Comic relief in the Bible
This week's Haftorah (I Kings, starting at 18:1) brings back a memory.

First a little background: Elijah seeks to prove that there is only one God through a kind of contest: he will offer a sacrifice to the one true God, while a group of "prophets of Baal [a Caananite idol]" are offering a sacrifice to Baal. Elijah apparently believes (correctly as it turned out) that his sacrifice will be accepted by God through a fiery consumption of his offering, while the nonexistent Baal will of course ignore the sacrifice of the Baal-worshippers.

While trying to get their god to respond, the Baal-worshippers began by praying. Elijah makes fun of them, stating: "Shout louder! After all he is a god. But he may be in conversation, he may be detained, or he may be on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and will wake up." (18:27).

Then the Baal-worshippers "gashed themselves with knives and spears, according to their practice, until the blood streamed over them." (18:28).

I was following the reading of this Haftorah in shul a couple of years ago, and started laughing out loud, thinking of the Baal-worshippers.

These poor schmucks- stabbing themselves and each other to get the attention of a nonexistent deity! So pathetic! So sad. And yet (at least to me)amusing at the same time.

It just goes to show: sometimes comedy is tragedy plus distance- in this case, about 2800 years' distance.

My letter to the Washington Post
on transit issues got published today

Brief summary: the Post ran one of those "Gee, it's too bad nobody wants to use public transit" stories. I point out that the poll upon which the story is based shows that

(1) the most common reason given for not using Metro (the D.C. region's major provider of public transit) was that jobs or residences were not Metro-accessible -- a fact which implies that more respondents WOULD use Metro if their jobs or homes WERE Metro-accessible

and

(2) even Washingtonians who don't use Metro to get to work use it for other purposes.

Torah talk on capital punishment
While I was rummaging through some bank statements, I found something that didn't belong there: some notes on a talk at the Association of American Law Schools conference in January on capital punishment and Jewish law, given by Prof. Stone of Cardozo Law School.

As far as I knew, conventional wisdom had always been that Jewish tradition was skeptical of capital punishment; even though the Bible prescribes capital punishment for all manner of offenses, the Bible also requires that capital punishment only be used if a crime has witnesses, and the Mishnah says that a court "that passes the death penalty once in seven years is called a violent court." (Mishnah, Makkot 7a). Prof. Stone explained the justifications for this view (doubts about infallibility of witness testimony, distrust on courts' ability to judge cases properly where lots of murders have occurred, etc).

But there are also much more tough-minded views in the Talmud and in later rabbinic commentary. For example:

"I have heard that a court may decree capital punishment without the warrant of the Torah . . . Such was the case with a man who rode a horse on the Sabbath in the days of the Hellenists, for which he was brought to court and stoned to death." (Talmud, Sanhedrin 46a).

"If there are murderers who are not subject to the death penalty, then an Israelite king may execute them by his royal prerogative and by reason of societal need, if he so wishes. Likewise, if a court wishes to execute such a person as a temporary measure, they may do so if such are the needs of the hour." (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Rozeaih 2:4).

"A murderer against whom the evidence is not [totally] conclusive, or who was not warned [before he slew his victim] or even [one] who [was observed by only] one witness, and similarly an enemy who inadvertently killed [someone] - the king is granted license to execute them and to improve society according to the needs of the time." (Maimonides, Laws of Kings 3:10).

Prof. Stone suggested that Jewish law created a kind of two tier system. The Torah mandates capital punishment under some circumstances- but only under very narrow circumstances, and subject to evidentiary rules that make capital punishment very difficult. But in addition, rulers (whether they be kings or rabbis) can impose capital or other punishment whenever social needs demand it, and the latter system is not subject to such strenuous safeguards.

Prof. Stone also pointed out that there was anti-death penalty commentary that she was omitting, and that she personally was opposed to capital punishment in 21st century America.

why I'm discontented with what passes for conservatism today
When I was younger, I always thought of conservatives as fundamentally pragmatic and liberals as ideological wackos. But a recent New Republic article suggests that the positions have been reversed

(I can't seem to link to it but here's the URL

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050228&s=chait022805 )

A few key quotes:

"Conservatives don't always dwell on their first principles because those principles have little use in converting unbelievers. But they pop up from time to time, especially when conservative factual claims come under stress.

Take, for instance, the current debate over privatizing Social Security. Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Michael Kinsley has argued that privatization cannot increase national wealth--an argument that, if true, would undermine the idea's central rationale. A recent National Review editorial implicitly accepted the thrust of Kinsley's argument and proceeded to gamely offer up some possible second- and third-order benefits that privatization could produce. (People might be induced to save a bit more, and maybe higher debt would discourage spending.) Seemingly unpersuaded by its own reasoning, the editorial righted itself by declaring that "reducing dependence on Washington is a worthy goal in its own right."

Likewise, conservative columnist George F. Will conceded not long ago that, contrary to the claims of privatization advocates, Social Security does not face a financing crisis. But Will declared his support for privatization anyway. "[T]he best reasons rise from the philosophy of freedom: Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of money."

This preference for removing power from Washington is simply something that either you accept or you don't. It's neither right nor wrong in an absolute sense. It does, however, make empirical reasoning pointless. Viewed pragmatically, Social Security raises questions about which economics has a lot to say: balancing the tradeoffs between retiree incomes and costs to workers, allocating risk, and so on. Liberal thinking, unlike conservative thinking, actually hinges on the outcome of those questions.

This doesn't mean that conservatives don't believe their own empirical arguments. Nor does it mean that ideologically driven thinking can't lead to empirically sound outcomes. In many cases--conservative opposition to tariffs, price controls, and farm subsidies--it does. But empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking. What appears to be conservative economic reasoning is actually a kind of backward reasoning. It begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.

Consider the conservative view of health care. Conservatives repeat the mantra that the United States has "the best health care system in the world"--a formulation used endlessly by President Bush. That isn't true by almost any objective measure. The United States devotes a far higher share of its economy to health care than any other country. Yet, according to the most recent World Health Organization study, the United States ranks just 37th in overall health care performance. These massive inefficiencies derive in part from our huge numbers of uninsured. The uninsured end up forgoing treatment until they arrive at the emergency room. Basic preventive care, of the sort universally available in every other advanced country, would avert such disasters--at less cost to the economy and with less suffering and fatality for patients.

The only way to deem the U.S. system the "best" is if you substitute ideological criteria for pragmatic criteria. Our health care system is indeed the best at minimizing the role of government. France, on the other hand, produces better measurable health outcomes at a vastly lower cost. Yet conservatives would consider the notion that France has a better health care system than the United States to be self-evidently false.

The conundrum is that the remedy of smaller government is particularly ill-suited for the problem of health care. The market for medical services does not resemble the market for blue jeans. Among other problems, health insurance firms have every incentive to deny coverage to those most likely to get sick, which makes the individual health insurance market inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Economists call this phenomenon "adverse selection," and it is inherent in the private health care market. It cannot be solved without some kind of government intervention.

For this reason, conservatives have almost nothing to say about adverse selection. When they do write about the topic, they tend to call for bromides like (to take an example from a David Brooks New York Times Magazine essay last year) "reforming the health care system so competition works as it does in every other sphere--to improve value, spur innovation and reduce costs." This is classic backward reasoning: Start with a solution (competition) and then proceed to make it fit the problem. In this case, the author doesn't even explain how to make the solution fit the problem. He simply assumes that it can be done because market forces work everywhere and always."



"If liberalism is not the mirror image of conservatism, what is? The more apt parallel is probably socialism. True socialists believe that allowing capitalists to keep some of the fruits of workers' labor is inherently immoral. They also tend to believe that free enterprise does not work very well. But, like the conservative belief that big government doesn't work well, this empirical belief merely sits atop a deeper normative belief. For committed socialists, doing away with "exploitation" is an end in itself.

.... It's not a coincidence that the two most economically liberal Republican presidents--Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford--also displayed the most serious interest in empiricism. Both required their assistants to produce detailed "Brandeis briefs" outlining the essential arguments on both sides of any policy debate. Ford invited Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith into the Oval Office for a free-ranging debate on economic policy.

Since the mid-'70s, the GOP has grown steadily more conservative, and therefore less pragmatic. Genuine ideological conservatives, banished to minority status since Eisenhower, briefly resurfaced under Barry Goldwater, and, after falling back again, began to take control of the Republican Party. Conservatives correctly see George W. Bush as one of their own. Bush does frequently depart from conservative orthodoxy, as with his tariffs, farm subsidies, and Medicare drug benefit. Yet conservatives understand that Bush sees these compromises as politically expedient, not a genuinely felt embrace of expansive government. His signature proposals--massive tax cuts and Social Security privatization--both reflect a belief that reducing government is an end in itself. Outside events exert not even the slightest influence on his policy goals. Bush steadfastly embraced his tax cuts as the economy veered from boom and surplus to slowdown to wartime to recovery and deficit.

Meanwhile, Democrats have continuously reexamined their policies in light of changing conditions. Bill Clinton came to office planning to spur the economy with a Keynesian stimulus, but abandoned those plans after fierce debate among his staff economists. Instead he embraced the novel goal of sparking recovery by slashing the deficit in the hopes that lower interest rates would enable sustainable growth. As that policy seemed to work, moderate liberals continued to embrace the credo of fiscal restraint. But, after the economy slid toward a recession in 2001, liberal economists abandoned short-term restraint in favor of temporary tax cuts to encourage spending.

Clinton also recognized the failure of welfare, previously a cherished liberal goal, to accomplish its stated purpose, and he enacted a sweeping overhaul. Many liberals complained, but the main objections centered around the details--certain punitive provisions and the lack of adequate job-creation measures--not the concept of welfare reform.

That Clinton's economic policymakers had great use for empirical inquiry, and Bush's do not, is hardly a secret. One way to see the contrast is to compare the economic summits each president has held. Clinton's 1992 Little Rock economic summit featured a vigorous and open-ended debate between diverse participants, and it helped persuade the Clinton team to alter the economic blueprint developed during the campaign. Bush's summits have been tightly scripted affairs in which supporters testify to the virtues of his policies.

Or compare two memoirs: Robert Reich's Locked in the Cabinet and Paul O'Neill's The Price of Loyalty. Both books chronicle the disillusionment of a former Cabinet member. Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, bemoans the triumph of cautious deficit-cutting over public investment, but his tale is larded with academic policy debates he simply happened to lose. O'Neill, the former Bush Treasury secretary, mourns that administration's hostility to expertise and fact-driven debate. "You don't have to know anything or search for anything," he says of the ideologues in the administration. "You already know the answer to everything. It's not penetrable by facts. It's absolutism."

CNU response to O'Toole attack on NU
The Congress for New Urbanism responds to the article I referenced in my 2-13 post:


Reason Mag's Bad Crime Tip
February 15, 2005
Reason Magazine has given its readers some bad crime advice, publishing a piece with a shaky grasp of the relationship between safety and urban design. Just as bad, the article misses the point on a subject its editors should know a thing or two about - the regulatory environment governing what gets built and where in the United States.

The article in question - Crime Friendly Neighborhoods - hit the magazine's web site this past week. It's written by Stephen Town, a British police officer who specializes in fortifying communities against crime, and Randal O'Toole, an economist known for attention-getting critiques that caricaturize the principles of traditional neighborhood design and New Urbanism.

The piece is a sharply worded attack on New Urbanism and its efforts to promote communities built around compact traditional neighborhoods, places with residences, schools, shops located within walking distance of each other. Near the top of the piece, Town and O'Toole make the sweeping claim that the neighborhood designs of New Urbanists "almost invariably increase crime."

But as Rob Steuteville, editor of New Urban News, notes in a rebuttal to the article, O'Toole and Town have a strange way of going about proving this hypothesis. "The 3,000-word article fails to mention a single New Urbanist community in the US that has increased crime," writes Steuteville. "Since nearly 500 sizable New Urbanist communities are under construction or built in the US ... why couldn't the authors come up with a single example...? The New Urbanism, after all, began the US more than 20 years ago."

Steuteville ticks off a list of well-known and well-received new communities where the authors could have tested their theories, including Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Celebration near Orlando, Florida, and Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon. "The idea that crime is a problem in these New Urbanist towns is laughable," says Steuteville.

And then there are the hundreds of infill projects that incorporate major elements of traditional urban design - projects such as Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, CA, and CityPlace in Long Beach, CA, which have replaced failed enclosed shopping malls with neighborhoods mixing residences and shops. They are associated with upturns in formerly struggling parts of their downtowns.

By far the strangest omission in the Reason piece, however, are the hundreds of public housing developments redeveloped according to New Urbanist design principles under the federal Hope VI program. Hope VI replaced towering and isolated housing "projects" with mixed-income neighborhoods incorporating townhouses, small apartment buildings and often schools or businesses, all on smaller blocks that connect with the surrounding street grid.

"The HOPE VI projects have been the subject of numerous studies, and they have come through with flying colors," reports Steuteville. "The gaping chasm between crime rates in public housing census tracts and their cities as a whole had narrowed from 141 percent in 1990 to only 26 percent in 2000 in places where HOPE VI plans had been put in place. And this change took place while citywide rates fell dramatically," says Steuteville, summarizing the results of a study by Sean Zielenbach for the Housing Research Foundation. At Diggs Town in Norfolk, VA, where a New Urbanist plan was put into place without displacing residents, police calls dropped from 25-30 calls a day to about three a week, according to one study.

The research that Town and O'Toole do cite at length is from the 1970s and pre-dates the New Urbanism movement by almost 20 years.
Ironically, this seminal research by Oscar Newman was based on his early observations that design flaws in St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects - which towered in isolation on desolate superblocks - made them more prone to crime. New Urbanists agreed with him and made fixing such design flaws a hallmark of the Hope VI program.

For Town and O'Toole, the lessons of Newman's research are extremely narrow. The problems of Pruitt-Igoe and other unsafe neighborhoods is too much public accessibility and unclaimed public space. So anything that restricts public access - cul-de-sacs, gates, the replacement of public parks with large, fenced back yards - is good, while anything that aids public accessibility is dangerous.

Newman himself didn't see things this way at all, as Laurence Aurbach has noted at City Comforts Blog. In his book Creating Defensible Spaces, Newman recognized a multitude of ways to promote safety through design. While it's obvious that building gated communities full of cul-de-sacs is one way of creating defensible space, Newman noted that safety improvements can also be gained from traditionally urban techniques that allow people to observe and claim responsibility for a space, even as it's shared with the public.

Where places have adequate "natural surveillance," Newman did not generally advise closing off streets and paths. Some of his own plans improved circulation. In the case of an Indianapolis public housing development, he proposed "a system of streets to penetrate the entire site" and said increased circulation would "greatly facilitate" the work of police.

In urban neighborhoods, Newman promoted "the close juxtaposition of the building with the street so that as many apartment interiors and building entries as possible face the street." Residents more easily extend their zones of influence over narrower streets, rather than wider ones, he said.

New Urbanists know these strategies well. Their goal is not adding accessibility and public space, willy-nilly, as Town and O'Toole allege. It's to create harmonious urban places that combine private spaces with active and well-observed, well-connected streets and other public spaces. Streets, squares and plazas are compact and lined with buildings whose many doors and windows help occupants provide ongoing natural surveillance. In places ranging from Brunswick, Maine to Savannah, Georgia to New York's Greenwich Village, these strategies create a satisfying level of safety. The logic of well-observed places is well-understood publicly - it's why today's parking structures are built with glassy stair towers facing streets and why they're now viewed as far more friendly and inviting.

With few real facts on their side, Town and O'Toole keep distorting the image of New Urbanism. In their opening anecdote, they cite the simple act of adding a bike path to the end of a British cul-de-sac as a New Urbanist act. Note to authors: Bike paths aren't a particularly urban form and inserting them into an area of cul-de-sacs hardly makes them urban. No New Urbanist would expect it to lead to a reduction in crime. So why blame us when the new path gave vandals from a nearby school easier access to the neighborhood?

The authors also portray cul-de-sac subdivisions as a sort of natural state of suburbia and New Urbanist reforms as attempts to regulate conventional suburbia out of existence. In truth, suburbia is already highly regulated. New Urbanism is a reaction against the arsenal of regulations and standards governing community design and real estate development in the United States. These mandates force the separation of businesses, residences, and civic facilities onto widely dispersed parcels reachable only by automobile. If you love the way the court house, church, school, shops and residences frame the public green in a place such as Woodstock, IL (better known as the setting for Bill Murray's Groundhog Day), you can almost forget about building another community like it without having to change a lot of regulations, which is no easy task.

Don't just take it from us. Here's Catesby Leigh, writing in the National Review: "The idea that suburbia is a spontaneous, market-driven phenomenon is completely false... Modernist planning is deeply entrenched. In most of the country, getting traditional, mixed-use neighborhood projects approved is a Herculean task, for the simple reason that they are illegal under postwar zoning ordinances. Under the modernist regime, builders specialize in plopping down substantial quantities of homogeneous 'product' in self-contained precincts. One builder does apartment houses, another single-family homes, another hotels, another office towers, another warehouses, and so on."

Strangely, Reason joins O'Toole as defenders of this heavy-handed regulatory culture - and opponents of reform efforts that seek better options for community leaders in shaping their communities, as well as more options for citizens in choosing a community. Adds Leigh, "Officials at all levels of government should do what they can to level the playing field for competition between two very distinct approaches to shaping the human environment by making sure the [New Urbanist] SmartCode approach is an option for local communities - which, of course, should have the final say on land-use issues." Here, here.

CNU President and CEO John Norquist invites the editors of Reason and other libertarians to have a true dialogue on community design. He notes that the Congress for the New Urbanism invited O'Toole to a debate at its annual Congress in Chicago last year and even paid his air fare. That makes the poorly substantiated attack puzzling. "There's a bitterness emanating from this man towards New Urbanism that's hard to understand," said Norquist. "We welcome a true exchange with the libertarians. When you get past stereotypes, it's clear that New Urbanism seeks to broaden consumer choice. We strongly advocate for the benefits of traditional neighborhood design, but it's not about forcing that choice on anybody. The desirability and safety of well-designed urban places speak for themselves."

a bit more pointless New Urbanism bashing
On Reason online, Randall O' Toole bashes grid streets, asserting that cul-de-sacs and separation of land uses control crime.

O'Toole asserts that the safest neighborhoods are dominated by cul-de-sacs that are as isolated as possible from stores and from other streets, implying that any neighborhood in which residents can walk anywhere at all is "custom made for easy crime" because of the possible influx of strangers. In other words, the way to stay safe is to imprison yourself.

But the experiment of imprisoning residents in order to protect them has been tried in the American Sun Belt, with dismal results. In my former home town of Atlanta, the traditional street grid disappears about two or three miles from downtown, to be replaced by a maze of cul-de-sacs. Yet in 2002, Atlanta had 1964 burglaries per 100,000 people - more than five times as many as New York City, and more than twice as many as San Francisco. (I think burglaries are the most relevant crime to this argument because that crime is most likely to occur inside a house, and thus most likely to be connected to street design and land use - and also because O'Toole has, in another article, used the term burglar-friendly to describe pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods).


The rest of metropolitan Atlanta has tried similar techniques with equally dismal results. According to a Smart Growth America survey, Atlanta has the third lowest "street connectivity" score in America - that is, its streets do not connect with each other, just as O'Toole would like.

Yet the region boasted 924 burglaries per 100,000 people in 2003 - more than twice as many as in metro New York City (356 burglaries/100,000), the region with the highest level of street connectivity for which 2003 regional crime statistics are available. Rochester and Syracuse, the two regions with the lowest level of street connectivity, also have burglary rates higher than metropolitan New York City.

Segregating housing from commerce is no panacea either. The three regions with the lowest mix use levels are Raleigh (854 burglaries/100,000), Greensboro (1198/100,000) and Riverside (853/100,000)- all more burglary-prone than the national average of 757 burglaries per 100,000 people. By contrast, the three most mixed-use areas for which crime statistics were available (Providence, Allentown and Oxnard) all had fewer than 600 burglaries per 100,000 people.

To be sure, regional crime statistics are of limited value, because regions include a wide variety of neighborhoods.

But plenty of small suburbs have a gridded, mixed-use core and extremely low crime rates. For example, East Aurora, New York is dominated by a gridded 19th-century downtown - yet it had fewer than 150 burglaries per 100,000 people (20 in a town with just under 14,000 residents). Ditto for Haddonfield, New Jersey, which sits on a subway line running from Philadelphia and crime-infested Camden, and had just over 11,000 residents and only 10 burglaries.

Concededly, these neighborhoods are high-income enclaves. But how do they stay that way? If East Aurora-style urbanism was so inherently undesirable, high-income people would stop living there.

More importantly, if high-income suburbs have low crime rates no matter what their geographic form, it logically follows that the main reason one town is more dangerous than another isn't urban form: its demography. Places with lots of poor people have a lot more crime, whether they look like East Aurora or like a typical Atlanta suburb. Places that don't have a lot of poor people don't have a lot of crime.

cute parody of Bush bashing (I think)
I found this in the "Fray" (the readers' feedback section of Slate:

"The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable -- yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom."

Truth: The road of Providence is I-95, which depending on traffic conditions and maintenance, can be quite uneven and unpredictable.

http://www.dot.state.ri.us/WebTraf/index.html.

But mislead: I-95 does not lead to freedom, or at least not directly. Directly, it leads along the Providence River past Rhode Island Hospital and Providence Place. It does lead to Pawtucket to the North and Cranston to the South (which does have a Freedom Seafood), and technically, goes all the way up and down the Eastern Seaboard. But freedom is not found anywhere near I-95 in Providence itself.

There is a Freedom Square a few miles off I-95 in Reston, Virginia.

http://www.mortons.com/website/htmldocs/locations/restonP.html

There is also the Freedom Florence Recreational Center off I-95 in South Carolina.

http://www.cityofflorence.com/freedom/vision.html.

And a Freedom Commerce Drive off I-95 in Jacksonville, Florida (go Eagles!)

http://www.motel6.com/reservations/motel_detail.asp?MotelId=1232&state=FL&full=Florida&city=Jacksonville

And the Freedom Salon and Spa about ? mile off I-95 in York Maine, whose website, in classic Republican fashion, tells us "Freedom will be on your right in the rotunda." I'm am not making this up.

http://www.freedomsalonandspa.com/contactus.htm

That Bush has to continuously resort to such verbal trickery is a disservice to our nation and to freedom itself. And no, I am not referring to the Freedom Federal Credit Union ATM in I-95's Maryland House rest stop."

Bush budget out
The Bush budget is out, and right now I don't have anything exciting to say about the details. But I do recommend the Historical Tables,which show how the government has grown (and occasionally shrunk) over time. A couple of things that grabbed me from Table 1.2:

1. Even if you believe the Bush projections, government will be bigger in 2010 that it was when Bush took office. In FY 2001, government took up 18.5% of GNP. Today its at 20.3%. Bush claims it will be at 19% in FY 2010. (Of course, these sorts of projections tend to be highly optimistic).

2. The good news: either way, government far smaller than under Reagan. In the 80s, federal outlays took up 21-23% of GNP.

a belated dvar torah on Mishpatim (last week's Torah portion)
In some circles, any deviation from strict laissez-faire (or in slightly less doctrinare conservative circles, any deviation that might help poor or black people, depending on the speaker) is termed "socialism." - the basic ideological assumption being that you are either for laissez-faire or socialism, and there's no middle ground. And I think this sort of thinking motivates the whole push to mess with Social Security- the idea that there is something repugnant about society providing for its old, and that those oldsters should just take care of themselves like everyone else. (Of course, many of the same people who think this way are all for government getting involved in foreign wars). I grew up in Atlanta listening to libertarian talk show hosts like Neal Boortz, so I'm very familiar with that kind of thinking.

By contrast,this week's Torah portion (Mishpatim), doesn't seem to agree with the Boortzes of the world. This week's Torah portion, Mishpatim (Exodus 21-24), has all sorts of laws about social justice- some criminal and tort stuff, but also the first of the Torah's many redistributionist laws (restricting lenders' rights, leaving the land unharvested every 7th year so the poor can take grain, etc.).

Obviously, some of these laws can't be followed literally in modern society. But looking at the Torah as a whole, if there's one economic idea that comes across again and again and again, it's that society is not every person for himself/herself, and that there is a middle ground between total egalitarianism at one extreme and Neal Boortz economics at the other extreme - that even though there will always be rich and poor, the rich (and the middle class) owe something to the poor and also to each other. If political economics is a football field, with some sort of socialism at one end and some sort of libertarianism at the other, I don't think the Torah is at one particular spot on the field -- but I do think it is somewhere between the 40 yard lines, or maybe between the 20 yard lines.

So how does this play out in a secular society where church and state are separated to some extent? That's an issue I struggle with.

an antidote to election-based euphoria
The mainstream press was full of euphoria about the Iraqi elections, for the excellent reason that turnout was heavy among two of Iraq's three major religio-ethnic groups (Shiites and Kurds).

But as the Washington Post points out, conditions in Iraq are sufficiently dangerous that some people would rather live in the totalitarian dungeon of Syria than in the new, "free", Iraq.

And in the New York Times, another article (which I can't seem to link to) says that Sunni turnout was very low and that Sunnis don't appear all that willing to play ball with whoever is elected.

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!