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Since you appear to have read extensively on this subject selfinterest, perhaps you could enlighten us with some links to these studies. Just as a cautionary note, TPMCafe readers generally prefer not to read "studies" funded by right-wing think tanks.

Posted at February 3, 2006 10:57 AM in response to School Frays
Or are you saying that it just doesn't matter if mixing classes works, since it's too politically damaging to attempt it? That's almost intellectually respectable; people used to say that about affirmative action too.
The only actual assertion the aptly named selfinterest posted was that affirmative action and "forced integration" have cost Democrats a lot of the white middle class vote. Historically, that's hard to argue. Yes, race is clearly still a flashpoint, and will likely escalate in intensity in the next few years as Latinos, immigrants and black folks move to the suburbs and exurbs on their own.
But it's not clear that that sort of racial hostility will be a driving force for voting patterns over say the next 10 years. For example, look how quickly the "Minutemen" appeared in Herndon,VA in response to a proposed day laborers center, but also how quickly the city managed to tamp down the public controversy.
Nobody wants a preponderance of poor people in their schools, neighborhoods, etc. People who are just hanging on in the middle class tend to feel especially threatened by these changes. But that's exactly the point of this approach: break up the preponderantly poor schools, and send the kids to various middle-class schools. I believe there's some tact required to do this in a way that doesn't raise too many hackles, but I don't think it's a perpetual loser for the Dems.
So enough on the politics, of it. I'd also be very curious to know how the poor kids who are swept up into these environments fare during and after primary education. There's a decent body of evidence to suggest that poorer kids face a lot of difficulties getting through college, due in some part to factors outside of economics.

Posted at February 3, 2006 9:58 AM in response to School Frays
Yes, you're right, this claim is total poppycock. Libertarians and Greens in many states in this country even can't get 1% of people to go to the polls and vote for them, much less blow themselves up. And many US states have greater populations than most Muslim countries.
But hey, who am I to stop people from playing a fun game like that:

If even 1% of drivers succumbed to the temptation to begin driving on the wrong side of the road...

Posted at February 1, 2006 7:09 PM in response to How Many Jihadists?
That lies in some kind of universal insurance coverage, combined with some strategy for cost containment.
Spot-on. Unfortunately, progressives often seem to lose interest in cost containment for sake of universal coverage.
The three most promising areas of cost containment are ones that provoke difficult debates:
1) Stop performing heroic measures near death. I'm sure it's no surprise to folks here that people spend most of their life's healthcare bill in the months before death. And that's because keeping a dying person alive gets exponential harder and more expensive as they get closer to dying. But tell that to someone who's losing a parent to cancer, or a cherished grandparent to emphysema.
2) Outcomes-based medicine. This works on two levels.
a)It gives customers a chance to evaluate what works and the price and quality of each solution without relying on the doctor's agency.
b) It implies a burden of responsibility to patients - if you don't lose the weight your doctor says you should, you are clearly responsible for your own condition. That kind of thing is going to show up very quickly when outcomes are genuinely trackable.
3) Make people pay for anything other than "basic" healthcare.
Pols don't really want to talk about 1, 2b, or 3, because all of them carry big political risks. But unless the Dems can convince the public that we are neither promising MRI's and days off for everyone with a headache nor are we trying to decide what kind of healthcare they can choose, any plan they advance will be cannon fodder. In the long term, I believe universal healthcare is a winning issue for Democrats. But it's gonna take a lot longer to market the ideas and build public trust than just a single election season. This is a 5-10 year progressive project.

Posted at January 31, 2006 6:21 PM in response to HSA Primer
I don't really understand this either. I'm only coming at this as a physicist, but part of my understanding is that it takes a lot more engineering to get Highly Enriched Uranium than merely Somewhat Enriched Uranium (the complicated cascade of gas centrifuges for UF4 if I'm not behind the times). That's part of why the inspection process is effective. You can hide plain old uranium, even after it's been enriched, but it's hard to hide the engineering program that's needed to do it. One of the premises of NPT is that the science behind nuclear weapons pretty much can't be hidden. It's the engineering that's presently hard.

Posted at January 26, 2006 10:15 AM in response to Uranium Enrichment - How Widespread?
Al Gore got hung up over what image he should project and how to project it. In all other realms, he has a record of intelligence and competence for which it is difficult to find an equivalent. There is an element in the electorate that spans both major parties, the Modish Bourgeois, who require candidates who can cater to their intellectual foppery. Al Gore has just too much substance.
Hold on a second - Al Gore ran a seriously flawed campaign. He explicitly rejected Clinton's accomplishments and popularity, despite running as an "incumbent" vice president. Like John Kerry, he refused serious countermeasures to the attacks being foisted on the media by the GOP until very late in the game. And he rarely if ever displayed the passion, intelligence and good sense which are so evident in him now, presumably for fear of coming off as "too liberal". Al Gore did that himself, though likely with the enablement of Bob Shrum and company. Don't interpret that as a defense of Maureen Dowd's boring and vexing sarcasm, but let's not forget that it takes both a passionate and sincere person, and a compelling politician to win national races.

Posted at January 26, 2006 10:06 AM in response to Poe and Dowd
howard, I happen to agree, but I think that's for different reasons than the conflict between ombudsman and editorialist. One is a problem of the substance of her work, the other is structural...

Posted at January 23, 2006 11:07 AM in response to The Missing Abramoff-to-Dems Money
Yes, plutonium is much easier to obtain (from spent reactor fuel) than enriched uranium. It is more difficult to explode (you need sophisticated conventional explosives to compress an empty sphere of plutonium into a critical mass).
Yes, you're right - it is very, very hard to accomplish, both from a science perspective, and from an engineering perspective. Incredibly fine tolerance manufacturing and all that.
But North Korea's nuclear program is based on plutonium -- they know how to do this.
Given that we have rather limited information on N. Korea's weapons program, I'd call this speculative. Certainly they have not tested an implosion bomb like this. That isn't to say that I disagree that both Iran and N. Korea will likely eventually get it. One of the underpinnings of non-proliferation is that the science is fundamental enough that's given enough time, it's almost impossible for any country with a big enough budget not to get it.
Posted at January 23, 2006 11:00 AM in response to Nothing Worse?
Not only that, but as Mark says, the data he analyzed could themselves only show the inference that Abramoff directed money at Dems, with a strong countervailing argument that most Indian tribes have traditionally been loyal donors to Democrats.
The Post has present absolute 0 concrete evidence or indications that it has concrete evidence that Abramoff actually directed these donations. As such, they are reporting inference and speculation and not facts, and they should make that distinction very clear.
The ombudmsan, ostensibly the faithful voice of the readership to management, has no business espousing an opinion on such a contentious public topic. The Post should remove her either as ombudsman or as an editorialist, period.

Posted at January 23, 2006 10:46 AM in response to The Missing Abramoff-to-Dems Money
It's just too funny a testament to the my-friends-and-me style of putting on a conference.

This is a pearl, as are your points about how women make up the bulk of the volunteer force that powers progressive causes. As Franke astutely observed, one of the left's biggest problems is that we don't know how to bring people into our ranks and up through them.
Though I don't think Luigi's tone is all that helpful, he raises a good point. Why are the women on the board of the NDP not objecting to this before the fact? I mean seriously, what's going on there? Did they make a stink about this that we haven't heard about? Cause I think that could shed a lot of light on how one of these things goes from "let's get us and our friends together for a conference" to "all white fellers and a couple token women and minorities".
One speculation I have is that it is somehow related to the Dems' problem of being dominated by single-issue activist groups. So when people (progressives included) think of "women in politics" or "women's issues", they think of NARAL, NOW and Emily's list, rather than Suzanne Nossel at Democracy Arsenal.
If we're going to spend a lot of effort building institutions to feed the pipeline of people to organized progressive politics, we should spend some time making sure that the pipeline includes women as well as men.

Posted at January 18, 2006 11:06 AM in response to Are women people?