It was almost exactly 23 years ago that Ronaldus Magnus signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

Consider this an open thread.

This goes out to Spec. Geoff Wood, my best friend back in the day, a good Texas boy, someone who raised hell with me in several countries and a bunch of states, was my best friend, a good soldier, a man who loved his fast cars and Lucchese boots, taught me a lot about music and food, loved life and loved his Willie:

RIP, brother.

I have to admit that I don’t have a very strong opinion about Afghanistan. I don’t understand the situation at all, I understand that, unlike Iraq, there may have been good reasons to go in, and I also understand that those reasons may or may not have anything to do with whether or not the United States should stay there and that staying there costs a lot of money and demands a huge sacrifice from our servicemen.

In any case, I was impressed with this speech about why we should get out, from my Congressman, Eric Massa:

I found this story to be interesting (and, for me, local):

U. ROCHESTER—In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the study.

It brings up a couple points:

• Does the fact that this is happening so quickly make the theory of plate tectonics more believable to young earthers?
• Thank God this wasn’t Kenya or they’d be looking for a birth certificate in there.

Update. This is good news for conservatives.

Well, I’m sad to say that I was not selected as one of the ten finalists for the WaPo next great pundit competition. It’s probably just as well, because I wouldn’t want to spend the next six months living in a house with nine people I’ve never met before.

Here are the winning essays. They’re about what you’d expect: three full-tilt concern trollings, a couple MoDo/Double X style gender pieces, a pointless piece about that college kid who’s hiring a personal assistant, a snoozer about good government (which does make a good point), a predictable rant about cable news, and one thoughtful piece about health care.

I guess I’m just jealous that mine didn’t make the cut.

I remember turning on CNN last year or the year before—more than once—and seeing Sully and Hitch discuss this or that (with no one else there except the CNNbot) about American politics. What the fuck? What would these limeys know about American politics? (In fairness, Sully’s take on how Obama operates is dead on, IMHO.)

I mention this because this weekend I met up with an English colleague of mine who a) thought Democrats should nominate Zell Miller or at least make him VP in 2000, b) thought Bush would be a better president than Gore during the 2000 election, and c) thought that Bush would lose by the widest margin in the history of American politics in 2004. Despite this (all of which he now admits was wrong), he continues to predict various silly things—that Republicans will find their “own Obama” in the next presidential election or two, for example. This is someone who is probably a bit to the left of me politically and is undeniably brilliant in many ways.

What’s a bit hard to describe is how eerily similar his analyses are to Hitch and/or Sully. There’s the inexplicable hatred of Hillary Clinton. There’s the fixation with whether or not various candidates are good people. There’s the complete inability to understand how the contemporary Republican party operates (i.e., that it’s run by lunatics who would fuck up any administration, regardless of what a “good man” John McCain is).

So, what gives with all of this? Why do we have so many English people over here commenting on our politics? Why do they understand it so poorly? And why do they think they understand it to begin with? My guess is that the common language creates the illusion of a similar system but that the reality is that there are almost no similarities between our system and theirs.

Why does this hippie want to undermine the sanctity of marriage?

(via)

Ted Turner on being down to his few billion:

Turner said he has learned to live with less, yet he still bemoans the decline in his net worth.

“To drop out of that league, that was hard to do,” Turner said. “I’ve had the experience of being on top and riding the roller coaster down again, nearly to the bottom. You know, if you economize and don’t buy new airplanes or long-range jets, or that sort of thing, you can get by on a billion or two.”

What the world need now is New York Times profile of the woes of billionaires who used to be multi-billionaires.

I’ve been laughing about this all day, pretty certain that Balloon Boy was okay, but I held off on posting it until I knew for sure: this is the funniest Tweet I’ve read in a while, though maybe that is/was just the mid-day Via/evening Guiness talking.

If you lower the balloon tax, the boy will come back down willingly. To create jobs where he lands.

DougJ +4

Ryan Sager (via Sully) highlights a fact that has long fascinated me:

With the exception of 2001 and 2002 (9/11 effect?), between 52% and 89% of Americans every year since 1990 have thought that crime is on the rise. That’s a pretty remarkable statistic, given that crime declined steadily nationally throughout the 1990s and has remained essentially level in the 2000s. Whatever the year-to-year correspondence is, we know that people have gotten the big picture wildly wrong, year after year.

That is, people pretty much always seem to think that this year is worse than last, regardless of the actual trends.

Does this sound like anything else to you? How about: This generation is so much stupider/lazier/ruder than the last; politics is so much dirtier these days; the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

A friend of mine once pointed out that, while each generation is thought to be dumber than the last, the people of a thousand years ago are thought to be dumber than people today (single digit literacy rates, burning of witches, etc.). So generational intelligence is a function that increases despite being everywhere locally decreasing.

TNC on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham:

The death penalty promotes our sense of order—it offers assurance that those who savagely violate our most cherished morals will be harshly penalized. The question, for me, is what will we tolerate to preserve that assurance? What I hope will come out of this case is a more honest debate about the death penalty. I strongly suspect that Rick Perry—at this point—knows that something went badly wrong in Willingham’s execution, and yet still believes in the death penalty. What I hope will emerge is death penalty advocates honest enough to admit that no system of state-sponsored execution can be infallible, because people are fallible. I want them to come out and say what’s clear—innocent people will be executed. I want them to stop treating us like children, and make the argument.

Unfortunately, this is not what will happen. Death penalty advocates will simply argue that we can’t say for sure that Willingham was innocent and so on. The burden of proof will shift, or has already shifted: it now must be proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that an innocent man has been executed.

Americans’ support for the death penalty is not isolated. It is of a piece with Americans’ (negative) attitudes about evolution, just to cite one example (I’m sure I could find others but I find the topic depressing); that is to say, it has more to do with superstitions and conceptions of good and evil than with reason. Probably the most we could ask for right now is to have the people administering the lethal injections dress as pimps so that in the event of another wrongful execution the New York Times and Washington Post treat it as an important story.

I think it’s important to highlight what happened in Texas, both with the conviction and with the cover-up. Because—not but—when it comes to reversing attitudes about the death penalty, it’s a long, long road.

I kind of hope the Roberts gang overturns this, just so I can read about what kinds of alternative rough justice (here; here; here) the pundits will suggest:

The Supreme Court will consider throwing out the convictions of former Enron Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling for his role in the collapse of the one-time energy giant.

The court said Tuesday it will hear Skilling’s appeal of lower court rulings that upheld all 19 of his 2006 convictions of conspiracy, securities fraud, insider trading and lying to auditors involving the 2001 collapse of Enron.

Update. Obviously, I think Skilling belongs in jail. But I really would enjoy reading all the crazy shit the media would come up with if he walks. And, also, to be honest, I think there’s too much of an attitude of “the Enron guys got nailed, so it means our system is fine now” out there.

I’ve got a bit of start on entering Washington Post’s “Next Great Pundit” competition. I decided to write as a crazed Liebercrat who is anti-Obama but is obsessed with the idea of appeasement. I need a lot of help. Ideally, the thing sound good with lots of little catchy sound bites, but make as little actual sense as possible. Also, is anyone willing to send it under their name? I have a friend here who will do it, but I’m not sure his profile is what they are looking for. Here’s what I have so far for my essay—it is very rough and only maybe a quarter finished. A lot you should be much better at this than I am, so please pitch in if you’re so inclined with suggestions, rewrites, etc.
————-

Slouching Towards Munich

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate
intensity” Yeats wrote a few years after the close of what was then
called the Great War. The war we are now engaged in has yet to be
given a name and is more Hobbesian all-against-all than Yeatsian
good-against-evil, but otherwise circumstances are much the same.

Obama is among the best, of that there is no doubt. He is reason
incarnate, silver-tongued, and unquestionably well-meaning. But there
is a lack of conviction. Abroad our enemies and ostensible
allies pay us little heed. North Korea and Iran are building nuclear
arsenals. Russia thumbs its nose at our proclamations about freedom
and free markets. At home extremists on both sides—birthers and
truthers, tea partiers and foul-mouthed bloggers, Keith Olbermann and
Glenn Beck—dominate the discourse as never before. In Congress,
unions and insurance companies control the fate of health care
legislation, while the administraion is silent and the fiscally
prudent are silenced.

Appeasement goes by many names and by any, it tastes as bitter…

More interested in apprehending Roman Polanski than Osama Bin Laden….

What really bothers me about the Hiatt/Sully Nobel for Neda campaign, beyond the fact that Nobel prizes cannot be awarded posthumously, is that it seems disrespectful of Neda’s humanity. This courageous young Iranian woman was a human being, who can no longer speak for herself. Sully and Hiatt don’t know anything about Neda, and they certainly don’t know exactly what she would say, what she would she advocate for, if she were still alive. To use her dead body as a symbol for their own political beliefs is deeply wrong.

I’ve always had the same problem with Christianity. You would like to think that if you spent your life preaching a message of peace and tolerance and were eventually executed for doing so, that people wouldn’t spend the next 2000 years waging wars and torturing people in your name.

I understand the impulse to use the dead bodies of people who died for their beliefs as tools to advance your own agenda. But it’s a temptation that should be resisted, out of respect. It’s one thing to be inspired, it’s quite another to put words in the mouths of the dead.

Nate Silver and the rest of the 538.com crew have just finished thoroughly eviscerating the Republican polling firm Strategic Vision. There have been a number of less serious anomalies with Rasmussen as well (though Rasmussen had an excellent record with the 2006 and 2008 races). And not too long ago, Stu Rothenberg was caught mouthing GOP talking points about the race in NY-20. Rothenberg has also made a number of other comments (here; here) that make it clear he leans Republican personally.

So here’s something interesting: Rothenberg is currently predicting a small number of losses for Democrats in the House (it looks like a dozen or less from this) while Charlie Cook says there’s a 50-50 chance that Democrats will lose 40 or more (Rothenberg, by contrast, shows only a total of 31 Democratic seats as being at all in play and most of these he ranks as relatively safe).

I find the intersection of political prognosticating and political messaging to be a fascinating place. I think that most of the major prognosticators (Cook, Rothenberg, Sabato—with obvious local exceptions, previously Chuck Todd) play it straight with their predictions (if not their other comments) for the simple reason that to do otherwise would hurt them professionally. But politics is full of self-fulfilling prophecies, people like to back a winner, fundraising depends on the perception of how likely a candidate is to win a race, and so on. There’s an interesting tension between trying to accurately predict things (as, say, Carville/Greenberg’s Democracy Corps group does or, be bipartisan here, Mike Murphy generally does) and saying crazy stuff about having “the math” that you think will help your side win.

I often wonder what someone like Michael Barone thinks he’s accomplishing by spewing right-wing nonsense when he could be using his former respectability to further his political agenda.