Excited to see the results of the DC superhero mayor election:

— All about the former Bow and Arrow Pub.

— I saw Smashing Pumpkins play in Prague in 1997; after the first song Billy Corgan said “it’s so great to be here in POLAND!” and everyone booed.

— John Podesta kills stuff.

— This book review is still the best thing ever.

— It’s been suggested that this can help counteract yesterday’s Star Trek blogging, but frankly I think The Game is being pretty distasteful here.

Song of the day, “Cherub Rock” excellent in Poland or wherever else you may find yourself.

Kevin Drum contemplates our bleak future:

For many years it’s looked as if we were getting closer and closer to an economy in which there flatly wasn’t enough unskilled work left to keep employment at normal levels. Stagnant median wages were the canary in the coal mine, with permanently higher unemployment coming in the future. But I dunno: maybe the future is now.

Well for one thing, this is part of the reason why we need to improve the performance of our high schools and the affordability of our colleges. Historically, each generation of Americans has been better-educated than its predecessors, shifting the skill balance in the workforce. Over the past generation that pattern’s broken down.

But another thing here is America’s pathological reluctance to put people to work providing adequate public services. I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that picking up trash, cleaning streets, fixing potholes, etc. are the kind of things government should be doing. It’s also clear that if you compare the United States to other countries, it’s possible for a country to have cleaner, better-maintained streets than we have. Doing better on this score wouldn’t be brain surgery and would provide low-skill jobs. And, yes, it would cost money. But the United States of America is the wealthiest society the world has ever known. It’s a bit ridiculous that we can’t repair damaged sidewalks in a timely manner. Or, rather, given that we clearly can repair damaged sidewalks, it’s ridiculous that we don’t.

And you could really go nuts with this stuff. Smaller buses could run more frequently. Libraries could stay open longer. Playgrounds could be better-maintained. Not as “stimulus” but as a permanent decision to say “hey, we’re a rich country, we should provide public services at a reasonable level.” Instead, we’ve chosen to cut taxes for the wealthiest members of the most unequal rich country on earth. And apparently we’re going to regulate yoga studios. But I think we could be doing better.

Jeff Young outlines House Democrats’ plan to raise $540 billion over ten years in new “surtaxes” on high-income taxpayers: “There would be different surtax rates, ranging from 1 percent to 3 percent, for workers with annual earnings of $350,000, $500,000 and $1 million, Rangel said.”

This is not my favorite financing idea, but it works just fine.

I knew that the Republicans were planning the stunt of having Frank Ricci testify at Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. Ricci is, of course, not any kind of legal expert. But having him appear in person might help tug at the audience’s heart-strings and inspire a certain level of empathy of his situation. But Kate Klonick writes that beyond Ricci there’s going to be lots more affirmative action at the hearing:

In 2005, when Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts were confirmed by the Senate, affirmative action seemed almost an after-thought. In Alito’s case, only two of his 33 witnesses in his hearings had obvious ties to affirmative action groups, one from each side of the aisle. For Roberts, Democrats called only two witnesses to speak to his record on civil rights.

In contrast, more than one-third of the witnesses on the Republican’s list for Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing are lawyers and academics who’ve based their careers on opposing affirmative action, and activists who have become symbols of the anti-affirmative action movement. The conservative side of the debate over Sotomayor has revolved, so far, around her decision to uphold a lower court ruling in a reverse-discrimination case she heard while on the Second Circuit, Ricci v. DeStafano, and her comments about how her experiences as a Latina woman have shaped her judicial conclusions. With five out of fourteen anti-affirmative action advocates on the minority’s witness list, it’s clear that these focal points are not going away.

It would be one thing if Sotomayor had some kind of unusual record on affirmative action. But she doesn’t. What she did in the Ricci case, whether one likes it or not, was simply apply the existing precedent. Conservative judges didn’t like the existing precedent, and since there are now many more conservatives on the Supreme Court than there used to be, they overturned the precedent in a 5-4 vote. But it would have been very strange for a Circuit Court judge to decide on her own to overrule existing precedents in a way that sharply split the Supreme Court. But of course Sotomayor is a Latina woman, so now this unremarkable decision becomes the center of their argument.