Live From Montenegro!

Montenegro is a weird little country. Not only is it the second newest country in the world, it also seems to have next to no national indentity. They speak Serbian, write in Cyrillic, put the Austro Hungarian eagle on everything, and use the euro. Considering that you can get around the Balkans speaking variations of Serbian, it more and more seems like Tito had the right idea by keeping national movements down and just calling the whole region Yugoslavia. Of course, the ethnic and national balkanization was the result of horrible civil wars and ethnic cleansing, which were themselves the inevitable result of keeping an unwieldly mutli-ethnic, multinational country together, but it’s pretty easy to see that much of the subsequent division has been rather arbitrary.

But despite its political weirdness, Kotor is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited It sits on an inlet from the Adriatic and is on the base of incredibly steep hills that go straight into the water. The water is, of course, clear and warm and delightful to swim in. The old city itself is immensly charming, but isn’t really all that different from Dubrovnik or any other old port on the Adriatic.

On a non travel related note, I should use Stanley FIsh’s Times piece on Heller and intentionalism to say just how much I love Stanley Fish. Not only does he address a large number of topics in a generally interesting, erudite and heterodox manner, he’s a great example of a public intellectual whose speciality is in the Humanities. As many have commented, one great difference in the public intellectual culture of today as opposed to the hey-day of New York in the 1950s is that today’s public intellectuals tend to be from the social sciences, especially economics. So instead of Irving Howe or Lionel Trilling commenting on culture, we have Tyler Cowen and Steven Levitt.

This change isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s certainly refreshing to see someone whose background is in Milton comment on the affiars of the today. This is especially nice when Fish comments on legal matters. Legal debates, especially constitutional ones, often tend to revolve around questions that those with a literary mind can best answer - would you trust an economist to illuminate the issues surrounding intentionalism? Of course, the law has been ground zero for the domination of economists and social sciences. What is law and economics - or even legal realism and pragmatism - rather than a “de-humanitiesizing” of legal scholarship and theory? Both schools are, of course, quite valuable, but there is a need for balance in the popular and academic discussions of the law.

And while we’re on the topic of literature, I have some quick notes from the reading I’ve been doing.

One - Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated  is to the Holocaust what Beloved is to Slavery. Both books skirt around long, in-depth discussions of what they’re nominally “about” and instead use the form of the novel and a variety of postmodern tricks and techniques to evoke the horror of their respective subjects instead of just describing them. They also both have something to say about memory, though Beloved more so than Everything is Illuminated. One major difference is that Everything is Illuminated is hilarious and quite readable; while Beloved is super serious and often ponderous.

Two - Are their novels that are, at their core, optimistic about modernity? Or any works of art, for that matter? Even books that are enthralled with capitalism - the works of Ayn Rand comes to mind - criticize real, exisiting modrn societies for being weak and collectivist. Having just read White Noise and Brideshead Revistited, I can’t help but feel dissapointed that the smartest and best novelists - Pynchon, DeLillo, Waugh, hell, even Homer is ambivalent about technology and modernity - have an overall message that seems just wrong. No matter how much I love the humor and occasionally trenchant cultural analysis of White Noise, I want to scream, “But what about the fact that fewer people are in poverty than ever! Interestate war is fast becoming a thing of the past! People are happier! The existence of consumer culture means that humanity has broken free for the Malthusian trap that has ensnared it for 99% of our history!” Much the same could be said to Pynchon. And to Waugh, shouldn’t we all note that aristocracy…umm..sucks?

Of course, it is the role of the novelists to criticize, and they are hardly obligated to propose an alternative model for society. I could read the Economist for my optimism about the long term trends of history, and then turn to Pynchon and DeLillo for a reminder of how these trends aren’t all good. But reading postmodern novels is a whole lot more fun than reading the Economist. So here’s my question to any remaining readers - are their good novels that are ultimately optimistic about the state of the modern world?   

I guess my last note is to encourage yall to read Dylan Mathews Richard Rorty inspired ruminations of the Fourth of July. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is actually responsible for me proudly indentifying as an American without being constantly worried about the ugly, exclusionistic underside of nationalism. It’s one of the few political books I’ve read that has a. actually changed the way I view the world and b. would recomend to everyone who identifies as anything close to left-of-center.

July Fourth in Sarajevo

That sounds like the chapter of a Robert Kaplan book, and it is appropriate, seeing that there are still bullet holes all over the buildings in the main city square, not to mention land mines and bombed out buildings that litter the beautiful countryside. Speaking of which, Bosnia is a strikingly beautiful country and Sarojevo is really its crown jewel. It is really generic to marvel at the catholic churches, orthodox temples, mosques and synagogues that all peacefully coexist, but considering that this is a city where world war I started and was under siege for almost three years, it is pretty amazing. And since I am morbidly jealous of all the journalists who got their starts reporting from Bosnia (Chris Hedges, Samantha Power, Robert Kaplan, David Rieff), we all paid a visit to the Holiday Inn where they all lived and snipers ally, a block that was constantly littered with Serbian gunfire. Oh yeah, the food is delicious, the beer is really cheap and the women are beautiful.

Speaking of which, if you ever find yourself in the balkans, go to Belgrade. Sure, it was bombed by the USA less than ten years ago, but that has not stopped them from having the best party scene of any European city we have visited. The clubs get going at around 1:30, break up around sunrise and are absolutely filled with beautiful women. Oh yeah, they are on barges. I guess it is better we are in Bosnia, a country whose suffering we merely ignored for a really long time, for the fourth, rather than a county whose capital we bombed. Of course, Pristina would have been the best, but there does not seem to be anything to do there…

Oh yeah, Obama was really good to come out in full support for government funding of religious social services. This is one of those essentially meaningless issues that Democrats should seize upon for political positioning purposes, and Obama was smart to do so. Now, if he could come out for gay marriage while at the same time proposing a marriage initiative on a larger scale than the small bore Bush programs, I would be incredibly happy.

Czech Mate

Prague is a wonderful city. It’s full of historical sites, beautiful young people from all over the world and cheap, delicious beer, To get all around this magical place, Prague has quite the cheap, efficient and useful metro system. My friends and I would go all over the city on the subway, and we realized something queer. No one seemed to buy passes or, if they had, they never seemed to scan them. So we figured that we could get away with only buying the cheapest passes and then pleading confusion and stupidity on the off chance that someone request to see our tickets. So we’re waiting to get on our train, having missed our stop by one, when two transit cops request to see our tickets. We dutifully show them our expired, invalid tickets and hand over our identification. They have the gleam in their eyes like they got us. They explain that our ticket is bad, and then request that we pay the 700 Czech Kroner (roughly $50) fine “on the spot.” As we all rummage around for the appropriate amount, they begin to walk us up to the station office. They put the 2100 Kr that three of us fork over in their little bags, making zero recording or doing anything official with their bounty. We soon figure out that it’s a bribe when they take 30 euros from the fourth member of our party. To be nice, they cop us the cheapest possible ticket and see us on our way.

It’s good to know that even with the EU inextricably stretching outward, standardizing rules and flattening out cultural distinctions, that low level police corruption aimed at young tourists is still thriving in the Czech Republic.

PS - LIke Yglesias, I’m something of a Russophobe Russiaphile, and so my friends and I rooted for the Motherland in their semi-final match against Spain. We were backed up in this choice by the number of cute girls with the Russian flag painted on their faces, as well as the several awesome Russian dudes waving flags and shouting for the reunification of the USSR (can’t actually confirm that last part). But as Spain built up their insurmountable lead and the Russian section quieted down and the tear-drenched mascara began to stain the faces of the cute Russian fans, we soon realized that the Spanish contingent also had awesome fans, numerous cute girls AND they were having an amazing time. So I guess the lesson is not to get your face painted at least until the outcome is clear.

PPS - Unlike Yglesias, I don’t see the end of Amsterdam’s infamous coffeshop culture anytime soon, conservative government or not. It’s easy for one to say “oh, weed is legal, but it’s getting harder to be licensed and open a new shop, so the culture must be changing.” But Yglesias has been to Amsterdam fairly recently, and surely he saw how widely available it was. It’s really quite shocking and just goes to show that weed will be de facto legal and widely available for the foreseeable future. Sure, they’re banning outdoor smoking (of tobacco, you can still spark up in coffee shops) as well as moving towards restricting magic mushrooms, but these are really marginal changes that reflect a rise of public health consciousness, as opposed to a move away from the drug culture that defines the city.

PS - Hostel tips for Budapest? That would be really helpful. Vienna too.

Europa

Beginning early this afternoon and ending sometime in late July, I am going to be in that great continent. I’m not bringing my laptop, so expect blogging to come to a standstill for the duration. I’ll still be writing for Pushback as much as possible and checking my email, but most of the blogging here will probably consist of posting pictures.

So if any of you fair readers have advice of cool things to see, bars/clubs to go to or really anything at all about Amsterdam, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Dubrovnik, Kosovo, Montenegro, the Dalmatian Coast, Sarajevo, Naples, Rome or Istanbul please drop a comment or send me an email.

A Tad Unfair

I may be the only person in the world that really likes both Kathy G and Megan McArdle, so it’s somewhat disappointing to see G make such a lame, petty point:

A blogger expresses the touching sentiment that “the world would be a vastly better place if people recognized that the right response to disagreement is debate, not rage” and sorrowfully reflects that “too many people in political debate are looking for reasons to be angry.”

And yet — this same blogger’s most notorious pronouncement concerned the matchless hilarity that would ensue if antiwar demonstrators were to be attacked by counter-demonstrators wielding two-by-fours.

Why, that’s a bit ironic!

Ah yes, one comment from February of 2003. Seriously, can people drop this? You blog for 7 or so years and of course you’ll say something stupid or overheated. And more importantly, the post in question reads like McArdle is only advocating the two-by-fouring of “the scruffier element of Saturday’s peace rally [that] is planning on demonstrating for peace by, er, wreaking mayhem.” Sure, it’s still not the best sentiment, but it’s not like McArdle thought that New Yorkers should start beating up on quakers marching through the streets.

Can’t you go back to arguing over early childhood interventions, the minimum wage or the Coase Theorem? Please?

The Nation Observations

Recently, The Nation sent me one of those free subscription offers. And since I can’t read enough magazines (thank you internet addled attention span!), I of course responded. And I like it! Even though I’m not a huge fan of their economic writing (Naomi Klein…), but more than anything, it’s a good way to know what the Left (very intentional capital L) is thinking. And apparently it’s thinking that putting Jesse Jackson in subscription offers is something that their readers want to see. I don’t want to impugn Jackson himself, but he’s a guy who doesn’t seem to have a lot of credibility with anyone or seem particularly cool. On my subscription offer, on the other hand, they had a plug from Gore Vidal. And Vidal, in case you wanted to know, is totally awesome.

Smart People Named Matt

Matt Zeitlin, Matt Yglesias…and Matt Rognlie. This last one is practically ancient compared to me (I think he’s in his early 20s, but can’t quite nail that down without some more intensive googling) and He’s 19 and is quite wise. Like, what he has to say about nuclear power:

Even if Nanosolar’s estimates are too optimistic, the current market price of $4800 per kilowatt of solar capacity, combined with the steep downward trajectory in historical price displayed here (page 13) and the rapid increase in investment as solar approaches cost parity, suggests that costs will indeed fall to $1000 per kilowatt in the not-so-distant future. At this point, solar power will undoubtedly be cheaper than nuclear.

And all this doesn’t even consider the massive subsidy implicit in federal liability guarantees, the unresolved questions about nuclear waste disposal, or a uranium supply constraint that will become binding if any large expansion of nuclear power takes place…

At this stage, it’s hard to imagine anything dumber than McCain’s apparent insistence that the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill include more subsidies for nuclear power. Just as the deranged band of Washington neoconservatives only shows interest in humanitarian interventions when they involve blood and guts, the modern Republican approach to climate change is to mention it only as an excuse for mindlessly promoting more nukes.

Wow, my little intro sounds really condescending, but really, Rognlie is the shizznit.

I’m Going To a Barbeque…

and it’s really nice out, so don’t expect a ton of blogging today. What you should expect, however, is that this clip from Stop Making Sense is the best bit of live music ever:

But, oh wait, this is a political blog, right? Let’s do that substance thing.

Philip Whyte gets his liberaltarian on in FT.

Weed and Ciggs are now (roughly) equally popular among teens.

Fred Kaplan lays down the smack on Bush’s North Korea policy.

And, back to the silliness - Wu Chess.

The game of chess, is like a swordfight. You must think first, before you move. Toad style is immensely strong, and immune to nearly any weapon. When it’s properly used, it’s almost invincible

Enter the 36 Chambers…

Blogroll Additions

I dont’ do this enough.

Matt Steinglass

The Art of the Possible

United States of Jamerica.

Oh yeah, the reason I’m posting at 5 in the morning is because I just wrote a 10 page, 3000 word paper on Tolstoy and the Iraq War. I started it seven hours ago. Woo Hoo procrastination!

Neurodiversity

As someone who expressively defends the rights of parents to abort their children* end their pregnancies because of the presence of a gene that could cause some crippling disease, one would not expect me to think that the neurodiversity movement is totally awesome. But this New York article about the movement, and its critics, is simply fantastic - and convincing.

The way Andrew Solomon describes it, the autism activists are split into three camps. One, the vaccinists, think that autism (or autism spectrum disorders) is not only a crippling disease, but one that should be eliminated by fixing the environmental factors. The genetics also think that autism spectrum disorders are crippling, and think we should be trying to find a cure. The neurodiverse types are more of a mixed lot, but generally tend to view autism and Aspergers not as a disease, but as a different way of thinking. To them, autism is only a disability because of a normative view of what an abled person, and that if we tried to accept and accommodate those on the spectrum, much of the “symptoms” would go away, mostly because they wouldn’t be viewed as symptoms.

The vaccinists are clearly wrong on two points. One, vaccines don’t cause autism. But not only are they selling false hope, they promote a ridiculously regressive model of the disorder, seemingly excluding any possibility that someone on the spectrum could see some value in their neurological difference, just insisting that they’re not only disabled, but poisoned. The geneticists often adopt the same view of the vaccinists, seeing autism as purely negative. But they’re probably closer to the truth in seeing a genetic component of autism. Where they are right, in my opinion, is that looking to a genetic cause of autism won’t lead to the elimination of neurodiversity by means of abortion. The genetic component to autism likely involves hundreds of genes operating in a epistatic fashion to influence some traits that all add up to a spectrum disorder. It’s highly unlikely that well ever be able to point to some specific genes and say that a baby will be autistic.

Where the neurodiversity folks get it wrong, I feel, is in their (sometime) categorical objection to seeing any objective component to autism-as-disability. Oftentimes, their tributes to the benefits of autism can fall on the deaf ears of parents who spend massive sums and huge amounts of time just trying to get their kid not to have self-destructive tantrums or potty trained. To those parents, it’s hard to say that their kid is merely approaching cognition in a different way, he’s disabled (if the term is to mean anything at all).

I see no reason why we can’t come to some sort of compromise as outlined by Temple Grandin:

Neurodiversity has dawned since she began grappling with autistic pride, and though she has enabled it, she is too late to be its beneficiary. Grandin argues that both the autistic person and society have to make accommodations. “I won’t do all the neurotypicals want, but you have to go halfway,” she says. “We had manners pounded into us. We had fancy dinners at my grandmother’s, and I was expected to sit at Granny’s table for twenty minutes and I couldn’t monopolize the conversation. You can’t degeekify the geeks, but you can be a polite geek. Autism is a continuum from genius to extremely handicapped. If you got rid of all the autism genetics, you’d get rid of scientists, musicians, mathematicians. Some guy with high-functioning Asperger’s developed the first stone spear; it wasn’t developed by the social ones yakking around the campfire. The problem is, you talk to parents with a low-functioning kid, who’ve got a teenager who still goes to the bathroom in his pants and who’s biting himself all the time. This guy destroys the house, and he’s not typing, no matter what keyboards you make available. His life is miserable. It would be nice if you could prevent the most severe forms of nonverbal autism.”

Grandin’s desire to find a middle ground resonated with me. If there is one thing that everyone in the autism world seems to recognize, it is the pervasive confusion about what qualifies as “sick,” and what qualifies as “odd.” Some of the geeks, in Grandin’s parlance, are autistic; some are just geeky. Some people with no language make social connections; others are highly verbal but unable to understand social rules; others are paralyzed by anxiety, or have hyperacute sensory responses that cause them to withdraw. Some kids have full use of language, and others have echolalia (meaningless repetition of overheard phrases), and yet others have language for basic communication but no more; Alison Singer, an executive vice-president of Autism Speaks, told me that her daughter had language at last—“which means that she says, ‘I want juice,’ not that she says, ‘I feel that you’re not understanding how my mind works.’ ”

I guess the major question is if it’s even possible to integrate all the baggage associated with the concept of autism being a “disease” with some sort of program to recognize the perspective of those with spectrum disorders who don’t feel particularly sick. If we accept certain concepts of social interaction as desirable or normative, then basically anyone on the spectrum is going to be “weird” or “disabled.” But if we take some of the neurodiversity standpoint, will we still be able to say that there are some who really would benefit from some sort of treatment or something to let them interact with the world, or at least prevent active self harm?

Of course, I’m ranting on much too long. Clearly those with spectrum disorders and their parents are the ones who ought to be having this conversation, not bystanders like me.

*Point well taken.

We’ll Get the Elites

Yglesias worries that some elite Democrats won’t get on the Obama bus when it leaves the station:

I’d say that the more legitimate concern about unity would have to do with elite unity. There’s a certain set of people who, say, donated to the Clinton re-election campaign in 1996, to Al Gore in 2000, to the DNC when Terry McAuliffe was chair, to some pro-Kerry 527 groups in 2004, and to Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign in 2008. These folks aren’t going to vote for McCain, but how invested will they be in backing Obama? That’s in part going to be a function of whether or not Bill and Hillary urge them to be deeply invested in backing Obama. And much the same could be said for other brands of elites — interest group leaders, random consultants and strategists, etc.

Maybe Hillary Clinton would strongly prefer being Vice President to being Senator from New York. If so, her sway over these kinds of people could be a good reason for Obama to seriously consider a unity ticket even though such a ticket has a bunch of other drawbacks.

From what I hear, Obama has already contacted the 100 biggest Clinton donors, and they’re all ready to give Obama money and throw their support at him - but only after Clinton drops out. And after June 3rd, when the Pelosi/Dean/Reid block moves to Obama, you can expect these donors to either encourage Clinton to officially give it up, or to start explicitly supporting Obama. Also, there’s no real reason to think that these elites are only interested in the Democratic party because they’re enamored with the Clintons. As for the interest groups leaders, random consultants and strategists, they’re mostly interested in self-preservation and trying to get into a Democratic White House. Patti Solis Doyle is already talking to the Obama campaign, and we can expect many mid-level staffers and consultants to ingratiate themselves with Obama soon enough. And even those interest groups will realize that if Obama wins, they want to be on his good side: no one wants to get frozen out of Democratic administration that can work with a super-majority in the House and 55-60 votes in the Senate.

It’s worth remembering in these discussions that the reason many fundraisers, consultants, strategists and interest group types are so close with the Clintons is because, since 1992, they’ve either been at the helm of the party, or their flacks (McAuliffe) have. To be a major Democratic mover and shaker in the last 16 years is to be a Clinton loyalist of some degree. There just wasn’t much else out there.

Obligatory Emily Gould Post

I’m a blogger, so I have to say something about Emily Gould’s ponderous New York Times Magazine essay. Although plenty have been outright critical of this LiveJournal esque, purely personal piece, I though it at least had potential.

After all, there has been a culture shift among people of Gould’s generation (of which I am a younger member) when it comes to comfort with sharing personal information with strangers. But instead of an essay that starts with Gould’s travails at Gawker and then gives us some sort of conclusion or speculation about the larger effect or root causes of oversharing, we get page-after-page describing her panic attacks, relationship with Josh Stein and mean commenters. We don’t really get any insight into the sociology (or pop sociology or anthropology) of being an oversharer. Instead, we get Gould’s redemption story (replace drink too much with overshare and you get James Frey without the lying!), with very little insight into why people share so much and why readers are so fascinated with lives of young bloggers.

On a slightly different note, isn’t it super obvious what the Times is doing? Just by having Emily Gould - blogosphere star! - write something, they’ve guaranteed themselves a ton of traffic and buzz. This isn’t the first time the Times has done this. Remember that weird, anecdotal “blogging kills” article? Sure, there wasn’t any news or even a real trend to report, but they sure got a ton of incoming links!

Crossposted @ A Culture Blog.

One Year Down, One More Blog

One small problem with my blogging has been that I’m unsure how want to organize my writing thematically. Hypothetically, blogs are supposed to be pure expressions of whatever the writer is thinking. Now, most people think about all sorts of things that have nothing to do with each other, and so personal blogging can become pretty disorganized. There’s certainly something a bit weird when you put basketball commentary, political stuff and scathing reviews of the new Usher track all on the same blog. For some, this works out perfectly OK, but I for one want to keep this blog relatively rigorous and seriously minded. But I want to write about silly things too! Like Usher! And Rihanna!

So, for all my pop culture musings, please click over to A Culture Blog. I already have amazingly insightful posts about Wanted, Usher, Sisqo, Young Jeezy and Emily Gould.

It’s A Fluid Race

Jodi Kantor has a fairly distressing article detailing, anecdotally of course, how many old Florida Jews think that Barack Obama is an anti-semitic, Arab, Muslim, black liberationist radical. What’s especially weird about the persistence of these smears is how much currency they have despite the fact that many mainstream, and even hawkish, Jews have been pretty upfront about debunking them and defending Obama. Jeffrey Goldberg, of course, has written an op-ed that basically embraces the tortured liberal Zionist point of view and conducted an interview with Obama that had the sole purpose of letting him prove his bona fides on Israel. Alan Dershowitz, a true Israel hawk and Clinton supporter, is quoted in the article as saying that Obama is pro-Israel. So what gives?

My best guess is that a lot of the people quoted in the Times article haven’t been following the race particulalry closely, and that a lot of their information comes from these emails that have been circulating all around the Jewish community for months (trust me, I get them). And then they hear about Reverend Wright and Farrakhan, and since they aren’t particularly interested in in delving deep into Obama’s biography, the conclusion that he’s the hybrid spawn of Idi Amin and Elijah Muhammad becomes apparent.

The reason I’m not despairing is that Obama (and the media) still has a lot of time to correct this incorrect perception. As any political consultant or campaign worker will tell you, a huge portion of the electorate doesn’t follow the race until right up until the election. And since Florida didn’t have a proper Democratic campaign, these voters only know Clinton well, who Jews tend to adore. But as Obama campaigns, especially in Florida, and tries to make sure that everyone knows his biography, hopefully these lies and smears will begin slip away.

Umm, Kinda Missing the Point

Matthew Yglesias does a good job demolishing Jim Geraghty’s silly Decembrist bashing post, but there’s one  more bit of Gergaty’s laughably ignorant post that needs to be addressed:

From Wikipedia: “Named both in reference to the Russian Decembrist Revolt (which may explain its use of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union as an introduction at many concerts)…” Lovely.

Say what you will about this trend, but it’s plenty common in hipster circles to see a kitschy, ironic adoption of Soviety imagery and symbols. It would be a leap to say that the Decemberists want to starve the Ukranians. And, what exactly is wrong about championing the Decembrists, who were would-be reformers who wanted to inject some Western European style political liberties into the retrograde Russian system. Is Mark Schmitt some sort of communist now too?

How Do they Even Share the Same Website?

Ezra Klein notes Lawrence Kudlow declaring that he wants to the GOP to lose forever:

This idea of rewarding work instead of wealth is just insane

To translate out of wingnutese, Kudlow is saying that we should be cutting income, capital gains and corporate taxes more, because they tax wealth, and shouldn’t be cutting the payroll tax, which directly taxes work. Now putting aside whether Kudlow’s supply side reverence for reducing taxes on capital

They’re politically insane because taxes, especially income taxes, can’t get much lower. In case Kudlow didn’t notice, we’re running a pretty dig deficit, and with medicare about to get a whole lot more expensive, not to mention the continuing cost of the war, we’re going to have higher taxes. This is just a fact that other Republican supply-siders have already reconciled themselves with - even Grover Norquist says that letting the Bush tax cuts expire wouldn’t violate the no new taxes pledge. So not only is Kudlow’s agenda probably not going to be actualized anytime soon, it’s also politically inane.

As David Frum has pointed out over and over, most Americans don’t pay that much income tax.* Especially those “Sam’s Club Republicans” from the broad, GOP, under 100K middle class. Republicans will never have a problem getting the plutocracy to support them, it’s those voters that they’ve lured in with social and cultural issues that they’re going to have to work to retain. And those voters don’t have a ton of wealth that gets taxed, so more capital gains and income cuts aren’t going to do anything for them. Payroll taxes, on the other hand, take a much larger chunk out of their incomes.

But if Kudlow wants to promote fiscally irresponsible, politically deadly tax cuts and fiscal policy that will keep his party in the wilderness, that’s fine with me.

* Here’s the relevant excerpt from Comeback.

Four out of five taxpayers now pay more in payroll taxes than federal income
taxes. Some 29 million income-earning American households pay no income tax at all.1 By contrast, the notorious top 1 percent of taxpayers pay well over one-third of all U.S. income taxes.

Charts! Graphs! Jewish!

Gallup has a good page showing that, despite Clinton doing better than Obama among Jewish voters, the gap isn’t all that large and he still does much better than McCain. Although he’s down seven points to Clinton, in the general election, he beats McCain by thirty points:

I think that since Jews tend to fall into the high-income, upper middle class, educated coalition that Obama is drawing his support from, expect these numbers to get even more skewed for Obama. Also, the large amount of elderly Jewish voters could be swayed by the fact that McCain wants to eviscerate their beloved social programs. Sure, Obama is less likely than Hillary to get the Israel-first vote, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If these one issue, ethnic lobbies - which inevitably promote poor foreign policy (like the Florida Cubans) - are shown to be ineffective at actually defeating candidates, then they will only have less influence. That, I’m pretty sure, is a good thing.

Are You Willing To Risk An Accidental Launch?

Ron Rosenbaum has a great article in Slate discussing how our nuclear launch postures and command-and-control systems make us all to vulnerable to an accidental nuclear war due to the perception that we are being attacked by Russia. Considering the resumption of Russian “strategic flights” of nuclear-armed bombers that skirt American air space in Alaska as well as the general heightening of tensions between Russia and the US, I can’t think of a more important issue that trying to avert a Strangelovian catastrophe.

Rosenbaum profiles Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and the premier expert of nuclear command-and-control systems in the US and Russia, and it turns out that Blair is worried sick that the possibility for accidental escalation is all too high. He has four suggestions, all of which seem very prudent. One is not allowing “massive escalation” to be only one button push of the nuclear football away. This makes sense, for MAD to work, the massive retaliation doesn’t have to be immediate, it merely has to be possible. And considering the risk of a false positive, it’s an option you want to make very difficult to implement. Blair’s second idea is that not only do we “de-target” missiles (which we already have) but make targeting more than just a push of a button away. It should take hours to target missiles, not minutes or seconds. He also proposes “de-alerting” warheads so that they couldn’t be accidentally launched by hackers (scarily possible).

What’s odd about Rosenbaum’s piece is that he thinks that those first two steps, as opposed to steps three and four which propose removing warheads from missiles and putting the warheads in storage, is that he thinks they are especially politically palatable and thus would be easy to implement. I doubt this. The modern GOP has an incredibly revisionist attitude towards nuclear weapons, as shown by their desire to build bunker busters, not meaningfully reduce the nuclear stockpile and their dismissal of arms control. Do we really think that a president McCain would take such constructive measures, especially because he’s super adamant about a rising Russia? Also, would McCain or any GOP administration be the best at negotiating with Russia so that they would take these steps as well?

But what Rosenbaum’s scary piece shows more than anything is that the greatest threat of nuclear weapons is that someday they’ll be used. Which means that we still need to pursue the stated goal of every US president, and especially Reagan, of a world free of nuclear weapons. Considering the state of the world, nuclear weapons have become a great danger to those countries which already have them, and so it’s hard to say they’re making us safer. Tack on the possibilities of wildfire proliferation and accidental launch, and the case for abolition becomes even starker. To bring it all back to the presidential campaign, two candidates don’t support abolition, or at least steps towards that goal - Clinton and McCain - while Obama does. Obama also, in his short Senate career, spent a whole lot of time on proliferation issues and was one of the main supporters of Nunn-Lugar, a program which funds the removal and securing of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. It speaks very well of Senator Obama that he’s shown such foresight on the number one security issue for the entire world.

When Sophisticated Liberalism Resembles Libertarianism

Ezra Klein gets his Cato on:

William Smith points to the term NAMBI: Not Against My Business/Industry. As opposed to NIMBY (Not In My Backyard), NAMBI is “used as a label for any business concern that expresses umbrage with actions or policy that threaten that business, whereby they are believed to be complaining about the principle of the action or policy only for their interests alone and not for all similar business concerns who would equally suffer from the actions or policies. The term serves as a criticism of the kind of outrage that business expresses when disingenuously portraying its protest to be for the benefit of all other businesses.” So think restaurants complaining abut taco trucks, dentists complaining about dental hygienists filling cavities, doctors shutting out nurse practitioners, and all those other high-minded moments when competition is squelched due to the high-minded concerns of those who wish to avoid competing.

This, of course, is a compliment to libertarianism. Liberals, know public choice!

Hasn’t Obama Already Done This?

So Andrew Sullivan, after Jeremiah Wright’s concerted effort to destroy the Obama campaign, throws down the gauntlet at his preferred candidate:

I reiterate that I think Obama has to make clear again that he vehemently opposes the use of race to divide and separate and inflame ancient grievances; that he wants to get beyond the racial politics of the Vietnam era; that he is dedicated to overcoming race and offering hope - not obsessing about race in order to foment anger and bitterness. Parts of the message Wright gave today were not just alien to Obama’s stated views - but actively hostile to them. Obama cannot explain that often enough.

What else does Obama need to make clear, that he opposed the Iraq War? I mean, this is just surreal coming from Sullivan, who’s been trumpeting Obama’s ability to heal festering wounds and “put an end to all that” for almost a year. I don’t know about everyone else, but I think Audacity of Hope, his 2004 convention speech, his first campaign announcement speech and the Philadelphia speech can all assure us that he isn’t a fan of “obsessing about race in order to foment anger and bitterness.”Why I think it would be good politics to, at this point, considering giving Wright the full Sistah Souljah, there’s really no need for pundits to say that he has to. Anyone with more than a few brain cells knows that Obama isn’t black nationalist firebrand, or even someone who really wants to make his campaign about race.