve Benen) a few links on what the bill actually accomplishes. It's also worth checking in with Steve Benen's reading of John Boehner's December 2008 declaration "The Future is Cao," which looks a whole lot different now.

* I've been thinking about the Paul Begala editorial from the summer, "Progress Over Perfection," and I think some nay-saying progressives could use the reminder.

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner's circle: farmworkers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

* Meanwhile, Ryan's Twitter feed has this on the attention economy as "post-capitalism."

The views I challenge include the notion that attention flows through the Internet chiefly to corporations, that attention only has significance if somehow monetized, that it is ultimately capitalists who exploit attention, and that money remains far more basic than attention.

Don't worry, fellow citizens; capitalism is alive and well.

While you were sleeping, capitalism apparently ended. I've been keenly aware of the emptiness of most free-market rhetoric, but nationalizing banks goes far beyond what I'd ever thought was in the realm of the possible. Our economy is entirely, astoundingly broken, just another gift of eight years of radical Republican misrule.

Elsewhere in the news and internets:

* The House has passed its energy bill over the objections of the Republicans, which Bush has threatened to veto. (See this post from last night for more on this.) Why the veto? Because it actually takes the Republicans up on their empty "all of the above" rhetoric. Right now this looks like some good political jujitsu from the Democrats—perhaps the first time I've ever had occasion to type that particular sentence.

* Harper's has opened up its David Foster Wallace archives in memoriam.

* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.

* In a nearly exact inverse to the Citibank theft story the other day, a banker has been caught stealing $14 million dollars from the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving it to needy customers.

* Colbert's getting his own Christmas special.

* Duke's own Fredric Jameson has received the Holberg Prize.

* All American kids play video games: 99% of boys and 94% of girls, according to a recent study.

* Obama's putting out a long, two-minute ad on the economy. That's all well and good, but he should be running ads like the one Ezra proposes on Social Security night and day.

* Tantalizing news about the Chevy Volt.

* And the always amazing Big Picture blog has photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.