Daniel Gross isn't fazed by the Volt's price tag because he thinks it will come down. A parallel:

When the automobile age dawned at the turn of the 20^th century, cars were toys, luxury products and status symbols for the rich to race and tool around in. They weren't affordable for the overwhelming majority of Americans. In 1903, most car companies were "turning out products with steep prices of $3,000 or even $4,000," writes Douglas Brinkley in Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress. In 1903, about 12,000 cars were sold in the United States The following year, Henry Ford introduced his Model B "at a startling $2,000." Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator only goes back to 1913. But $3,000 in 1913 is worth about $66,114 today. This BLS report suggests that average family income in 1901 was about $750. Any way you slice it, cars were very expensive.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama gets out of an electric Chevy Volt following a groundbreaking ceremony for Compact Power's new advanced battery factory in Holland, Michigan, July 15, 2010. The plant will build batteries for electric vehicles including the Chevrolet Volt and Ford Focus. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty.)

This helps:

The dispute today is over land ownership. Bedouin families around Arakib say they own about 4,600 acres of the desert, insisting that they paid taxes during the Ottoman period and British Empire. Gravestones in the cemetery show some families have inhabited the area for at least 140 years.

In 1951, Bedouin leaders say, they were forced by Israel's military into settlements along the West Bank border. "They told us we could come back in six months," said Nori Uqbi, a community activist who is suing the government to regain control of what he says is his family's land. "But it was all a lie."

Instead, he said, the villagers were never allowed to return and have been prevented from cultivating the land.

And here:

It doesn't matter that el-Arakiv was in the Negev before Israel was founded.

It doesn't matter that the state has moved the el-Arakiv bedouin from place to place over and over again.

What probably DID matter was what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said just the day before, when he publicly announced that the Bedouins are a threat to Israel. Netanyahu warned of a situation in which "various elements will demand nationality and rights within Israel, in the Negev for example, if a region is created without a Jewish majority. This occurred in the Balkans and this is a real threat."

"If a region is created without a Jewish majority"? So there is now a policy of forced internal migrations within Israel to prevent any single region having a demographic imbalance on racial terms? More background on the government's plan to populate Negev here.

Mandatory sentences for crack have been 100 times those for cocaine since the 80s. Congress has just reduced the ratio to 18 to 1.  Steven Taylor draws lessons:

I would not recommend crack cocaine usage and there were (and are) still social costs of some significance associated with its usage.  The problem with the reaction in the 1980s was that, like much of our drug laws, we overreact and make rules based on fear and the drama of the moment rather than rational consideration of the problem.  We paint each new drug as practically the end of the world and react accordingly (the current drug of fear is meth-in the past it was heroin).  Again:  all of these are substances that cause substantial harm, but we tend to lack a sense of proportion in dealing with them.

John Cassidy complicates the study Leonhardt touts:

Yes, good teaching is important. But the key policy issue is raising average teaching standards throughout the education system, not simply seeking out and rewarding exceptional kindergartens. In affluent areas of New York City, parents’ efforts to capture every possible educational advantage for their young children have already reached absurd levels. If this new research is accepted as gospel, I can already see admissions officers at snooty private schools waving it in the air and saying to parents: ‘Look, I told you our $30,000 fees were justified. Where else can you find a kindergarten teacher with a Princeton Ph.D. in Victorian literature?”

Wonkette calls his campaign site "indescribably perfect." Money quote:

VOTE FOR ME AND IF I WIN I WILL IMMUNE YOU FROM ALL STATE CRIMES FOR THE REST OF YOU LIFE!

Chattanooga Times Free Press snags an interview:

“I always knew it would (attention) happen because I’m sure everyone feels like me. It just takes guts,” the one-time Marine said. Voters “like my gun views,” he said. “I want everyone to have a gun. If I think that someone doesn’t have one, maybe I’ll fine them $10.”

Daniel Indiviglio takes a look:

It's sort of staggering to think about how many foreclosures are occurring in Las Vegas. First, there's the awful one in 15 homes statistic. That accounts for an amazing 6.60% of all housing units in the metro area. And remember, this was just over a six-month period. The glimmer of hope is that this actually isn't the worst the city has seen. In fact, foreclosures are down 14.73% compared to the prior half, and 8.80% lower than the same period in 2009.

Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney tell the story behind those statistics:

So many homes in Las Vegas have been foreclosed upon that banks rarely bother to hang a "For Sale" sign on the front lawn anymore. Instead, visitors identify bank-owned properties by the brown grass and the 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper taped to the front door or the garage.

Andrew Exum has one final criticism of Wikileaks:

It does seem as if measures have been taken by Wikileaks to protect U.S. and allied personnel whose lives might be endangered by the leaks. The same cannot be said for the Afghans. A cursory search of the Wikileaks documents by the consistently excellent Afghanistan-based journalist Tom Coughlan revealed hundreds of Afghan lives to have been put at risk by these leaked documents. The mentions of Afghans -- either because they have confounding, non-Western names or because they simply are not considered of importance -- do not seem to have been considered by Mr. Assange and Wikileaks when they decided to dump these documents into the public sphere. I don't know whether Mr. Assange simply did not understand enough about Afghanistan to realize what he was doing when he leaked these documents or just doesn't care, so myopic is his focus on the governments of the United States and Europe.

Josh Green goes to bat for Elizabeth Warren:

Warren is regarded skeptically by some in the Obama administration for her tendency to be outspoken, which is precisely why consumers trust her. The tendency of Obama officials, especially the economic team, is to speak in the bland jargon of technocrats. But with an election looming, the White House needs someone who can explain its policies and convince voters that it is working in their interest. That may be why the administration seemed to soften its tone toward Warren this week. "I think she would be a very strong leader of this organization,'' Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said. Warren's reputation would help not just the consumer agency, but the White House, too. And that could be key to holding power.

CJR laughs at Wall Street's fear of Warren.

Contra Susan Shaw et al, Michael Grunwald says the BP spill isn't as bad as it has been made out to be:

The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater Horizon oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is comparatively light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Prince William Sound, is balmy at more than 85 degrees, which also helps bacteria break down oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. Finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient.

But taking the long view, maybe not:

When Worm and colleagues combined the satellite data, the early shipboard records, and direct measurements of chlorophyll made from the 1950s onward, they found that the recent dip in phytoplankton wasn't a passing phase. It had been happening in most parts of the ocean for more than a century. On average, the planet has lost 1% of its phytoplankton every year since 1900, the team reports in the 29 July issue of Nature.

"You compound that over a century, this becomes a huge, huge decline," says Paul Falkowski, an oceanographer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who was not part of the study. Indeed, Worm's team estimates that phytoplankton numbers have plummeted 40% since 1950.

What's more, the team found that phytoplankton numbers were more likely to dwindle in areas of the ocean that were warming, suggesting that climate change is responsible for the drop.

Actual paper here. This is one of the feedback loops that has some of us deeply worried that the cost of climate change may be far worse than we now imagine:

"What If They Had Beards?" From Curved White.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviews Andrew Hacker about his new book on education. His views on tenure:

Academics typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can't be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We've seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don't change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they've been trained to follow.

Thoreau argues that tenure will not go away, but shrink. Cowen wants to know what would replace it.

Friedersdorf has noticed that many "hard core progressives" and "movement conservatives" think that "their ideology would prevail more often if only their partisans were more angry, their attacks more pointed, their operatives more ruthless." He thinks this mistaken:

Lots of hard core progressives and movement conservatives are wrong: Political and ideological gains don't come from being best at smashing faces through plate glass windows or winning news cycles or employing the most extreme rhetoric. Perhaps you disagree with some of the examples I used. These are contentious issues. Overall, however, I hope you'll agree that the subset of people who treat politics as guerrilla warfare have a terrible win-loss record, and a warped, wrongheaded view of how winning in politics is done. I don't really know if one side of the political spectrum or the other engages in this kind of nonsense more often, but this isn't an argument about which side is worse, its an observation that some people on both sides are operating on a faulty premise.

Disagree? Have counterexamples? I'd like to hear them.

Dancing in the rain, revisited. Simply beautiful:

Steve Chapman decodes the intent of NOM's Summer for Marriage Tour:

Why would NOM hold a rally where it is sure of being badly outnumbered by motivated and well-organized critics? Maybe because that's what it wanted. The Summer for Marriage Tour could have been called the Come Shout Us Down Tour. The endeavor has managed to make opponents of gay marriage look like a brave, embattled minority, even though they constitute 53 percent of the public and have gotten their way in all but a few states.

But they also suffer embarrassments like this.

Building off the Dish, E.D. Kain considers sunset clauses for entire branches of government:

Too often our government is a self-serving, bloated mega-institution incapable of ever cutting off any of its outgrown limbs. Making more if it temporary – or at least writing in the possibility of temporariness when constructing it – would at the very least give these big government institutions a reason to try to remain relevant.

Of course, the downside would be an even more concerted effort to self-preserve, but at least there would be a conversation going on about whether survival was in the best interests of the nation at large.

A reader writes:

As a Jewish American, I am offended by Newt Gingrich's suggestion that use the name of Córdoba by Muslims is insulting to non-Muslims. The height of Muslim rule the Iberian Peninsula, the rule of the Caliphate of Córdoba, was also the height of Jewish culture in Spain. It was the decline of the Caliphate of Córdoba that began the end of tolerance of Jews in the Muslim-ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula. Nevertheless, it was not until Christian rule was established over the entire Iberian Peninsula in 1492 that there was a concerted effort to eliminate the existence of Jews and Judaism in every part of Spain.

Gingrich seems most offended by the fact that the Mosque of Córdoba was established on the grounds of a former church. He failed to mention that the church in question was purchased for the purpose of constructing a mosque on the site. Those who later converted the mosque into a cathedral were not so kind as to offer payment.

I agree with Gingrich that churches and synagogues should be allowed to operate from within Saudia Arabia. However, I am of the opinion that this should not be a pre-requisite for religious freedom in the United States. I was under the impression that the United States considered democracy and freedom of religion to be core principles, not privileges to be used as bargaining chips.

(Photo: The Great Mosque Of Cordoba - now the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption - from Flickr via Wiki.)

Ambinder previews it:

The Democratic strategy in a nutshell is small enough to fit in one but has the protein of a good, tasty nut. The Republicans want to be mayors of crazy-town. They've embraced a fringe and proto-racist isolationist and ignorant conservative populism that has no solutions for fixing anything and the collective intelligence of a wine flask. This IS offensive and over the top, and the more Democrats repeat it, and the more dumb things some Republican candidates do, the more generally conservative voters who might be thinking of sending a message to Democrats by voting for a Republican will be reminded that the replacement party is even more loony than the party that can't tie its shoes. This is a strategy of delegitimization, not affirmation.

A reader writes:

I feel a little embarrassed writing into a site that routinely takes on serious issues to dissent with you and your readers about the state of Doctor Who. The show started going off the rails in the mid '80s. When it finally went off the air in '89, it was nothing more than a vehicle for slagging off Margaret Thatcher (a political stance I doubt you'd agree with). After it was resurrected in 2005, it rapidly degenerated into a maudlin soap opera. 

Sometimes in the world (if not so often in the US), foreign policy really isn't about Israel. A reader writes:

The recent screeching coming from the neocon stands with regard to Turkey seem to miss the fact Turkey is emerging as the major energy broker of the region with the help of the UK. Take the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline for instance. As its name implies, this pipeline takes crude oil from the Caspian fields all the way to the Mediterranean Turkish sea port of Ceyhan. The pipeline, which came into full operation in May 2006, has for its largest shareholder a company called BP (30.1%). Then there is the South Caucasus pipeline (December 2006), which takes natural gas along the same route as the previously mentioned pipeline but ends up at Erzurum in Turkey instead, where it is joined by the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline coming from the gas fields of Iran (yes, Iran). BP is also an important shareholder of the South Caucasus pipeline (25.5%). The geo-strategic aims of these two projects were to diversify the energy supplies and lessen Europe's dependence on Russian oil and gas. 

Brooklyn, New York, 10.48 am

For a glimpse into why American conservatism really is intellectually dead, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is a pretty good start. Daniel Henninger today pulls a Mark Levin, turning a deeply difficult series of choices about taxes and spending into an abstract debate between two theories. And the description of those two theories would flunk a paper in political theory in a freshman class.

The question is how to tackle the mounting debt and current deficit. Henninger accepts that the debt is "dangerous". But he seems to believe that any tax increases at all to counter it would be more dangerous. This is position worth arguing - and I'd agree that the bulk of the deficit reduction should come from spending cuts (and would support the very harsh cuts in Medicare, Social Security and defense to get there.) But I'm not nuts and understand that sustaining the Bush tax cuts indefinitely and providing no additional revenue source means an austerity that makes David Cameron look like the tooth fairy.

So what would Henninger cut? He doesn't say. He cannot say. He wants to have an abstract debate about big government vs small government or taxes vs spending or liberty vs tyranny - a debate that, as long as it is held in such comic-book forms, he will win.But if that is the debate we are going to have, we will all lose. The entitlement crisis and the war debt began far before Obama's term in office and represent deep structural deficits that were ignored during the spending spree and tax bonanza and off-budget wars of the Bush administration that Henninger slavishly supported.

He also has this fathomlessly cynical thing to say:

Somewhere, George W. Bush must be laughing. Amid 9.5% unemployment, Democrats must deal with the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Laughing? Laughing that he bequeathed his successor a bankrupt government, two lost, counter-productive wars, an unfunded, budget-busting Medicare entitlement, and a tax structure that simply cannot be sustained without massive cuts in defense, Medicare and social security? Are partisan games and dumb-ass generalities and no specifics on spending cuts really what's left of Republicanism?

If so, and you are a fiscal conservative, your only serious (if horribly tainted) choice is the Democrats. The Republicans are still quite bonkers.

The video above is distressing. The following context might help:

Scores of Bedouin men were standing on a yellow hill, sharing their experiences from the early morning hours, while all around them uprooted olive trees lay on the ground. A whole village comprising between 40 and 45 houses had been completely razed in less than three hours.

I suddenly experienced deja vu: an image of myself walking in the rubbles of a destroyed village somewhere on the outskirts of the Lebanese city of Sidon emerged. It was over 25 years ago, during my service in the Israeli paratroopers. But in Lebanon the residents had all fled long before my platoon came, and we simply walked in the debris. There was something surreal about the experience, which prevented me from fully understanding its significance for several years. At the time, it felt like I was walking on the moon.

This time the impact of the destruction sank in immediately. Perhaps because the 300 people who resided in al-Arakib, including their children, were sitting in the rubble when I arrived, and their anguish was evident; or perhaps because the village is located only 10 minutes from my home in Be'er Sheva and I drive past it every time I go to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem; or perhaps because the Bedouins are Israeli citizens, and I suddenly understood how far the state is ready to go to accomplish its objective of Judaising the Negev region; what I witnessed was, after all, an act of ethnic cleansing.

Haaretz reports on new subsidies for Israeli army officers to move into the Negev. I am unaware of any legitimate reasons for destroying these people's village and lives. Perhaps I am missing something.

Paul Ryan can only name two things he would cut from the federal budget: repealing the rest of the stimulus and TARP. Seriously? Shadegg falls for the bullshit of an "across the board cut". Steve King repeats the nonsense that the Bush tax cuts paid for themselves. Others are merely flailing.

If you care about debt and deficits, do not, repeat do not, enable the GOP to take us all down that denialist road to bankruptcy again.

To my mind, the coming elections are all about whether 1) the Republicans have a better alternative than returning to Bush-Cheney policies on spending, taxes, war and debt and 2) whether what the Democrats have done in this Congress is worth rewarding. My view is that 1) the GOP has actually gotten worse since Bush-Cheney and their vows of spending cuts are utterly unconvincing (especially since they will have no mandate on any of the specifics necessary to forge a new path). And I remain of the belief that the stimulus worked about as well as one can in an advanced economy, the bank bailout was much more successful than I expected, the decision to bail out GM now looks prescient as it recovers, and the health reform is a decent start but requires careful monitoring on the cost front.

But what do voters think? On health insurance reform, the poll of polls still shows a plurality opposed (the proportions both supporting and opposing the law have sunk). But this nugget from the Kaiser poll stuck out:

Among Republicans, opposition to the law remained steady at 69 percent, but the intensity of that opposition ticked upward. Fifty-three percent of Republicans said they had a "very unfavorable" opinion of the law this month, up from 50 percent in June. Independents, who can tip the balance in elections, split 48 percent to 37 percent in favor, compared with 49 percent to 41 percent a month earlier. The intensity of opinion among this group showed little change; just less than a fifth expressed a very favorable view, and just more than a quarter expressed a very unfavorable view.

This is the great risk of the Palin strategy. By marinating in Fox News propaganda, the Republican base has become extremely angry and polarized. But the sane and not-so-political middle has softer and more favorable views. I wonder whether this pattern is beginning to spread to other areas. As one detects a GOP becoming simply an anti-Muslim party, as the draconian measures against illegal and mainly Hispanic immigrants proliferate, as epistemic closure grows ... will we be surprised this fall? Or can anger really change the entire scene?

In a rare congruence, some writers at NRO agree with the Dish on ... Doctor Who.

My favorite doctor's assistant? Patrick Troughton's Jamie, on whom I had a massive crush as a little boy. (Given the image above, who wouldn't? And he looked so hot in a kilt facing a Yeti.)

And I have to say I always feared the Cybermen more than the Daleks. Why? I presumed in my bed at night that the Daleks couldn't get up the stairs.

Providing some historical perspective on Iran's Greens, Michael Singh keeps hope alive:

All three opposition movements [of the 20th century] took years to consolidate before becoming powerful enough to force change on the regime. The Constitutional Revolution, which is thought of as emerging around 1905, as protests broke out over tariffs, was in fact a continuation of events that began in 1891, with the campaign to overturn an exclusive tobacco concession the shah had granted to the British. Similarly, Mossadeq’s National Front achieved power in 1951, but this was after decades of discontent with a monarchy that had descended into disorder following World War II. ... The Islamic Revolution of 1979, moreover, had roots going back to 1960–4, when riots against the shah swept the country and Ayatollah Khomeini and many other activists were exiled.

On the current unrest:

We have a new comic action hero: Foreskin Man! (Not for the squeamish). He's fighting male genital mutilation - and his official website is here.

Nate Silver introduces a new measure for

polling and strategy memos which are vapid, disingenuous, jargony, or just plain fucking wrong. The scale is dubbed the Pennometer after former Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who was a master of the genre; it runs from 0 Penns for memos that are honest and persuasive to 5 Penns for those which might as well have been penned by Penn himself.

First up: the memo that just told us the Democrats cannot lose the House in November:

Heh.

They work:

[L]arge shares of seniors mistakenly believe the law includes provisions that cut some previously universal Medicare benefits and creates “death panels.”  Half of seniors (50%) say the law will cut benefits that were previously provided to all people on Medicare, and more than a third (36%) incorrectly believe the law will “allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.”

Like most analysts, Josh Barro approves of extending unemployment benefits:

We could eliminate these fears [of structural dependency] by making Unemployment Insurance adjustment an automatic, rather than political, process. I haven’t seen any specific formulas proposed (if a reform is on the table, readers, please alert me) but in general UI should be extended when unemployment is high and/or rising, and contracted when it is low and/or falling. A formulaic adjustment program could mimic what Congress habitually does already, but without generating market uncertainty—or incurring risk that Congress will be too timid to pull the trigger on abbreviating UI benefits in recovery.

Noah Millman's moves the ball down the field. His re-framing of the global warming/innovation debate should be read in full. Ezra Klein's contribution:

The example I've been using to show the limits of techo-optimism has been the BP spill. We could've stopped it from happening, but we couldn't reverse it once it happened. And we know a lot more about managing oil spills than about manipulating the atmosphere. But reading Atul Gawande's article on dying brought another example to mind: cancer.

Cancer, of course, has been a long-term problem. For decades now, we've put an enormous amount of money into researching cures and treatments. We've thrown our best minds at the problem. And we've made some remarkable advances. But not nearly enough of them. Insofar as we've been waging a war on cancer, there's a very good argument that we're losing, and it's not clear when, or whether, we'll turn it around.

I stand corrected. A reader writes:

You wrote: "I pray for the hope that is one of the three cardinal virtues."

The four Cardinal Virtues are Temperance, Prudence, Justice, and Fortitude.

The three Theological Virtues are Faith, Hope, and Charity.

The seven Heavenly Virtues are Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, and Humility and they oppose the Seven Deadly Sins of Wrath (Anger), Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony.

Temperance and prudence: how good to be reminded of these core virtues in an age where they have all but disappeared from our polity.

So much for the notion he simply flatters his audiences. He is just aware that Turkey is not in the same league as Pakistan in the support for and export of Jihadist terror:

The prime minister initiated the row this morning in a speech to Indian business leaders in Bangalore, when he spoke of his horror at the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai for which Delhi directly blamed the Pakistani authorities.

Cameron came close to endorsing that view when he said: "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able to promote the export of terror, whether to India or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world.

"That is why this relationship is important. But it should be a relationship based on a very clear message: that it is not right to have any relationship with groups that are promoting terror. Democratic states that want to be part of the developed world cannot do that. The message to Pakistan from the US and from the UK is very clear on that point."

A reader writes:

It might be worth pointing out to the knuckleheads who are protesting the building of a mosque near Ground Zero that there's been a Japanese Shinto Shrine very close to Pearl Harbor for a very long time.  I'd also be willing to bet that there are German Lutheran churches in NYC close to where German submarines were sinking US merchant ships in WWII.  Somehow the Greatest Generation managed to deal with these things.  Why can't we?

Another writes:

Lost in all of the pseudo-patriotic posturing and puffing by Gingrich, Palin et al., is the fact that it is against Federal Law for the City or State of New York to attempt to prevent the use of the buildings in question for religious (including Islamic) purposes absent a compelling government interest in preventing that use.  The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act ("RLUIPA"), (U.S.C. § 2000cc-1 et seq.), section 2(a)(1) states that: