and now, a break for ultimate theological questions
Normally, people who believe in the Documentary Hypothesis (i.e. that the Torah was written by a variety of humans at a variety of times) and in Divine authorship of the Torah pretty much ignore each other, rather than arguing with each other.
But Apikorsus posts some actual debate on the issue.

following up on my 1/19 post on sprawl and politics
An alert reader quoted the following from a New Republic article by Joel Kotkin:

"Democratic legislators too often seem hostile to suburban concerns, and indifferent to the aspirations of those who would like to buy a home and a small greenspace to call their own. In Albuquerque, for example, planners working for the local Democratic regime advocated banning backyards . . . [this and a similar incident] speaks to a stereotype that Democrats have been battling for years now: that they disdain suburbia and the families who live there. It is long past time for Democrats to start undoing that perception."

But the election returns really don't show much evidence that such a "perception" exists. Let's compare the gap between the Democratic nominee's suburban vote and the national vote:

1980 35% suburban, 41% nationally -6
1984 38% suburban, 41% nationally -3
1988 42% suburban, 46% nationally -4
1992 41% suburban, 43% nationally -2
1996 47% suburban, 49% nationally -2
2000 47% suburban, 49% nationally -2
2004 47% suburban, 48% nationally -1

If anything, the Democrats are holding their own in suburbia: winning in the three way elections of 1992 and 1996, and fighting to almost a dead heat in the last two elections. And as noted in by 1/19 post, Bush has gotten clobbered in lots of blue state suburbs.

Where the Democrats are losing ground is in rural areas. Again compare:

1980 39% rural, 41% nationally -2
1984 32% rural, 41% nationally -9
1988 44% rural, 46% nationally -2
1992 39% rural, 43% nationally -4
1996 44% rural, 49% nationally -5
2000 37% rural, 49% nationally -12
2004 40% rural, 48% nationally -8

Its not the suburbs with the small back yards where Democrats got clobbered. Its back on the farm.

And in fact, Albuquerque itself illustrates my point. In both 1976 and 2004, Republican presidential candidates narrowly won New Mexico. But no thanks to Albuqerque: the Republican presidential vote in Bernalillo County (city of Albuquerque and some suburbs) slipped from 54% in 1976 to 47% in 2000.

URLs to some of my law review articles
...For people who want to read them in print quality format (as opposed to the cut and paste work of my December posts)

Hastings article on ADA and public transit:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/hastlj52&id=1065&size=2&collection=journals&set_as_cursor=4

Colorado article on APA Planning Guidebook:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ucollr74&id=661&size=2&collection=journals&set_as_cursor=6

Utah article on urban growth boundaries:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/utahlr2002&id=13&size=2&collection=journals&set_as_cursor=5

Marquette article on sprawl:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/marqlr84&id=307&size=2&collection=journals&set_as_cursor=9

1995 New Mexico article on cumulative voting:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/nmlr25&id=203&size=2&collection=journals&set_as_cursor=10

1993 Florida article on gerrymandering:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/uflr45&id=417&size=2&collection=journals&set_as_cursor=12

Johnny Carson, may his memory be a blessing
In today's times, Steve Martin writes the kind of obituary I hope someone will write for me after I leave this world.

wonderfully pithy line
"While adequately entertaining, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is, unfortunately, as ultimately disappointing as the Bush presidency."

Steve Sailer, getting digs in at both sides

a wonderfully cute little flim
Europe and Italy compared

I've never even been to Italy (except when I was too young to notice) and I STILL enjoyed it.

for Clevelanders only
an enormous set of blogs, etc. for Cleveland, Ohio residents:

www.brewedfreshdaily.com

good way to get humility
Google yourself and realize how limited your notoriety really is.

I googled the following people:

My father 121 (whose Holocuast memoir, coauthored by my sister in law, you really should buy; just go to amazon.com, search for "bert lewyn" or "bev saltzman lewyn" or go to
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738865532/qid=1106515536/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/002-9220984-8362452?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)

Me 1060

Lawrence Tribe (superstar law professor at Harvard) 5380

Andres Duany (New Urbanist architect) 19,400

Rabbi Akiva 33,100 (2nd century Jewish scholar, famous for gory martyrdom)

James Howard Kunstler (New Urbanist author) 48,200

Robert Bork 64,300

Martin Buber (20th century philosopher) 178,000

Rashi (medieval Jewish scholar) 497,000

John Aschroft 921,000

Britney Spears 8.6 million

George W. Bush 12.1 million

If you really want to know what's going on in Iraq
Iraq Blogcount has a truly enormous set of links (97 as of today) from American soldiers, journalists, and ordinary (?) Iraqis. I of course have looked at almost none of them - which makes me feel slightly guilty.

I am linking to that blog, but am not taking the time to link to all the other blogs listed (since you can find them yourself by going to that site).

deer
I was walking home from the law school Thursday night and saw about five or six deer grazing in the law school parking lot. They are not so docile that they don't mind humans: they were staring at me, wondering if I was going to bother them. I crossed the street to avoid doing so. They kept staring until I was half a block away. Only in Carbondale!

tyranny, Pirke Avot and Iraq
President Bush's inauguration address boldly came out against tyranny- no surprises there. Indeed, some people seem to think of "tyranny" as the all-purpose argument stopper (as in, "I'm for the war in Iraq because Sadaam Hussein was a tyrant.")

But common sense suggests a more nuanced position. In Pirkei Avot, a book of aphorisms by rabbinic sages written in Israel during the late Roman Empire (2nd century C.E., maybe a bit later), Rabbi Chanina is quoted as follows:

"Pray for the welfare of the government, for without fear of governmental authorities people would swallow each other alive." (Avot 3:2).

Chanina was not speaking about a tidy little democracy, or even a garden-variety benevolent dictatorship. Chanina's "government" was the Roman Empire, a dictatorship which had killed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Jews, while putting down various rebellions - in other words, a government not all that much different from Sadaam Hussein's.

In other words, Chanina was saying: EVEN IF the government is murderous and tyrannical, pray for it, because a tyrannical government is generally far better than none at all.

And I agree with this view: in a garden-variety tyranny, I am free to do anything but criticize the government. But where there is no government, or where the government is too weak to establish order (e.g. some of America's more dangerous neighborhoods), I can get killed just for minding my own business.

Of course, there are some limits to that principle: a government that randomly kills people (e.g. the Khmer Rouge), or one that kills people who do nothing to offend it, is no better than anarchy.

But the Roman Empire was not such a government. If rebelled against, the Empire responded with indiscriminate savagery- but if left alone, the Empire left you alone. Most modern tyrannies (even, I suspect, Sadaam Hussein's) probably resemble the Roman Empire more than the Khmer Rouge. The logical implication of Chanina's view is that even a Sadaam Hussein-type government should be prayed for if there is no alternative government out there.

By contrast, if there is no order in Iraq, the Iraqis are left with a situation where people "swallow each other alive" - a situation worse than tyranny, according to Rabbi Chanina (and me).

(Caveat: I don't know enough about the situation to know to what extent this is the case, or whether the situation is likely to improve as long as American forces remain on the ground).

This week's Torah portion- parting of Red Sea, etc.
This week's Torah portion is about the parting of the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds, or whatever). It is of course not known which Egyptian king was involved in this incident.

But the 13th-century Egyptian king Merneptah commissioned a monument known as the Merneptah stela which declares:

"Israel is desolated, his seed is not . . . "

As the above links point out, some people think Merneptah was the Pharoah of the Exodus, which means maybe, just maybe the stela actually refers to whatever happened between Egypt and the Hebrews.

Of course, the stela's declaration of victory doesn't quite square with the Biblical story. But imagine the following conversation:

Soldier: "Your majesty, we lost a few people in that sea, didn't we. How are we going to explain this to the folks back home?
Merneptah: "Just declare victory and say the Hebrews all drowned or got killed."
Soldier: "But didn't more of OUR people drown than THEIR people?"
Merneptah: "Picky, picky, picky. The Hebrews are across the sea so they are not going to come back to contradict us. Just as dead slaves tell no tales, slaves who've skipped town also tell no tales."

Not saying it happened- just saying it could've happened (in which case the columns from Merneptah's palace that I saw in a Philadelphia museum last year could have been the very columns that Moses and Aaron leaned on as they visited Merneptah - and maybe just as the security guards in the museum warned my niece not to touch the columns, maybe Merneptah's security guards told Moses and Aaron not to touch the very same columns- how cool is that?)

Of course, all of this assumes that some Egyptians returned- a view which is arguably inconsistent with Exodus 14:28. But I'm not knowledgeable enough about Biblical Hebrew (or any other sort of Hebrew) to know whether that verse really meant that not a single Egyptian was alive to tell the tale (as opposed to every Egyptian in a regiment, or every Egyptian who actually went into the water to pursue the Israelis rather than staying on the shore to mop up).

the one good argument against the Iraq war
A recent article in the Forward quotes a report by a CIA-linked think tank stating that the Iraq war "could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists".

Of course, the report is just a warning rather than a reliable prediction. But the Administration's incredibly lame response was far scarier: "Asked about the finding that the war had created a recruiting and breeding ground for terrorists, [press secretary Scott] McClellan said 'That's assuming that terrorists would just be sitting around and doing nothing if we weren't staying on the offensive." In other words, if the terrorists weren't in Iraq they would be someplace else.

What's so idiotic about McClellan's statement? The assumption we don't need to worry about encouraging terrorism because there is a fixed supply of terrorists, unchangeable by American foolishness.

But people aren't born with a big "terrorist" sign on their forehead. There are over a billion Muslims in the world, and all of them have the choice of either (a) quitting their day jobs and becoming terrorists or (b) NOT quitting their day jobs, and allowing their resentment of America (if any) to fester as a part-time passion rather than a full-time occupation.*

If we do the right things (whatever those are) we can encourage most of those billions to pick option (b). If we do the wrong things, we encourage more of those billions to pick option (a).

So the big question about Iraq is: does the war increase the number of Muslims picking option (a)? And now that we are already enmeshed in Iraq, what can we do to reduce that number?

*Obviously this is true of all human beings, but right now Americans are primarily worried about terrorism by Islamic radicals, since no other terrorist group seems to be particularly interested in exterminating Americans right now).

Torah thoughts
Every year, I use a different Chumash (Five Books of Moses) so I can get a different perspective on the week's Torah portion (2004: Richard Friedman's commentary, 2003: Plaut, 2002: Etz Chaim, 2001: Artscroll). This year I am using Samson Raphael Hirsch's work.

Hirsch has an interesting perspective on the prohibition of leavened products (chametz) during Passover (Exodus 13:7). I had always heard that chametz symbolized something bad: the egotism that we need to let go of during Passover. But Hirsch has a slightly different spin: unleavened bread (matzoh) is the bread of affliction, because slaves don't have time to sit around letting bread rise. Leavened bread symbolizes freedom and independence. So chametz symbolizes something good.

So why not eat chametz during Passover, the festival of Jewish freedom? To remind ourselves of the days when Jews were without freedom, and to remind ourselves that without the Creator of the idea of freedom (however one concieves that Creator), there is no freedom.

great minds sometimes think alike
George Will sees what I saw days ago:

"Some people warning of a distant Social Security crisis postulate 75 years of 1.8 percent annual growth. But if America has 75 such sluggish years, Social Security's insolvency will hardly be the nation's largest problem -- and personal retirement accounts will reflect, not compensate for, the stagnation."

But he favors privatization anyhow, on touchy-feely philosophical and economic grounds.

counterargument: is there really a SS crisis?
It could be argued that there really is a Social Security crisis because Clinton said so when he was President.

This is one situation where the "your guy says so" argument doesn't really work. Why not? For two reasons.

First, whoever is in power has a motive to exaggerate Social Security's problems, because the perception of "crisis" will increase support for any loony scheme to fix it (either on the Left or on the Right). If I am a conservative who wants to abolish or privatize Social Security, hollering "Crisis!" will encourage people to take my solution seriously. If I am a liberal who wants to finance Social Security out of general revenues (thus freeing politicians to raise Social Security benefits without being constrained by the Social Security trust fund's relatively limited revenues) hollering "Crisis!" will encourage people to take my solution seriously.

Indeed,a recent National Review article discusses President Clinton's motives for touting a "Social Security crisis" in the late 1990s.

(Does that mean that if Democrats ever have a unified congressional majority they will be trying to "fix" an arguably imaginary "Social Security crisis?" I absolutely believe so.)

Second, in the late 1990s, the budget was in balance. So Social Security's long-term fiscal problems might have looked more intimidating. By contrast, the overall federal debt is so out of control that even if the Social Security fund does start to run a deficit, its deficit doesn't seem (at least to me) to be quite as significant.

And third, I believe one should never, ever, ever underestimate the Democrats' ability to do things that are against their long-term interests.

another thought about Social Security
why is it that (according to this Administration) budget deficits today are NOT a crisis, but possible Social Security deficits 20 or 30 years from now ARE a crisis? After all, if we can borrow to support one deficit, we can borrow to support the other.

Does sprawl help Republicans or Democrats or neither?
THE SUBURBAN MYTH

By Michael Lewyn

In 2004, as in past elections, Republicans lost central cities overwhelmingly, did better in inner suburbs, and did better still in low-density outer suburbs (also known as "exurbs."). It could therefore be argued that the correlation between suburbia and conservatism indicate a causal relationship between the two - that is, that the lower densities and automobile dependence of suburbia somehow turns Democrats into Republicans, or that the high population density and other features of urban life turn Republicans into Democrats.

If either proposition was true, we would find that central city Republican strength held steady in declining cities, because urban life inevitably creates Democrats - or that central city Republican strength even increased, as declining urban densities turned urban Democrats into Republicans.

To test this theory, I compared 2004 election returns in seven population-losing cities with 1960 election returns. Why 1960? First, because 1960, like 2004, was a very close election. Republican presidential candidates received just under half of the popular vote in 1960 (49.5% to be exact), and just over half in 2004 (50.7%). Second, because 1960 was to some extent a pre-sprawl election: most northern cities had just begun to lose population in the 1950s, and were far more populous and affluent than they are today.

In fact, Republican strength in central cities has nosedived in recent decades. In every city, the Republican share of the popular vote decreased by at least 10 percentage points. However, suburban Republican strength did not consistently increase. Republican strength held steady in some suburbs, increased in a few, and nosedived in others.

How come? Suburbanites tend to be married and white- the very groups most likely to be Republicans. Thus, the movement of married whites to suburbs has been disproportionately a movement of Republicans, which in turn has demolished the GOP's urban base. By contrast, the remaining urbanites tend to be either young, single whites, Hispanics and African-Americans: three groups that disproportionately tend to vote Democratic. The same is true in some inner ring suburbs, thus reducing GOP strength in those suburbs: for example, the Republican vote share in suburban Cook County (Chicago's inner ring suburbs) nosedived from 59% in 1960 to 40% in 2004.

Although married whites are more Republican than urban singles and minorities, they may not be any more Republican than voters already living in rural and suburban counties. Thus, the movement of married whites to outer suburbs has not consistently increased Republican support in outer suburbs. In other words, if migrants to growing Exurban County X are 55% Republican, and County X's existing residents are 60% Republican, County X actually becomes less Republican even as its political influence increases. So fast-growing exurbs such as McHenry Chicago near Chicago and Chester County near Philadelphia are either less Republican than in 1960 when they were rural counties, or are only slightly more so.

Thus, urban decay and suburban growth are, for all practical purposes, a kind of Democratic gerrymander: Republican voters are packed into already Republican rural areas-turned-suburbs, while the city and inner suburbs become Democratic areas. Thus, sprawl actually may increase the number of Democratic mayors and other local officials by increasing the number of heavily Democratic municipalities.




Republican % of vote

TABLE 1: CENTRAL CITIES

1960 2004

Baltimore 36 17
Detroit 29 6
St. Louis 33 19
Chicago 36 18
Milwaukee 38 27
Philadelphia 32 19

INNER SUBURBS
Baltimore County
(Baltimore) 50 47
Suburban Wayne County
(Detroit) 43 45
St. Louis County
(St. Louis) 49 45
Suburban Cook County
(Chicago) 59 40
Lake
(Chicago) 59 50
Dupage 69 54
(Chicago)
Will
(Chicago) 50 52
Suburban Milwaukee County
(Milwaukee) 51 52
Montgomery
(Philadelphia) 61 44
Delaware
(Philadelphia) 52 43

SUBURBAN COUNTIES
Harford 56 63
(Baltimore)
Howard
(Baltimore) 56 44
Cecil
(Baltimore) 55 60
Anne Arundel
(Baltimore) 54 56
Oakland
(Detroit) 54 49
St. Charles
(St. Louis) 48 58
McHenry
(Chicago) 67 60
Waukesha
(Milwaukee) 57 67
Chester
(Philadelphia) 64 52

SOURCES: For 2004 data- For all county data- http://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/frametextj.html
(Also central city data from Baltimore, St. Louis and Philadelphia)
City data- Data from Boards of Elections in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit
For 1960 data- All from America Votes 1960 (Richard Scammon ed.)

Portland vindicated
For the past quarter century, Portland's urban growth boundary has limited suburban sprawl. (See my Utah Law Review article, posted Dec. 27 on this blog). But critics of the Portland experiment assert that the UGB has made housing unaffordability, based on the National Association of Home Builder's housing affordability index.

The most recent HOI just came out, and guess what? Portland is now more affordable than most metro areas. To find the data go to the NAHB's NAHB's housing affordability website

Then look up any of the tables with metro area rankings.

i wonder what he meant in context
"Personal accounts don't really solve the problem."

Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Ca., chair of Ways and Means), quoted in today's Wall St Journal (A2).

Couldn't find the whole speech anywhere online.