Some excellent points from Tim Lee:

Speeding is illegal. You can get fined for it, and if you do it fast enough and often enough you can lose your license and even go to jail. Moreover, speeding kills.

Yet we don’t have a national debate about “illegal driving.” No one frets that peoples tendency to drive over the speed limit threatens the rule of law. People would think you were crazy if you said: “I don’t have a problem with driving, but it needs to be done legally.” Nobody complains that tolerating people who go 65 in a 55 zone is unfair to other drivers who are driving exactly 55. Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs doesn’t do segments about “illegals” (that is, people who engage in “illegal driving”) and what a menace to society they are.

In some ways the analogy is inexact, but what I think is really important here is that we don’t have the rhetoric of “illegals” to refer to people who drive illegally fast, or to jaywalkers, or to people who commit tons of other regulatory violations. But we do have this incredibly dehumanizing discourse around people who’ve violated the immigration laws. And I think the way in which the analogy is relevant is that if someone were to propose changing the way we handle speed limit violations, people would recognize (a) that “illegal drivers” are human beings whose interests count in the equation and (b) that attempting to construct perfectly enforced speeding laws is almost certainly counterproductive.

Binyamin Applebaum notes that with the fury of financial regulation overhaul lobbying now complete in Congress, it’s time for everyone to refight many of the same battles again as regulators begin to draft more specific rules:

preparing for the next battle: influencing the creation of several hundred new rules and regulations.

The bill, completed early Friday and expected to come up for a final vote this week, is basically a 2,000-page missive to federal agencies, instructing regulators to address subjects ranging from derivatives trading to document retention. But it is notably short on specifics, giving regulators significant power to determine its impact — and giving partisans on both sides a second chance to influence the outcome.

To some of its critics, the Obama administration is full of socialists. To other critics, it’s full of patsies for Wall Street. But in terms of its approach to financial regulation, what’s really striking about the team’s approach is the degree to which it reflects the views of bank regulators who believe that given the appropriate tools they have it within their power to prevent these disasters. Consequently, a lot of the action to determine whether this thing works will end up playing out among the regulatory agencies as they start filling out the details.

There’s no form of tax increase or spending reduction that has a really enormous amount of public support behind it, but as both public opinion polling and even Pete Peterson’s “America Speaks” event demonstrate, far and away the most popular method available for reducing the long-term fiscal deficit is higher taxes on rich people. I’m much friendlier to the idea of broader-based tax increases than is the average American, but it’s really striking the extent to which members of the political elite insist on ignoring the strong public consensus behind higher taxes on the rich in their discussion of politically feasible policy options.

As I mentioned briefly, I met Krist Novoselic on Friday, and though I’m a big Nirvana fan the actual subject was his work as chairman of Fair Vote, an excellent organization pushing a variety of worthy reforms to the American electoral system.

One of the things we talked about was the remarkable fact that for all the bellyaching in Washington about the related topics of gerrymandering and polarization, elites seem totally blind to the ways in which shifting to a more proportional system could ameliorate these problems. When Americans hear “proportional” they often immediately leap to imagining something like a nationwide closed party list system, but a much more realistic and practical solution would be to have multiple member congressional districts with single transferrable vote.

What does that mean and what does it have to do with polarization?

Well, take New York City. Instead of carving the city up into 13 or 14 different districts with members elected by plurality, all of them won by Democrats, the whole city could vote proportionally for a slate of 13-14 members of congress, and several of them would wind up being Republicans with the exact number depending on political fortunes. This would reduce what I think bothers people about polarization in congress in at least two ways. One is that though on many issues the NYC Republicans and NYC Democrats would fiercely disagree, on a bunch of other issues that have substantial regional or urban/non-urban elements to them the NYC bloc would be collaborating along with other bipartisan congressional blocks against other bipartisan congressional blocks. The other is that the balance of power in congress wouldn’t be determined by a relatively small number of “swing districts.” In any given election, Democrats and Republicans alike would have plausible pickup opportunities all across the country—even in New York City—meaning that it would make sense for the GOP to always at least think about trying to answer the concerns of American cities.

Then on the flipside, if Nebraska elected its three-member congressional delegation in a proportional manner you wouldn’t have the scenario where 41 percent of Nebraskans vote for Barack Obama but 100 percent of them are represented in the House by conservative Republicans. All regions of the country would have a measure of bipartisan representation, and both parties would have substantial blocs of members to advocate for the interests of different kinds of places.

From an LA Times writeup of a light rail extension into the San Gabriel Valley that’s just getting under way:

Real estate developers and politicians are hoping the line will pave the way for some new residential and commercial developments in the cities.

Much of their enthusiasm centers around so-called “Transit-Oriented Developments” — the idea that local economies thrive when they offer public transportation, housing, and retail in the same space. Some of these developments would be denser than what the suburban cities are typically used to.

“There’s something about rail that creates an anchor for economic development,” said Michael Cano, transportation deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor and MTA board member Michael Antonovich.

I don’t know the details of these plans, but I certainly hope that when they say “some” of the transit-oriented development will be denser than non-TOD neighborhoods in the city that they mean “almost all.” After all, the main “something” about rail that “creates an anchor for economic development” is the fact that rail, being a highly space-efficient means of moving people, tends to facilitate dense development. I think rail transit offers a lot of benefits and it makes sense for many municipalities to invest in it, but these benefits don’t arise through magic, they’re mainly realized by zoning for denser development.