Obviously Megyn Kelly was right the second time and maternity leave is an excellent idea. For many of the same reasons that the government subsidizes children’s education, it also makes sense to subsidize basic parenting functions.

Ideally, we ought to have nationwide paid parental leave financed out of tax dollars so as to not create an implicit tax on employing people who have kids. In practice, anti-tax fervor in the United States makes it more plausible that we’ll move to a mandatory paid leave system without taxpayer finance that’s then going to need a lot of loopholes and exemptions.

The Rick Perry elevator pitch is that Texas has led the nation in aggregate job growth, which is true. But it’s unemployment performance has been just average. Which is to say that the Texas “jobs miracle” is really a Texas population growth miracle. This is a real enough phenomenon, lots of people have been moving to Texas from both Mexico and the non-Texas parts of the United States of America.

The question to answer about this is what Perry administration initiatives are we supposed to attribute this to. Texas’ high growth rate relative to the rest of the country is a longstanding phenomenon. Indeed, the gap was much larger in the 1980s. It appears to be related to Texas’ low pre-existing population density, natural resource wealth, proximity to Mexico, and warm weather combined by the high price of housing on the coasts. There’s an interesting story here to be told here, but it’s not super clear what the implications are for national policy. Does Perry plan on drastically increasing the volume of legal immigration to the United States in order to replicate the Texas population boom?

Authoritarian regimes may be different, but my read of the evidence—clearly implied by Ed Glaeser’s survey—is that rioting in democracies is overwhelmingly a micro-phenomenon where better response by authorities on the ground right at the beginning could (and usually does) prevent it without any meaningful change in broad social conditions. I think the key evidence for this is the sporadic occurrence of sports-related riots. Riots often seem to originate out of protest marches, which makes the rioting seem political. But the fact that riots also often originate in sports fans’ response to game outcomes should make us think that the real issue here is the existence of a crowd of people in the streets.

Combine the crowd with some bad apples and an inadequate initial response, and you get a riot.

Matt Stoller hypothesized last night that “If there are historians in 100 years, Clinton-Bush-Obama will be considered some of the worst leaders in American history.” Taking that to be less a historiographical hypothesis (realistically, history’s judgment on Obama has a lot to do with whether he gets re-elected) than a personal judgment, I asked Stoller who his top ten favorites presidents are. I think this is an important question since I think it’s hard to assess the claim that Barack Obama is a “good” or “bad” president unless we ask “compared to what?’

In response, Stoller gave me seven rather than ten “FDR, Lincoln, Grant, Washington, T. Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ.”

Maybe that’s a good list. Maybe it’s a bad one. The difficulty of even producing a top ten list highlights, I think, the fact that from a real left perspective there aren’t a ton of super-admirable presidents in American history. Which is fine. But I think it does put claims about the merits (or lack thereof) of the Obama administration in the appropriate context. The left-wing critics of Obama who I meet tend not to be super-enthusiastic about the records of the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, or Nixon administrations either. Indeed, when pressed Obama’s critics from the left can often be pushed to concede that he’s the greatest progressive success story in the White House in four decades. That’s no small thing.

My view is that the retroactive assessment of a character like LBJ speaks volumes to these comparative issues. The American left was not, at the time, exactly enthusiastic about the Johnson administration. After all, if Barack Obama tried to boost defense spending to nearly 10 percent of GDP and scale back entitlements to their LBJ-era levels, he’d be castigated as an extreme traitor. Even on the issues Johnson was good on, he never, for example, publicly opposed miscegenation laws. FDR’s entire presidency was founded on a corrupt bargain with white supremacists, and in 1937 he orchestrated a disastrous move to fiscal and monetary contraction that cost huge numbers of people their jobs for no real reason.

Sometimes when I bring these things up, people then create a construct whereby I’m saying nobody should criticize the president. That’s silly. During his administration, the left criticized Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam war and for good reason. Activists pushed FDR on racial justice very consistently and with frustratingly little success and for good reason. But this is the nature of the interplay between activists and presidents, it’s not a personalized betrayal that just happens to recur every single time.

I of course have my preferences in beverage, but there’s something odd about the moralism of Aminatou Sow and Phoebe Connelly list of drinks that you should be ashamed to order in public. Nobody should be ashamed to order drinks they enjoy in public. Many people could perhaps benefit from trying some new things, but the idea that people should be feeling shame over their tastes strikes me as wrongheaded.

I also note that the list in part seems to simply reflect a prejudice against “girlie” (i.e. sweet) cocktails. One of the greatest tricks the devil ever pulled was to persuade the world that there’s something inherently superior about the bitter flavors that men (on average) tend to prefer. This is some real science according to real scientist Marcia Pelchat. Preferences along the sweet/bitter spectrum are a biological construct, one where women tend to be positioned more in favor of sweetness and men more in favor of bitterness. Which is all fine. But a lot of people then go around and socially privilege the bitter flavor, which is not fine.