Even winning elections:

Democrats, who are within reach of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Senate, would also face high expectations, especially from the party’s more liberal quarters, that could be difficult to meet even with enhanced numbers in the Senate as well as the House. And they would be at risk of overreaching, a tendency that has deeply damaged both parties in similar situations in the past.

Obviously, the more seats a given party wins, the more it has to lose the next time around. In that sense, yes, victory leads to “risk.” But nothing lasts forever — certainly not grasp on political power. The real risk is the risk of not seizing the opportunity to accomplish useful things.

Robert Farley writes:

Oddly enough, I actually am better off that I was four years ago. The wife says it’s because I’m not a “working American.” Blogging is work, hon, and didn’t I just power wash the deck last week?

I, too, am better off than I was four years ago. Obviously, it’s a big country and so lots of people’s personal well-being will move in the opposite direction of broad national aggregates. Still, I think it’d be interesting to know more about this — overall economic conditions are, right now, somewhat worse than they were four years ago and the trendline is downward. But how many people are worse off than they were four years ago? More than half, it would seem. But how many more?

I went to see Changeling last night. The movie itself is so-so. There’s a very strong film lurking in there somewhere, but the beginning is slow and the end far too long and pointless. That said, the reconstruction of Los Angeles in the late-twenties and early-thirties is noteworthy to readers of this blog for the attention it lavishes on LA’s historically transit-oriented neighborhood. It was a city built along streetcar lines, that converged at a traditional downtown area.

But you also see the origins of the contemporary car-based city. Cars exist in Changeling but they’re rare. Consequently, there’s little traffic and driving around looks extremely quick and pleasant. Thus, over time more people will buy cars. But as the number of cars increases, their speed and convenience declines. Then planning takes a fateful turn deciding that infrastructure spending decisions and regulatory mandates will be made in an effort to further facilitate car use. That winds up creating a landscape where cars are the only option — the streetcar lines are gone, and auto-oriented development (parking lots everywhere! giant blocks!) makes walking impractical — which becomes, in turn, a landscape uncomfortably crowded with traffic.

Pennsylvania GOP warns Keystone State Jews that Barack Obama is going to send us chosen folk into the ovens:

A new e-mail making the rounds among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania this week falsely alleged that Mr. Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud,’’ and equated a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of their Jewish ancestors, who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s.” [...]

But where most of the attack e-mails against Mr. Obama have been mostly either anonymous or from people outside of mainstream politics, this one had an unusually official provenance: It was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s “Victory 2008” committee.

And it was signed by several prominent McCain supporters in the state: Mitchell L. Morgan, a top fund-raiser; Hon. Sandra Schwartz Newman, a member of Mr. McCain’s national task-force monitoring Election Day voting, and I. Michael Coslov, a steel industry executive.

This is so absurd I’m not even going to bother to be outraged. Someone ought to tell these people, though, that there’s some kind of baseline level of plausibility that your attacks need to reach if you want them to be effective. You can say a candidate’s health care plan will cost your family money, you can’t say that a candidate’s health care plan involves chopping up babies and serving them as medicinal.