Phoenix is hardly a transit-oriented metro area, but it does have a new light rail system and Mark Munro explains that it’s working out great:

Now comes Valley Metro, in one of the most apparently unpromising locations for transit of all, and it’s working, though not quite the way transit does in, say, New York, Boston, or Washington. Every day, Valley Metro attracts some 33,000 riders, way above the projected 26,000. But what’s interesting is the clientele. Unlike systems elsewhere, which are used principally by commuters, the 20 miles of rail in Phoenix running along the central spines of Phoenix and then through Tempe to Mesa are used largely by students shuttling between Arizona State University’s downtown and Tempe campuses, and people going to restaurants, bars, ball games, and cultural events downtown. Only 27 percent of the system’s riders use it for getting to work (compared to 60 percent elsewhere), which suggests that for now at least the Phoenix light rail will flourish as a sort of jitney service supporting a post-industrial metropolis’ ongoing cultivation of a classic entertainment district downtown, higher education there and in Tempe, and associated nodes of new and intensified development along Central Avenue.

Moving possibly intoxicated students around seems to me to be an underrated virtue of public transportation. Austin’s a fun town, for example, but when I was there I wished there weren’t quite so many people driving around after having so much fun. Growing up in New York then going to school in Boston and moving to DC, I’ve never really dealt with drunk driving youth culture on a consistent basis. In the parts of the country where there are no good alternatives I guess people are just accustomed to that sort of thing happening. But it’s really bad and dangerous.

Jonathan Martin writes about the crucial role being played in the New Jersey gubernatorial race by former moderate Republican Christopher Daggett’s surprisingly strong independent bid:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

Ed Kilgore observes:

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.

But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?

This is the kind of thing that makes you pine for Instant-Runoff Voting (or actual runoffs). Wouldn’t it be nice if Daggett’s voters got to actually register their second-choice preference, thus ensuring that the winner of Christie-Corzine would actually be the one the voters prefer? What’s more, right now it’s clear that a lot of New Jerseyites find Daggett appealing. And the polls almost certainly understate the true level of preference for him, since voting Daggett in a first past the post system doesn’t really make tactical sense. If people knew that a vote for Daggett wasn’t a “wasted” vote, it’s possible he could win the election.

The striking thing about Goldman Sachs’ profits isn’t so much that Goldman is making so much money as it is that, as Kevin Drum observes, the money is basically all coming from trading. It’s not that they’re bringing in big bucks doing investment banking or giving financial advice. They’re just gambling. And winning.

But what if they lose? For all we know, they’re actually making really unsound bets. Imagine putting $1 down on a lottery where there are 100,000 possible outcomes. In 99,999 of those outcomes, you win $3. But if that 100th ball comes out, you lose $1 billion. That’s a terrible bet. But you could still put a nice long winning streak together making that bet. You could earn a lot of money. Now you’d never do it with your own money on the line. But suppose you could do it with your company’s money, and then pay yourself an annual bonus based on the profits, and know all along that if you ever wind up with the bad outcome that Uncle Sam is going to bail you out.

Steve Metz has an excellent TNR piece making the case that pious talk aside, we’ve done nothing to actually build the civilian capabilities that all our defense policy planners and political leaders say we need in order to conduct the sort of counterinsurgency operations it’s claimed that we need to do. What to do about it. I’m going, however, to quote the very end of the article where I think he doesn’t lay the conclusions out just right:

There are only two solutions. We could belly up and provide the resources for a serious expeditionary civilian corps. But a few hundred or even a couple of thousand people is not enough. We would need many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of advisers with linguistic skills and cultural knowledge willing to leave home and live under risky conditions for years at a time. And we are not talking about 20-somethings paid a pittance and fueled by idealism, but skilled professionals demanding serious pay for their expertise and sacrifice. (The difficulty that the State department had convincing even its hardened professionals to volunteer for duty in Iraq showed what a challenge this is.) Of course, if the pay is high enough, the experts will come. But, at a time of massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis, this is simply not in the cards.

What, then, is Plan B? If we are unwilling to pay the price for a serious civilian capability–and admit that foisting the job of development and political assistance on the military is a bad idea–the only option is to alter our basic strategy. We could find a way to thwart Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states. We could, in other words, get out of the counterinsurgency and stabilization business. This is not an attractive option and entails many risks. But it does reflect reality. Ultimately, it may be better than a strategy based on a capability that exists only in our minds.

I think the situation is actually much less bleak than Metz makes it out to be. For one thing, the massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis really shouldn’t be a barrier to doing this. If the things that leading Pentagon officials claim to believe about American national security are true, what we ought to do is draw up a bill of what it would cost to properly finance the civilian side of things and cut that much money from the Defense Department budget in order to pay for it. But of course the Pentagon won’t actually agree to that, which sets up the more realistic option of the Pentagon paying lip service to the need for civilian capabilities while in practice building those capabilities in-house.

That’s not a great idea, but it’ll probably work out okay anyway because there’s really very little reason to believe that “thwart[ing] Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states” is really all that hard. Al-Qaeda is a very small number of people with what appears to be an extremely limited capacity to damage western interests. What’s more, even on the rare occasions when al-Qaeda achieves tactical success at murdering westerners, there’s no sign these murders do any real damage on a strategic level. It’s not as if the July 2005 bombings in London have displaced the U.K. from its ranks as wealthy, medium-sized country with highly competent armed forces.