Not perfect, because no state is. But better.

Steve Sailer:

In all the brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh being prevented from buying part of an NFL team, has anybody noticed that his endlessly denounced remark -- the one he actually said in 2003, not the libelous made-up ones we've been hearing lately -- about the media overrating black quarterbacks for political reasons has been largely vindicated?

Aaron M. Renn, Newgeography.com:

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group. . . .

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

(Via Steve Sailer.)

I want to note one sentence in the piece by Stephen F. Hayes that I just linked. It's from Bruce Riedel, who led Obama's own review of the Afghanistan situation:

That's a part of the process that's a legitimate question for a president--if I do this, can I sustain it with political support at home?

He's right, it's a legitimate question, and it helps explain why Bush didn't push harder to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and why the effort he did make is significant). The Democrats were solidly against him and the Republicans were flimsy at best. Now that Obama's in office with a strong electoral victory and his own party the majority in both houses of Congress, yet he's finding he needs to tread cautiously—should we wonder that Bush couldn't accomplish more of his agenda?

(This video of a 2004 Congressional hearing on Fannie and Freddie makes for astounding viewing in these post-collapse days.)

Stephen F. Hayes has an essential piece on the current administration's criticism of Bush's approach in Afghanistan. Shameful behavior by Emanuel, Gibbs et al.

(Via Jennifer Rubin.)

Mark Goldblatt on poor political argument:

[N]ot every fact carries equal evidentiary weight. Quality and quantity matter. Cherry-picking a handful of factual outliers, in other words, is not enough to overturn the common sense view of the reality you're describing. Nor is it incumbent on those who subscribe to the common sense view to defend their position from scratch. When you're arguing against common sense, the burden of proof is astronomically higher on you than on your opponents. [. . .]

Truthers on the Left (and, to be fair, Obama Birthers on the Right) are caricatures of rational thinkers, analytical burlesques whose access to a computer modem transforms them from tightly-wound troubled loners to tightly-knit troubled communities. But their inability to grapple with the burden of proof is reflected in the broader political culture. How many left-of-center talking heads and columnists, for example, regard as axiomatic the proposition that President Bush lied the United States into war with Iraq? If you stop and think about it, though, you realize the claim is extraordinary because it presupposes moral monstrosity. It presupposes, in effect, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, as well as their entire staffs, would intentionally authorize mass murder on a scale of thousands in order to . . . do what? Make their already rich friends slightly richer? [. . .]

There is a growing consensus that political rhetoric in the United States has become too overheated, that passions are bubbling over, and that reasonableness is on the wane. If more people understood the function of the burden of proof in rational discourse, we could begin to address that problem. Healthy debate is not measured by decibels. Not all voices deserve to be heard.

Christian Science Monitor:

Tea Party-sponsored candidates could make it more difficult for Republicans as they — Ross Perot-like — split races as they target both "tax and spend" Democrats and those they like to call RINOs, or "Republicans-in-name-only."

Glenn Reynolds:

For the Republicans, the obvious solution is to run candidates who are less RINO-ish. For the Tea Party folks, the obvious solution is to push hard for their guys in primaries, then vote for whoever wins even if they have to hold their noses a bit sometimes. That’s politics.

Yes indeed, though if either group learns its lesson before the 2010 elections I'll be amazed.

William Tucker (emphasis in original):

It was later, when welfare became a national issue in the 1980s, that the pieces began to fall in place. The debate was between liberals who argued welfare mothers were merely unfortunates abandoned by their boyfriends and conservatives who argued that welfare was encouraging teenagers to have illegitimate children. I realized the truth fell about halfway in between. Among the African-American I had met, it was a social custom for girls to have one or two children before getting married. Their parents would support them. Then by the time the third child came along their parents would be too old and tired and the young woman would get married. Most marriages in the community had been formed that way.

I read Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and found the pattern stretched back into slavery. In fact you could trace it all the way to Africa, where men have much weaker paternal rights and women commonly have one or two "children of fortune" before choosing a husband. This produced a kind of lottery, where men surrendered some paternal claims for the chance to sow their own "children of fortune." It also allowed girls to prove their fertility, an important thing in a fairly monogamous society.

All this made it clear why the American welfare system had had such a disastrous effect on black family formation. Traditionally, women had had one or two children and then married. The welfare system intervened precisely at the point where they married. Instead of marrying the father of their child, they married the state. The result was something unprecedented in human history — a culture in which single motherhood became the norm[. . . .]

Strangely enough, it wasn't my experience with single mothers that made me begin to doubt the virtue of my efforts. It was a visit I made [in Alabama in 1970] to an elderly couple. I've told this story many times but still consider it the starting point of my migration over to conservatism.

The elderly couple owned a small property near the edge of town where they had farmed for many years. They were in their 80s but still working the land. Some people in town had told me about them and I went out to make my pitch. I met them working in their fields. They stood listening for a few minutes in that way Southern blacks had, politely nodding their heads while I told them about the wonders of the welfare system. They were old enough, they were sure to qualify, it would be a nice check every month.

As I carried on I suddenly realized the man had tears in his eyes. It came across me in a rush. They had worked on this land all their lives, feeding themselves, raising children, fending off god knows what kind of adversity — and now I was telling them they could become dependent on the government. I finally apologized and left. I left that field thinking, "I wonder if I'm doing the right thing down here."

Glenn Reynolds writes approvingly of a passage by Te-Nehisi Coates that includes this: "I don'’t think that you guys expect me to get it write right 100 percent of the time. I think you expect me to try very hard to be accurate, and immediately acknowledge when I'’ve failed to do so." With apologies to Coates, whom I read too infrequently to assess, I want more than that. Specifically, I also demand evenhandedness of error. What makes me avoid the New York Times and other leftist-media outlets, as well as most rightist media, isn't that they make mistakes but that those mistakes nearly always benefit their favored side. They're like referees whose calls help only one team. Yes, they also ignore their errors, but that's secondary. Their bias would render them untrustworthy even were they to note every mistake.

Especially when they cover Congress.