It seems that when Tom Tancredo got asked about the fact that the State Department called his plan to bomb Mecca and Medina to deter terrorism “reprehensable” and “absolutely crazy” he came up with this reply:

“Yes,” Tancredo answered. “The State Department — boy, when they start complaining about things I say, I feel a lot better about the things I say, I’ll tell you right now.”

It’s striking to recall how recently it was that this sort of “if the knowledgeable professionals at the State Department think it’s a bad idea, it must be the right thing to do” mentality was conventional wisdom among conservatives and liberal hawks — “Arabists” was a term of derision to indicate people without the vision and idealism necessary to give us a horrifying bloodbath in Iraq and call it democracy.

In today’s edition of the annals of the new gilded age, Hal Steger informs us that “a few million doesn€™t go as far as it used to.” As Gary Rivlin reports:

Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires €” nose-to-the-grindstone people like Mr. Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few. Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry most people living paycheck to paycheck.

But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth €” often a lot more.

This is part of the weirdness of the new era of hyper-inequality, where not only does the top one percent pulls away from the other 99 percent, but the top 0.001 percent pulls away from the other 99.999 percent. Even very rich people feel the even richer pulling further and further away and don’t feel themselves to be as privileged as, objectively speaking, they really are.

While I’ve been busy conventioneering, it appears that the House of Representatives passed a really unfortunate surveillance bill. Spencer Ackerman reports on the White House’s direct interventions to thwart a compromise and here’s Marty Lederman on the bill itself.

Anyways, the Democratic presidential candidates all seem opposed to this, but I’d put the odds of any of them actually taking action to reduce their own powers once in office at approximately zero percent. Then, perhaps, at some point years from now, some story will break about a truly abusive use of these surveillance authorities (just look at what Elliot Spitzer did with the State Police and imagine what uses an oversight-free mass wiretapping scheme could be put to) and there’ll be some kind of rollback.

Of all the weird notions to pass through Washington in recent years, surely the hardest to explain was the notion that earmark disclosure would cut down on the number of earmarked projects. Members of congress insert earmarks in order to get credit for earmarking, so it should have been entirely predictable that more disclosure leads to more earmarks. After all, what member of congress wants it to be public knowledge that he’s in the bottom 20 quintile in terms of brining home the bacon? That’s an idea issue to add on to any general election or primary challenge — Rep. So-And-So is lazy and out of touch with his district.

This Chicago Tribune article about the new West Building at the McCormick Place Convention Center sure makes me wish YearlyKos had been held there rather than in the “even-larger South Building, which flaunts a grand concourse that’s more than twice as high as the one at the United Terminal at O’Hare International Airport” and managed to be so enormous that it made a very large gathering feel dreary and empty all the time.

Ever since I stopped smoking, I drink a ton of caffeine and find myself occasionally amused by others’ notion of prodigious consumption — “drank my crack, starbucks iced coffee, two of them” — Beutler told me yesterday afternoon he’d been so tired he drank two coffees and a Diet Coke which is what I drank before 9AM Saturday morning and had easily doubled by noon.

At any rate, I really didn’t use to be like this. Always enjoyed my morning coffee and my diet sodas, but without the constant cigarette-based infusions of stimulant, it’s a whole different story. Much better for me than the previous situation, I suppose, but for 2008 I should probably work on getting things under control.