First up: some late night links. Ezra uses a triangle to explain the debate over the ACA. And Benen gets some great quotes from Republicans when Medicare D was underwater in its first few months. To wit:

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas): “I think it needs to be understood that in a major reform, an improvement of a program like this, there are bound to be glitches.”

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.): “Kinks” in Part D got “worked out.”

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) to CMS official: “You guys have done a super job.”

Fmr. Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.): “This is a major change in the Medicare program and it is not surprising that there have been implementation pitfalls along the way.”

Heh. But back to today. Dude, we blogged a lot about conservatism – its deepening class divide; Lowry and Ponnuru’s gentle attempt at channeling Tea Party rage; and Thatcher’s unpleasant side. I wrote a post on what the ideas of my mentor, Michael Oakeshott, could contribute to the current travails of the GOP.

I remained unfazed by the Saudis’ fuming over a potential transactional relationship between Washington and Tehran; and made the case for Obama finally getting to grips with the out-of-control NSA. As for the president’s foolishly broad statement that “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” I sadly inferred that the president was either lying or willfully uninformed. I keep remembering Obama’s own description of his core weakness: deep laziness. Is that what’s behind his going on auto-pilot for the NSA and the ACA? Are we seeing in policy terms the results of the phoned-in failure of his first presidential debate last year?

Kids with tablets; kids with cannabis; a face of pellucid underwater stillness.

The most popular post of the day was still this (a surprise to me); and the second was this post naming the man who deserves to be fired for the Obamacare website fiasco.

The map seen above charts the Dish’s popularity around the world for as long as WordPress VIP has been watching. Only two countries that I can see have had no Dish readers. The six most popular Dish-hubs, after the US, are, in descending order, Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, Ireland and France. But we’ve only had one page-view from Tuvalu.

See you later this evening on AC360 Later and in the morning, when, with any luck, this nasty cold I’ve gotten will have abated a little.