Next up: strong disapproval over 50%.

He's really toast if that comes to pass.

Chris, you provide interesting historical perspective and a "metacontext" for what is essentially a message problem. "Conservative" identity comes from decades of think-tanking on how to unify the basic issue groups that tend to vote Republican - god, guns, and taxes, if I may oversimplify a bit. I believe single-issue groups can still play their role in progressive politics, just as they still do in Republican politics. But the prgressives need to brand the policy goals of these groups under unifying ideas - empowering families, people and families over corporations and profits, educational opportunity, and stewardship of our natural resources. It really is a branding problem - when you solve it in a way that really connects with people, you solve the conservative "tide" problem for a long, long time.

over reliance on judicial rulings to set into law the left's agenda. Democrats did not do enough to build popular support for controversial progressive policies; instead, we relied on judicial rulings to enact policies that were not sold to the voting public.

Even from this highly selective and redacted quote, it's clear that Roberts is saying, at worst, that affirmative action requires that some candidates will be inadequate. Whether or not that's true is debatable (having seen the results in colleges firsthand, it does appear to me that at least some people who would not normally meet the requirements of admission are given such a huge plus due to their race that they end up enrolled, and are quickly overwhelmed and drop out). That is not the same as saying "it wasn't possible for minorities to be anything but inadequately prepared". The diarist is reaching for some sort of eugenics thinking in Roberts words, perhaps to pin the label of racist on him, but it's not there, at least not in the small excerp he provides.

It's so easy for the right to blame the illegals, who are mostly just poor people with initiative to come up and work.

But it's just as easy for the left to equate legitimate concern for the effects of illegal immigration with "anti-immigrant". Illegal immigration has a massive detrimental effect on poor neighborhoods, schools, and health care. It has a strong downward pull on blue-collar wages. The tired, sad line about them taking jobs American's don't want won't wash anymore. In NY City 8000 people lined up for 80 jobs as garbage collectors, because the jobs came with decent wages, pension and health care. American's will do the work, if properly compensated.

I see nothing wrong with making illegal immigratio n a political issue - I do see demonizing illegals as a lousy way to go about it. It is the people generating the demand - the unscrupulous people who hire illegals - that must be held to account.

Or another terrorist attack.

Republicans have no legislation to run on. They have legislation they need to run from. So they need another war, or big terrorist attack, or 2008 is going to be a bloodbath for them. And they know it. Scary.

Who will it be? Iran? Syria? Who's the next Goldstein for they to prop up in front of the people?

Keep the people scared and distracted.

I enjoyed it, but really. The whole New Deal in fact was a use of government power to create a structural constituency of middle-class benefactors of public entitlements. When the Republicans try to restructure those entitlements to conform to their ideology (whatever the hell that is these days), it's really hard to feel outrage about it. They are just trying to undo massive structural changes in the electorate brought about my many decades of Democratic entitlement programs. Both sides, once in power, try to use the levers of power to entrench and reward their consituents.

Notice that some of them were apparently undocumented immigrants, which is why they don't qualify for tax-funded tuition programs. Still, there should still be some sort of private scholarships available, it would be a shame to waste this kind of intellectual capital.

I read their story in Wired. Very inspiring. I can't believe kids like this can't get fed aid to go to college. Robotics is definitely a big field of the future.

I'll see about donating to the scholarship fund.

But don't expect most "liberals" to get it. To far too many any suggestion of clamping down on illegal immigration is "racism" or discrimination or mean. I don't expect Democrats to ever take the lead on this issue. And I'd be damn surprised if Republicans did either, because illegal immigrants are their biggest club against paying decent wages.

I'm not worried that Democrats have been set up to support huge tax-free savings accounts for the wealthy. That's overthinking the situation.

The Republicans could have passed tax-free accounts outside Social Security without any Democratic votes anyway. Going to the mat on Social Security has only hurt their standing and cause for more tax reform.

So it wasn't part of some bigger conspiracy.

In fact, their chances now of getting those big tax-free acounts are lower than before, because of all the polical capital spent on Social Security dismantling. The biggest problem they had and still have is the budget deficit. With the deficit at nearly half a trillion, more big tax cuts for the rich will surely cause a plunge in the dollar, rise in interest rates, inflation, and fiscal crisis.

Lieberman puts Israel before the interests of America.

That's why he's such a hawk on Iraq. That's why he's so pro-neocon when it comes to the war. He'd have us going into Iran, too, and too damn bad all the American kids that would be killed.

He's very much in favor of using American tax dollars and lives to enhance Israel's security in the Middle East.

Let the name calling begin.

You still need a way to allocate goods and services. Or maybe not, if goods and services (and energy) are essentially limitless.

But what about the chaos during the transition, when we don't have a welfare system in place? What do you do with all of the dispossessed?

in exploring economic models for a shrinking population.

Human labor is increasingly marginalized as robot labor replaces physical labor, and intelligent systems replace mental labor.

What will people have to trade with one another? How will the economy survive?

The answer, I think, lies in drastically shrinking the population. There will for a long time be jobs and contributions for a small number of people, the system designers, bioengineers, maintainers, artists, doctors, etc. The economy will simply have no role for the others. A drastically lower population would help alleviate the transition.

Of course, that's not what's happening.

I've seen a few economic models for population implosion, but it's a greatly underresearched area.