The fascinating finding in this dKos polling data on people’s attitudes to various locations that frequently serve as right-wing bogeymen is to some extent obscured by the presentation of all the cross tabs. This chart I made boils down the key facts that San Francisco, New York, Europe, and even the dread France are popular among the public at large and even Republicans at large but held in low esteem specifically in the South:

Way back in his 1998 Atlantic article “The Southern Captivity of the GOP”, Christopher Caldwell was warning that “the Republicans have narrowly defined ‘values’ as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.”

Like most articles describing why political parties are suffering from deep, structural flaws, Caldwell’s was ultimately undermined by the basic reality that events matter. A combination of poor ballot design, a compliant Supreme Court, and America’s moronic election system put George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that most people didn’t want him to be president. Then 9/11 changed which issues people care about and led to GOP wins in 2002 and 2004. But you do see that pattern Caldwell identified coming into play a lot nowadays. It’s not really clear why you would think that “disdain for cosmopolitan cities and Europe” should be constitutive of conservatism, but it does seem to be a widespread element of the southern worldview, and it’s increasingly been adopted as the overwhelming posture of conservatism as such.

Lane Kenworthy, purveyor of the best policy-relevant charts on the internet but a disappointingly sporadic blogger, is doing a series of guest posts this week at Crooked Timber. I’m very much looking forward to it. His first post has this one:

Whether or not you see this as a problem per se, it’s important to keep these facts in mind when thinking about where the United States stands in the world. For a long time, median income pretty much tracked a measure of per family GDP, so you could rely on the GDP growth rate as a decent proxy for the well-being of the typical family. But since the mid-1980s that relationship hasn’t really stood up. Another country with a lower GDP but less inequality could still be a country in which most people are richer than most Americans, and I believe there’s pretty compelling evidence that that’s now the case in a number of European countries.

Obama administration announced some steps today to begin moving our Cuba policy in a more sensible direction:

– Lift all restrictions on transactions related to the travel of family members to Cuba.

– Remove restrictions on remittances to family members in Cuba.

– Authorize U.S. telecommunications network providers to enter into agreements to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite telecommunications facilities linking the United States and Cuba.

– License U.S. telecommunications service providers to enter into roaming service agreements with Cuba’s telecommunications service providers.

– License U.S. satellite radio and satellite television service providers to engage in transactions necessary to provide services to customers in Cuba.

– License persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to activate and pay U.S. and third-country service providers for telecommunications, satellite radio and satellite television services provided to individuals in Cuba.

– Authorize the donation of certain consumer telecommunication devices without a license.

– Add certain humanitarian items to the list of items eligible for export through licensing exceptions.

What they’ve done here, pretty clearly, is tightly target those measures where a clear case can be made that relaxing restrictions does much more to weaken the regime than anything else. That’s clever politics and probably a smart start. But the plain fact of the matter is that the whole embargo is based on faulty logic. Making the Cuban population as poor as possible isn’t going to bring democracy to the island, and the idea that a more prosperous Cuba could somehow become so prosperous as to pose a security threat to the United States is ridiculous. A Communist economy running without subsidies from the USSR is bound to be pretty poor no matter what, but there’s no reason for us to contribute to the situation.

I’ve been remarking for some time on how odd it strikes me that the bulk of Republican Senators representing states that Barack Obama carried in November seem to have no worries that blanket opposition to his agenda will hurt them at the polls. Now via Steve Benen, I Rob Christensen in the Raleigh News & Observer wondering if Richard Burr (D-NC) is going down to defeat: “Two statewide polls show Burr’s approval rating in the mid-30 percent range, regarded as a dangerously low number for an incumbent.”

That really is dangerously low. I have no idea what kind of candidates are out there to run against him, but mid-thirties is terrible for an incumbent in re-election cycle.

Meanwhile, you don’t seem to hear much about Kay Hagan, do you? But I suppose the same could be said for all the newly elected Senators. The newly appointed ones seem to have hogged most of the press.

Alec MacGillis had a great piece in yesterday’s Washington Post making the point that all the effort being put into avoiding wasteful spending in the stimulus may itself be a waste of time. After all, the point of a stimulus program is to spend money, not to get things done with as little spending as possible:

“This plan cannot and will not be an excuse for waste and abuse,” President Obama declared last month, after he designated Vice President Biden the “sheriff” in charge of patrolling for misuse of stimulus funds. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has warned officials overseeing the money that “we must ensure that haste does not make waste” and that even minimal amounts of misspent money would be simply “unacceptable.” And California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appointed an inspector general to oversee “every single dollar” of the $50 billion flowing into his state.

Missing amid all these high-minded calls to protect taxpayer dollars is an awkward question: When the whole point of a major government spending program is to stimulate the faltering economy as quickly as possible, what exactly counts as “wasted” money? After all, if some stimulus cash is misspent — say an errant official or contractor buys himself a Cadillac or a Harley Davidson, only to suffer the full force of law — might not such fraud boost the economy more than if the cash languished in a law-abiding state account? All that monitoring, however well-intentioned, may undercut recovery by compelling officials to spend more slowly to avoid hearings, prosecution, or embarrassment in the media.

We also learn that the “managing director for strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office” is named Chris Mihm just like the Lakers little-used reserve big man.

In defense of trying to stop stimulus waste, one could note that things like Arnold Schwarzenegger specially appointing an Inspector General to oversee California stimulus is itself a form of stimulus. But more seriously, the rationale for trying to do this rigorously is, I would say, macro-political rather than economic in nature. It’s not just that taking a stand against wasteful spending looks good. It’s that Barack Obama is governing at a time when the public has become much more open to progressive policy ideas and wants more in public services, but remains skeptical that government will, in practice, deliver services competently or effectively. Moving from stimulus to a broader progressive agenda requires overcoming that skepticism. And that means making sure that this very high-profile initiative get done with a minimum of waste or scandals.

These measures will, however, do something to diminish the efficacy of a stimulus bill that’s already almost certainly too small to really close the output gap anyway.

I said yesterday that I was inclined to think that the Pixies’ cover of “Head On” is better than the Jesus and Mary Chain’s original, but that “I always hesitate to claim that a cover is better than an original.” Minderbender replied “Calling bullshit on this one. Every time you mention an original/cover comparison, you come down on the side of the cover. See Nirvana/Vaselines.”

I’m flattered those posts were remembered! But of course the point is that the minority of covers that are arguably better than the originals are the most noteworthy ones, the ones you’re most likely to blog about.