Jonathan Alter

In Barbara Tuchman’s classic account of the outbreak of World War I, “The Guns of August,” neither Germany nor its adversaries seem to want war in 1914. But they stumble into it anyway. Substitute “default” for “war” and you have a good idea of where we are in the Great Debt-Limit Crisis of 2011.

Speeches by politicians are usually full of spin, biased use of facts and appeals to emotion. President Barack Obama’s address to the nation last night on the debt ceiling was no exception.

Where’s Franklin Roosevelt when we need him? While campaigning amid 25 percent unemployment in 1932, Roosevelt argued for what he called “bold, persistent experimentation.”

I get the feeling that it’s all over but the shouting. We may look back and say that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s convoluted parliamentary “backup plan” marked the effective end of the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis. The winner? President Barack Obama.

It’s hard to believe that less than six months ago President Barack Obama was talking about a “Sputnik moment.” In his State of the Union address he proposed huge investments in infrastructure, innovation and education to help us “win the future.”

As President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans trade shots on the budget, it’s getting harder to see how they’ll pull back from the brink and avoid a cataclysmic default.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers were back in federal court this week working out the schedule for the trial of former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards.

In Woody Allen’s charming new movie, “Midnight in Paris,” Owen Wilson’s character, a modern-day novelist, travels through time to the 1920s. He wishes he could stay, so he could keep hanging out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His love interest from the ‘20s wishes she were living in La Belle Epoque. Both discover when they travel back to the 1880s that Degas and Gauguin wish they were living in the Renaissance.

In a sweet form of payback, a couple in Collier County, Florida, this week foreclosed on a local branch of Bank of America. Sheriff’s deputies and lawyers appeared at the bank and told the branch manager that if he didn’t pay the couple’s legal fees -- as ordered months ago by a court in a wrongful-foreclosure case -- they would seize the branch’s furniture and other assets. With TV cameras on the scene, the bank finally paid.

Bloomberg View columnists William Cohan and Jonathan Alter debate over whether Obama administration adviser Elizabeth Warren should to named to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.