Fred Thompson says he’s against gay marriage but that a constitutional amendment to prevent state legislatures from deciding he’s wrong would be a bad idea and says federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo was a bad idea. What’s more, his thoughts on Iran, while not really fantastic, do show some elements of openness to reality-based thinking as in his acknowledgment that “it may backfire on us if we attack them.”

Kevin Drum looks at some Andrew Gellman charts and concludes that while richer states are less religious than poorer ones, “Interestingly, there appears to be no correlation between income and religiosity within states.”

But that’s not really what this second chart says. Rather, as Gellman puts it “overall we see a positive correlation between income and religiosity in poor states and a negative correlation in rich states.” Basically, if you live in a poor state, then the richer you are the more likely you are to go to church, whereas if you live in a rich state it’s the reverse. I wonder to what extent that finding might just reflect a U-shaped distribution of church attendance with people in the middle more likely to be observant than those at either extreme. I also wonder how this would look if we used educational attainment instead of income.

It looks likely that the Writer’s Guild of America, of which my father is a member, is probably going to go on strike tomorrow primarily over the studios’ unwillingness to pay so-called “residuals” — money that writers get when their shows or movies are shown on television or released on video — in digital media. The union explains the issues here if you’re interested.

Obviously, the entertainment unions are pretty small in terms of membership, but they’re one of the best examples out there of the idea that working people can advance their interests through unions even outside of traditional “hard hat” or public sector industries.

Via Brendan Nyhan, Jonathan Landay reports for McClatchey:

Despite President Bush’s claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger “World War III,” experts in and out of government say there’s no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Seems like an important point! Nevertheless, Like Muhammed ElBarradei and the IAEA this McClatchey outfit would have a lot more credibility if it hadn’t gotten Iraq so wrong. I’ll put my faith in George W. Bush and The Weekly Standard instead.

A pretty insightful Tom Friedman column notes that what we really need from India (and China) is for economic growth there to be paired with an effort to leapfrog the United States in terms of green development, with rising national income going into high-speed trains and clean, efficient mass transit infrastructure rather than into building the sort of vast network of highways, parking lots, gas stations, and car-dependent sprawl that we have.

In principle, this should be doable. Transitioning a place like the United States to a more green-friendly country is very challenging precisely because so many of us have so much invested already in high-carbon lifestyles. If India just puts sensible policies in place in terms of road and parking pricing, land use, and transit funding then Indians ought to be able to painlessly grow richer in an ecologically sustainable manner. After all, since right now Indians are mostly getting by without either cars or quality transit options, it’s not a question of giving anything up. Obviously, though, nothing along these lines is going to happen unless the right countries — and especially the richest country of all — shows a determination to start moving away from our current model.