Other Cool Things

Musing about political polarization, lack thereof, and the chicken littles who worry about either paradigm.
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/09/political_polar.html

The best response to “Bush is a man of integrity” is this email I found on Andrew Sullivan’s site saying “A man whose government is filled with incompetent cronies, and who values loyalty above merit is no man of integrity.”. The Washington Post has a good rundown of >well known cronies and how the spoils system works. The sad thing about it (and watch me convert to the left-blogger-narrative before your eyes) is that it’s clear the Post writers always knew this and have always known what a crony town DC. So… why don’t they say this more often? If it is at all the Democrats’ fault that they let Brown pass through the Senate, then why isn’t it also the media’s fault that they didn’t care to mention “horribly un-qualified hack getting appointed to key emergency post”.

People are actually elastic for changes in gasoline prices!
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_09_11_atrios_archive.html#112697302064222604

(I still think a gas tax is a flat tax, and any liberal that opposes a flat tax and is for a gas tax needs to think a little harder about their policy positions, but this is a good thing in that the libertarian solution to resource scarcity, that rising prices will eventually change behavior, seems to be working.)


Yglesias has an interesting point about how setting up the Department of Homeland Security was a Democratic idea that was turned by Rove into a Republican political ploy. I of course feel the things Republicans used to get angry over it (whether or not it will have the same union rules as the rest of the government) were worse, but it reiterates a good point about partisanship. If you can’t figure out why the parties are so knee-jerk to their opponents and willing to do mean things, the DHS tells you why. When the Republicans were using the DHS to slime Democrats in the War on Terror, they felt they were doing it in response to Democrats trying to slime them. Now it may have been out of proportion and even more manipulative, but you can see how they don’t feel that it was unilaterally throwing away our national sense of unity.