Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I’m never sympathetic to those progressives who want Sestak to run and will support him if he does. Despite the boost we got from Specter’s party switch, he’s still nowhere near satisfyingly liberal enough for a state as blue as Pennsylvania.

But, on the other hand, I think we want to encourage as many Republican senators and Congressmen to become Democrats as possible. And if other potential switches saw Specter not only lose, but to lose to a primary challenger backed by the DSCC and the President, then there would be no more party switches.

So, I actually think what’s going on now is the best of both worlds. Specter is feeling a little heat from his left, and so he’s accordingly getting more and more on board with the Democratic agenda, but he’s still being supported by the Democratic establishment, making his switch safe, and for him, a good move.

This Times story giving the tick-tock of the Sotomayor nomination had this hopeful nugget:

Over the course of the last four weeks, Mr. Obama nursed doubts about Judge Sotomayor and entertained alternatives, aides said. He called around, asking allies about her reputation for brusqueness. At times, he grew increasingly enamored of other candidates, particularly Judge Diane P. Wood, whom he knew from Chicago. But by the time Judge Sotomayor left the White House last Thursday after what Mr. Obama told aides was a “dense discussion” of constitutional law, he was pretty much sold.

It’s likely that Obama will get one more Court pick, and maybe even two, and I would think that Wood would be a front runner. If he gets to replace Stevens and Ginsberg, then one of the nominees would have to be a woman. Which means that, assuming nothing horrific happens, Wood would almost certainly get the nod.

Wood would be a great pick on totally dry, neutral grounds. She’s experienced, respected by everyone, has served on the bench with two of the most intellectually powerful and domineering conservatives in the judiciary (Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook) and is thought to be one of the best liberal jurists out there.

The fun part about a Wood pick is seeing what narrative would instantly congeal about her. Because she’s white, they would have a much, much harder time calling her a diversity pick. They also wouldn’t be able to go after her qualifications, though it would be funny if they tried to belittle her for getting her undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Texas. They would probably just go after her for being liberal and pro-choice. Which I guess would be more honest than the Sotomayor attacks, but also much less embarrassing.

Dylan  speculates on how any Obama  pick could do more than preserve the 4-4-1 set up of the current Court.

But Magliocca presents a third option: a justice who wins votes through respectful, almost passive persuasion. In a way, this is the judicial application of Obama’s entry into the “theory of change” primary. The idea in both cases is that merely by engaging one’s ideological opponents in good faith, one has a better shot of co-opting them. I have my doubts about how this would work on the Court. The tactic works for Obama because he can use public reaction as a bludgeon to punish conservatives who are clearly not reciprocating his good faith. Supreme Court justices, by contrast, are accountable only to their own consciences, leaving their colleagues nothing to play against them. That said, if at least once Sotomayor walks into Anthony Kennedy’s chambers, begins with, “You are too smart for me,” and walks out having flipped a 5-4 decision, then Obama’s selection of her stops being just a very good choice and starts being a masterstroke.

But this isn’t a “theory of change,” it’s a theory of Kennedy. On the cases that liberals care about, the ones that will 5-4 decisions with a Kennedy swing vote, there is only hope for persuading Kennedy. The other eight justices are both ideological and self-aware enough to know where they are going to vote on these big, controversial cases. So, to explain how Sotomayor, or any replacement for a liberal judge that Obama picks could actually swing the court, everything must be explained in the particularities of Anthony Kennedy’s jurisprudence and personality.

If there’s past evidence of Kennedy being persuaded by this type of empathetic, respectful appeal, then Sotomayor could be amazing pick, but until then, I wouldn’t expect much change.

If you’re going to write a non-news, silly, non-falsifiable trend story about teenagers hugging, can you least include the most salient cultural reference?

This isn’t very difficult.

[See update below]

Rebecca Traister, in the midst of an entertaining, thorough and not entirely fair take-down of Ross Douthat’s latest, says something a little strange:

Gallingly, there’s simply no paint-by-numbers answer to the problem of increased female disenchantment, unless of course you consider that, despite all the strides made by women, we’re still having conversations about who does the laundry, whether putting on a short skirt decreases brain cells, whether childcare is a feminine responsibility, whether it’s immoral to have sex outside of marriage, and why there are so few female CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, and presidents of the United States. These are conversations which, when extended over a period of decades, are liable to put anyone in a bad mood. [Emphasis added - MZ]

Now, I may be wrong here, but I think one can avoid being the second coming of Cotton Mather and still say that sex outside of marriage is morally wrong. Not because all sex outside of wedlock is wrong — I can think of no good moral reason why pre-marital or non procreative sex is morally condemnatory — but it seems like adultery, if I may use such a loaded phrase, is totally different from other, morally neutral forms of out-of-wedlock sex.

That’s because, when people get married, they make a vow, to eachother, not to have sex out of wedlock. And, in general, people should not break explicit vows and promises. For the same reason that garden variety lying or duplicity is wrong, so is adultery wrong.

Of course, each marriage is different, and if the other spouse is OK with extramarital sex within the framework of their relationship, then having sex outside of marriage isn’t anything to care about, but I imagine that situations like that make up a fraction of adultery cases.

Now, obviously, if women are being coerced into marriages and don’t exercise any meaningful choice or input in who their sexual partners get to be, then the question is totally different. But, today, I don’t think that’s a huge concern, and even if it were, I don’t think anyone could argue that the majority of people who cheat on their spouses or rebelling against a forced or otherwise coerced marriage.

Am I missing something here? Does Traister actually agree with me, and I’ve just misread her about why this debate is so depressing for feminists? I’m actually a bit confused as to the extent to which there can even be debate over this question.

UPDATE Ok, I just reread my post, and it’s now obvious that I’ve pretty embarassingly misread Traister here. Any common sense/charitable reading would indicate that Traister is talking about all out of wedlock sex, not just adultery. Obviously, I’m totally on-board with Traister here. Now, I think that some liberals and feminists are a bit hesitant to condemn adultery, but Traister isn’t making any argument about adultery, so there’s really nothing to disagree with here. Just see this post as me, out of nowhere, deciding to argue that adultery is morally wrong.

Dylan has an excellent piece at Campus Progress defending Sotomayor’s decision in the infamous Ricci v. DeStefano case. I haven’t yet heard a good argument that what the New Haven Fire Department did wasn’t require or at least allowed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Instead, I’ve heard a bunch of braying about how affirmative action is bad and how sympathetic Stephen Ricci is as a plaintiff. Basically, what George Will and Roger Cohen and a lot of Sotomayor’s critics are doing is making a policy argument and then piling on Sotomayor for coming to a legal decision that results in their preferred policy not being implemented.

What’s the phrase for thinking that policy considerations should overhwhelm legal ones? Starts with a J, two words, might end with ism?

When Roberts and Alito were appointed, liberals were plenty upset, but they never went after their qualifications or intelligence.

This was especially strange with Alito. As Orin Kerr pointed out, Alito and Sotomayor are oddly similar:

her resume hints at someone who is sort of like a liberal mirror image of Samuel Alito: the humble kid who goes to Princeton and Yale Law, becomes a prosecutor, and then gets appointed at a young age to the federal bench and puts in 15 years as a respected (if not particularly high profile) federal judge.

But no one would ever dare argue that Alito wasn’t qualified or intelligent enough or was a pure identity politics/political pick. And while Alito, being yet another white, Catholic male, doesn’t seem like an identity pick, he was in a strange way. That’s because for conservatives, appointing conservative Catholics is a way of communicating to the base, especially those who care about social issues, that the appointee is one of us and isn’t likely to be too friendly to abortion rights. But since this type of dogwhistling/identity politics is invisible to the mainstream press, no one ever really talks about it, and picks like Alito’s are seen as totally normative.

Despite the gossipy and silly whispering campaign launched against her by centrist and conservative commentators, the pick was, in many ways, inevitable. Sotomayor had just about everything Obama was looking for. Compelling personal story, accomplishments beyond being a federal appeals judge, female, Hispanic and not a bomb thrower.

She’ll be approved, and so the question is now how much of a fuss the Senate GOP and their allies want to make over the pick. There is an entire infrastructure, that’s very well developed on the conservative side, whose sole purpose is either to champion conservative Court picks or tear down liberal ones. And they, of course, are already spewing out their concocted and soon-to-be-everywhere lines about Sotomayor, focusing on her supposed poor temperament, lack of intelligence, he “activism” and her decision in the Ricci affirmative action case.

All of these lines of cricticism are notably distored. Sure, Sotomayor isn’t the mega-intellectual superstar that Pam Karlan or Kathleen Sullivan is, but neither was Alito, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Thomas or even Roberts. Her decision, along with two other Second Court judges, to not overturn a lower court’s holding in the Ricci case, while oddly constructed (the opinion made no effort to grapple with any constitutional issues), wasn’t particularly controversial. In fact, at least four justices are almost sure to agree that the throwing out of the test results for promoting New Haven firefighters was constitutional. As far as activism goes, well, any judge appointed by a Democrat will be called an activist. To expect Republican politicians and their allies to display any intellectual honesty or self awareness (it’s generally conservative justices who strike down the decisions of voters and/or government officials) is a total lost cause. Conservatives decided a long time ago that all of their least favorite judges were activists and all their favorites weren’t. Sotomayor’s cause isn’t going to be helped on this point by her somewhat bad sounding, but totally innocuous  statement that appeals courts are where policy is made, but they were going to go after her on this point anyway.

So, expect Sotomayor to be on the court at the start of the new term, and for nothing that happens in the confirmation fight to have any lasting impact.

Oh, wait.

Basically, in Montgomery County, Georgia, the high school school does not sponsor or host a prom. Instead, the parents of black and white students host two proms, held at the same venue on consecutive nights. A few white students attend the black prom, no black students attend the white one. The school, not surprisingly, has largely thrown its hands up at this horrible state of affairs, and instead leaves the parents and students to continue organizing their parallel proms.

Besides the fact that this story manages to confirm every stereotype ever conceived about the rural south (check out Harley Boone’s  picture with her stepfather and her mom who looks maybe 15 years older than her), but it also shows how unthinking and routine racism can be. The piece made it seem that no white students were especially enthusiastic about the segregated proms, and that it was mostly their parents combined with the inertia of the school that allowed this horrific tradition to continue unabated. The audio slide show, besides having some of the most sociologically interesting prom pictures I’ve seen in a while, is a perfect example of how white people describe this type of ingrained, traditional, lazy racism.

Harley Boone, one of the white girls, is quick to point out that black and white students hang out with each other and that proms have been done this way, “it’s not a big deal around here, it’s what we know and it’s what our parents have done for all these years.” This is important. The prom tradition isn’t really that much of a tradition. Instead, the separate proms were established in 1971, when the school was finally integrated. Before then, the question of having a black prom never even occurred to the white parents or students. Anita Williamson, Harley’s mother, hews even closer to the classic Southern racist script, “This community, this school system is fine like it is. They have done it ever since the school system has been open and they started having proms, it has worked for them this way, why change something that works? The kids are perfectly fine with it.” This is how people looking to justify legal and social discrimination and racism have defended themselves for as long as they have been forced to defend themselves.

So why don’t the kids rise up? Well, I hesitate to get too deep into the psychology of people from a place and culture I hardly know, but I think it’s probably just laziness. Rural communities like this one tend to not have a lot of movement in and out, meaning that their parents and older siblings all see segregated proms as normal and routine. Add on to the fact that a whole lot of high school students, in my experience at least, just go through the proscribed steps of the prom ritual without really caring a whole lot one way or another, and you’ll never really see much impetus for change.

For another look at how deeply American instituions for young people in the South are corrupted by lazy racism, check out this Jason Zengerle article about the University of Alabama’s Greek system.

So, this blog, written by two former Congressional staffers, has a lot more going for it than its clever title. And by that, I mean, incisive commentary! Seriously, check out this post about copyright and DMCA, as well as the rest of their stuff.

Louis Warren, guesting at Edge of the American West, has a fantastic post explaining the role of the 2/3rds majority to raise taxes or pass a budget in my home state’s horrific fiscal mess. More generally, Warren makes the point that requiring supermajorities is a huge obstacle not only to progressive change, but to effective governance more generally. The fact that such an arrangement, in California at least, arose during the Progressive Era at the behest of good governance campaigners (along with the initiative system) is a sad historical irony.

H/T

Matt Yglesias, responding to Kevin Drum, makes the argument that the public isn’t really to blame for California’s horrendous budget mess, at least compared to the institutional structures which encourage high spending and make it very hard to raise the requisite revenue:

I suppose it strikes me as unlikely that California’s budget problems are unusually intractable because California’s citizens as unusually unreasonable. The crux of the matter, as best I can tell from the East Coast, is that California has a set of political institutions that don’t work. The 2/3ds rule in the state legislation doesn’t make sense, the profligate use of the initiative process doesn’t work, the combination of the two is disastrous. There seem to me to be other sources of institutional dysfunction in California (LA County is almost twice as big as the country’s second-largest, and five of the fifteen top population counties form a contiguous belt in southern California) but those are the big obvious ones. Voters and politicians suffer from similar pathologies all the world ’round. But differences in history and institutions can lead to very different outcomes. California needs not only to come through this budget apocalypse, but to adopt a different institutional model that forces some level of decision-making.

I totally agree here. California, because of the relatively liberal tilt, high concentrations of politically powerful ethnic minority groups and powerful unions, is going to be a high spending state compared to the rest of the country. But because of its bizarre initiative system, which allows bare majorities of popular votes amend the state Constitution, we are stuck with low property taxes and the requirement that 2/3rds of the legislature sign off on any tax increase. It just so happens that the very same initiative system allows voters to mandate high levels of spending, and since initiative elections don’t have the highest turnout, concentrated groups (public employees unions) can usually vote themselves more from the state trough. And even though Californians probably have more desire for high spending than populations of other states, I’d bet that if other states adopted California’s budget institutions and structures, they would end up with similar problems.

Let me be clear: I totally agree with Yglesias that we ought to scrap the intiative system, reform prop 13 so that it, at least, commercial properties pay higher taxes and get rid of the 2/3rds requirement. But, on the other hand, it would be a bit bizarre if the solution to our budget gap was to remove the two fetters that keep the rapacious state Democrats and their supporters in check.

I think the best way to deal with this would be for California to declare bankruptcy or something like it, and get the equivalent of the IMF in and start kicking some ass. If we could, all at once, reform the budget process in California so that the people’s desire for high spending was naturally tempered or at least accompanied by higher taxes, then that would put the state in a position to become fiscally solvent…sometime.

Ta-Nahisi, disappointed as I am at the relative mediocrity of Eminen’s latest album, has this hard question Does Em have a truly classic album? He’s a great rapper, no doubt. But does he have an It Takes A Nation, an Illmatic, an Aquemini or a Death Certificate?” In some ways, Eminen doesn’t have an album with the consistency of any of those classics. His three best albums — Slim Shady LP, Marshall Mathers LP and Eminem Show — have enough good songs for two great albums, but all three have a depressing amount of filler. Now, I don’t think this necessarily disqualifies Marhsall Mathers, after all, Stankonia has plenty of not-great songs.

But aside from this rather narrow question, I think it’s worth defending Eminem’s musical and cultural legacy. A lot of people try to denigrate Eminen’s accomplishments and acclaim by pointing out that he was able to draw so much attention due to his race. This is true, but only to a certain extent.

The popularity of Eminem among, say, white ten year olds (which is what I was when “The Real Slim Shady” dropped) has a lot to do with his race. But his race can not explain how much respect he got from other rappers. Sure, if you’re a great white MC, you’re going to get a lot of attention, but there’s still only been one white guy — Eminem — whose achieved so much. There’s a lot of reasons why so many rappers are black, but one reason is that white rappers have the same problem that ethnic minorities do in predominately white contexts. They have to be that much better than everyone else, or else they are instantly dismissed.

There’s a reason that Eminem has such technically perfect flow and technique, it’s what he needed to overcome his whiteness. That’s probably also why he was so daring and inventive with his self-characterization. He simply couldn’t rap about the same things — money, women, how great he was — that other rappers could, or he’d just sound silly.

And I think that’s why we have to recognize his amazing three album run as one of the most culturally significant moments in recent history. Has there been anyone else who sold as many albums as he did with so much self-consciousness and such obvious vulnerability? His best songs were about his tortured relationship with his wife, his issues with his mom and an obsessed fan who was something of a doppelganger for himself. When Jay-Z raps about himself, it’s him saying he’s the greatest, when Eminem does, it’s about his incredible dysfunction.

Has Eminem sullied his legacy with his recent stuff? Yes, of course he has. But I think it’s still important to remember just how important he was — and still is.

I’m usually game for Notre Dame bashing. Here is a team that hasn’t fielded a nationally worthy team in decades, has lost 15 games in the the past two years, and is still showered with bizarre amounts of national media attention. One of my favorite non-Cal, non-Northwestern college football moments was the 2001 Fiesta Bowl, where a clearly undeserving Notre Dame team got obliterated by a scarily talented, and nationally under appreciated, Oregon State squad.

So I should be down with Jon Chait’s having some fun at the expense of the woeful Fighting Irish. But seriously, Jon, do you really want to use your Michigan Wolverines, who were 3-9 this past year, as a point of comparison? I mean, they lost to Northwestern. At home.

The three poles of the Republican coalition — national security conservatives, social conservatives and economic conservatives — are a surprisingly disparate bunch. While there are politicians and figures who can credibly claim to be all three, most of the time, nationally prominent Republicans have to win the trust of one or two of the factions and even then, aren’t completely trusted. One way that Republicans can unify, however, is around Supreme Court appointments.

Conservative jurisprudence, not at all coincidentally, is perfectly aligned with the politics of the three factions. A model conservative jurist will favor the secrecy and executive power claims that national security conservatives make, will rule in favor of large corporations and against workers and will, where he can, strike down or limit socially liberal legislation. So, when it comes to appointing Supreme Court justices, conservatives tend to A. view appointments as incredibly important and B. rally around conservative nominees they like.

That’s why some centrist and even liberal commentators were so silly to think that Roberts would be “modest” or “moderate” or “humble.” Would George Bush have appointed a jurist that wasn’t a stalking horse for conservative concerns? Would the conservative movement have rallied around some Anthony Kennedy or David Souter like figure? Of course not. These people aren’t idiots. Exactly why we were supposed to think that someone whose political career was started in the Reagan Justice Department and who had always been a loyal member of the conservative movement would disappoint them is beyond me.

Hopefully, Jeffrey Toobin’s extensive and pointed New Yorker article will put to rest any remaining claims that Roberts is a humble moderate. Here’s the nut of the piece:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

This really shouldn’t be a surprise. Hopefully, next time a conservative president is appointing a Supreme Court justice, liberal and moderate commentators won’t be so easily fooled.

The Congressional GOP, bereft of real policy ideas or the ability to do anything, has been reduced to juvenile mocking of Democratic ideas. I thought the most absurd of these was the bizarre claim that moving a few hundred Guantanamo detainees to American facilities constituted any type of threat to anyone. If they were all of the sudden so skeptical of the American prison system’s ability to keep dangerous people on lock and key, why are they OK with Supermax in Florence or with keeping convicted terrorists in federal prison (or detaining Jose Padilla in a brig in Charleston)? But trying to rationally answer such absurd claims was silly. This was the GOP using any possible argument to reestablishment themselves as  the jingoistic, national security party.

So what the fuck are the Congressional Democrats doing not providing the $80 million necessary to close down Gitmo and deal with the detainees? Do they think that their political fortunes will be improved by being bitch slapped by the GOP? The Republicans were making a stand that was nonsensical, even by their standards. I doubt anyone besides Michelle Bachmann actually thought American would be put at risk by the presence of these detainees. But, instead of being laughed at, the Republicans have learned they can bully the Democrats by saying whatever ridiculous nonsense that can be plausibly connected to being mean to terrorists.

Dylan Matthews sees the brutal way in which the Sri Lankan government ended their long civil war with the Tamil Tigers as an almost necessary outcome of any sucessful counter insurgency:

But it’s weird that such concern has evaporated into universal euphoria once the government’s tactics succeeded. I can’t help but wonder if this is the natural ideological consequence of a US government fetish for counterinsurgency. Sure, it has the potential to be implemented somewhat humanely – though as Michael Cohen and Tara McKelvey argue, we should avoid it like the plague even then – but these things experience slippage. It’s hard for the US military to publicly endorse a policy with the vigor with which it’s embraced COIN without a degree of inadvertent evangelism. Just as Abu Ghraib and Guanatamo gave foreign government a way to cloak themselves in the American flag as a means of defending their own torture regimes, the US adoption of counterinsurgency provides a justification for mass atrocities like the ones the Sri Lankan government has been committing. After all, the easiest way to beat an insurgency is to make it unbearably painful to join one,

Dylan is making two arguments here. One is that the US military and diplomatic establishment’s enthusiastic adoption of counter insurgency tactics has essentially given a carte blanche for other countries to employ the roughest COIN tactics with the least concern for human rights or civilian deaths. The second argument is more general, that counterinsurgency will inevitably turn into an almost total war against a loosely defined group of people, so that people are discouraged from becoming insurgents.

Let’s deal with the first, more limited question about the US and Sri Lanka. I doubt that there’s any scenario under which the Sri Lankan government wouldn’t have taken their oppurtunity to end their war with the most expedient means possible. The fact that they’re seemingly impervious to the complaints of the US and the UN shows that their priority was ending the conflict by being in control of all of Sri Lanka. After all, civil wars always tend to be especially bloody, as the fighting is necessarily on civilian or non-military turf. Also, since governments will always desire to control their own territory, a situation like the one in Sri Lanka will always lend itself to disregard for humanitarian concerns. In a war where you have to opportunity to regain territorial and political integrity, winning will always come first. If you don’t believe me, I have a scenic path from Atlanta to Savannah to sell you.

Now, I’m sure this was all made easier by adoption not just of COIN rhetoric, but more generally, by portraying the Tamil Tigers as terrorists (which they are) and thus putting the Sri Lankan government on the good side in the War on Terror.

Dylan’s second point about counterinsurgency more generally is a bit more tricky. Yes, there seems to always be the Mau-Mau route to putting down insurgents — torture, concentration camps and more generally, terrifying the population into no longer supporting the insurgency. But I think the relative American success in Iraq shows that the Mau-Mau route is hardly inevitable. If the insurgents are essentially parasites on the local population, then counterinsurgency will mean population protection, along, of course, with deploying high-tech commandos to kill terrorists.

I guess, on the margins, the US occupying countries and inevitably putting down insurgencies, will encourage other countries to do the same. I just don’t think Sri Lanka is an especially good example of this trend. Also, before the US even started engaging in COIN, countries were using the War on Terror more gnerally to justify their repressive military actions (see Russia in Chechnya or China in Xinjiang)

California is a very screwy state. On one hand, it has a liberal population and a high demand for social services and government spending. This demand is augmented by the fact that politically influential groups, mostly public employees unions, can organize and win initiative votes which mandate more spending. Also, the Democratic party has been captured by these groups, and because the California Republican party is bizarrely out of step with anyone besides their own hardcore supporters, the Democrats are generally given free rein to increase spending.

So, it seems interesting, from a conservative perspective at least, that according to this poll by Rasmussen, that Californians don’t want new spending or new taxes. Mary Katharine Ham, blogging at the Weekly Standard, seems to think that California’s spending and fiscal negligence is connected to Obama’s high spending, and because Californians are turning against the horrible fiscal situation, that augers well for Republicans to 2010.

But California is a very, very weird case. For one, the polling she cites is just about California and California’s fiscal situation is really only relevant to statewide California politics. What’s driving the absurd debt and deficits in California isn’t increased spending in face of an economic downturn, but because the structure of California politics encourages lots of mandated spending but discourages raising enough revenue. And, not surprisingly, Ham totally neglects one of the dual-roots of my home state’s fiscal crisis: Proposition 13.

If you look more closely at those poll results, you’ll see that Californians don’t want to raise income or sales taxes. This makes sense, because our income and sales taxes are already quite high. But the reason California is so utterly dependent on sales and income taxes is because property taxes are capped at a very low rate due to Proposition 13. Because of the limit on property taxes, California has to turn to sales and income taxes. And it turns out that California’s net tax rate as a percentage of total income is only slightly higher than the national average. In 2007, state and local taxes were 11.5% of income, and the average was 11%. It’s just that our tax burden is disproportionally taken up by sales and income taxes. Of the $170 billion of tax revenue in 2006-2007, $97 billion, or 57% came from income and sales taxes (25% came from property taxes). This dependency on income taxes, which by themselves account for 30% of total tax, is a recipe for fiscal disaster in a downturn, as incomes, especially incomes of the rich, take a huge hit. And that’s exactly what’s happened — income tax revenues have fallen 44% this year.

In short, California’s fiscal problems aren’t solely the fault of state Democrats and the unquenchable thirst for public funds of their allies. They’re largely responsible — along with the initiative system — for the spending side of the ledger. But Republicans, who celebrate Proposition 13 as a landmark moment in the history of the conservative movement, have handcuffed the state from dealing with the population’s desire for high spending in a responsible manner.

It’s hard to think of three more vacuous, undeservedly famous people. And they’re all fighting! I’m not writing this post because you should care about this bitch-fest* of epic proportions, but because Ned’s post on it is absolutely hilarious. Here’s  a taste:

I’m not just talking about Prejean here; I’m also referring to Perez Hilton, the ethically deficient gossip monger who took time out of drawing MS paint dicks on the faces of anorexics to grandstand in the middle of a beauty pageant and elevate a theoretically sentient life form into a prominent demagogue in the culture wars, while simultaneously damaging his own cause even further simply by virtue of being a massive tool.

Check out the whole thing.

* Bitch is, in nearly all cases, a misogynistic term used to denigrate women for being assertive and for challenging traditional gender norms. But seriously, this is a totally pointless, mutually self aggrandizing and utterly vapid spat between Perez Hilton, a beauty pageant contestant, and  Alaska Barbie. I really couldn’t think of a more appropriate term.

I could probably write a book about on this topic, but it’s quite annoying to hear conservatives warble on about how they’re skeptical of radical change, blah blah blah, Burke, French Revolution, purple monkey dishwasher, Stalin.

It just so happens that this suspicion of radical change only seems to manifest itself when the change is a liberal one. So, totally doing away with the post New Deal regulatory/welfare state, which is probably the most radical set of policy proposals supported by a wide range of respectable figures in the US, is radical change that conservatives are OK with, but undoing American apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy was just like the French Revolution.

I’m not saying that there’s not a place in our policy debates for skepticism about radical change and worries about unintended consequences. But to pretend that the modern American conservative movement has ever been a principled voicers of those concerns is just insulting to the historical record.

Conservatives have a policy agenda, liberals have a policy agenda. Let’s just debate those policies!