This NY Times article reviews the growing consensus within the Bush Administration that something needs to be done with the federal government’s absurdly complex and special interest-riddled income tax system. There is no real economic analysis of the alternatives here, just a review of the political implications of such a movement. The most hopeful quote in the article comes from a Democrat:

“It strikes me that there’s consensus in the country, and hopefully in Washington, that the tax system is too complex, that it’s full of loopholes that are exploited by special interests and that we need to simplify them,” said Senator-elect Barack Obama of Illinois, a Democrat who won easy election to an open seat.
Mr. Obama, speaking on “This Week” on ABC, said, “If we can arrive at a tax simplification agenda that is not resulting in a shift toward a more regressive tax system, but is instead genuinely making it simpler for ordinary Americans to file their tax returns without a lot of paperwork and gobbledygook, then I think that’s something we could work together on.”

Amen.

No astute political analyst am I, this Economist article reflects my amateur political analysis towards John Edwards’ political future:

Mr Edwards is well on the way to becoming a man with a brilliant future behind him. What did he add to the Democratic ticket other than a boyish smile and a well-honed stump speech? He failed to deliver either of the Carolinas to the party (even though he was born in the southern one and represented the northern one in the Senate). He has no clear ideological constituency.

In addition to the foregoing, Edwards’ Senate seat was won by a Republican, he was surprisingly poor in his debate performance against Dick Cheney, and he made an incredibly inept gaffe late in the campaign after the death of Christopher Reeve. In view of all of this, my sense is that a decent case can be made that Edwards cost Kerry the election in a reasonably close race. That’s not much of a foundation upon which to build a political future.

Jamie Malanowski, a New York-based writer, pens this Washington Monthly op-ed on Houston congressman Tom DeLay and provides the following overview to a discussion of the various ethics complaints and criminal investigations that are currently dogging Mr. DeLay:

Tom DeLay is the most odious character in American politics today. He does not lack for competition, of course, but what sets him apart is that all of his perversions have been accomplished under the radar screen. Apart from his colorful name ?the Hammer,? DeLay has no public identity, and even that nickname will more likely inspire people outside the Beltway to think of old jocks like Fred Williamson or Dave Schultz than the beady-eyed former exterminator who terrifies Capitol Hill. . . Tom DeLay is a cancer cell, silently metastasizing.

Statesmanship is not a word that comes to mind when thinking about Tom DeLay.

This Economist article addresses the second political murder in the Netherlands in the space of two years. The murder of outspoken and provocative film director, Theo van Gogh, by a Muslim radical has shocked Dutch society, which has long been the European epitome of tolerant and liberal values. Dutch people fear that they may now live in a place where violence has become a way of settling differences of opinion, especially over rocky relations with a growing Muslim minority. The article is an insightful account of the difficulties that even the most liberal Western culture faces in assimiliating intolerant Muslim fascism.

William J. Stuntz is a smart professor at Harvard Law School, and in this Tech Central Station article, provides an excellent and non-biased analysis of the voting patterns from Tuesday’s Presidential election, including the following observation:

The best way to see how the two sides stack up is to look at one of those red-and-blue maps that seem to breed these days. Divide the country into three parts: Kerry’s base, Bush’s base, and the Midwest. Kerry’s base is the Northeast — everything North of the Potomac River and East of Ohio — together with the Pacific Coast and Hawaii. (They don’t call it the “left coast” for nothing.) Kerry swept his base 194-0. Bush’s base is the South and the rest of the West. Bush swept his base too, by an electoral score of 237-0, assuming the New Mexico vote holds up. But Bush’s base is bigger. Which means Kerry needed to nearly sweep the Midwest to catch up. He did carry the Midwest, but not by much: 58-49 in the electoral college. Bush carried Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa — and he could have lost any of the last three without changing the result.

Read the entire article.

This Washington Post editorial examines the scandal that is the self-perpetuating nature of the House of Representatives:

Out of 435 House races, incumbents lost only seven — an even more impressive survival rate than that of two years ago, when eight incumbents were defeated. In nearly all House races, moreover, there was no serious doubt about the outcome: 95 percent of races were decided by a margin of more than 10 percent, according to the Center for Voting and Democracy, and an astonishing 83 percent were decided in 20-point-plus landslides.

How has this happened? Just take a look at the way in which we allow our Congressional districts to be established:

The main cause of the incumbents’ success is the country’s scandalous system for designing voter districts. Instead of entrusting the design to nonpartisan technocrats, the U.S. system entrusts it to state legislatures, allowing the majority party to promote partisan ends. The partisans feed demographic and polling data into their computers and come up with district boundaries that give their sides as many safe seats as possible. Because this process involves crowding opposition voters into a handful of opposition districts, it creates safe seats for both parties and an incentive for incumbents on both sides not to rock the boat.

And who has been at the forefront of this wrangling of Congressional districts? Of course, Tom DeLay and his friends:

The darkest wizardry occurred in Texas. There, the state Republican Party redrew the districts of five white Democrats, hoping to unseat all of them so that the Democrats would become identified as the party of minorities. The plan succeeded in four cases (outside Texas, a grand total of three incumbents were defeated anywhere). Rep. Charles W. Stenholm, a long-serving conservative Democrat who had been forced to run in a Republican-leaning district against a Republican incumbent, went down in defeat, as did three others who had pulled the Democratic caucus toward the center.
The Texas redistricting faces a court challenge. But whatever the legal outcome, it’s clear that these schemes are an inversion of democracy: Politicians get to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. Incumbent members of Congress face little threat of being unseated and so have little reason to be responsive to voters; their chief vulnerability lies in the threat of a primary, which encourages them to play to party activists.

The upshot of all of this is increased polarization in the political process:

[I]ndependent moderates are a shrinking force in the House of Representatives. In the 1970s, on the partisan roll calls, the average member backed the party position 65 percent of the time. In the 1980s, the average degree of partisan loyalty rose to 73 percent; in the 1990s, 81 percent; and in 2001-02 the partisanship index hit a remarkable 87 percent.

Quare: Is it time for judicial intervention over the legislative gerrymandering of Congressional districts?

This earlier post from several months ago passed along an article about Yale Economics Professor Ray Fair‘s interesting model for predicting the results of Presidential elections. Here is Professor Fair’s updated prediction, which forecasts President Bush winning 57.50% of the two-party vote.
On the other hand, Professor Bainbridge points out a less complicated indicator that favors Senator Kerry.

This LA Weekly article reviews the late C.A. Tripp’s forthcoming book — The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press 2005) — in which the author concludes that there is a reasonable probability that Abraham Lincoln was gay. There actually has been speculation about Tripp’s conclusion in historical circles for quite some time. Indeed, I recall Gore Vidal stating in television interviews years ago that, in researching his 1984 historical novel Lincoln, he began to suspect that Lincoln was gay. Give the article a look, and then wait for the return volleys from the more traditional Lincoln biographers.

Tom Mighell points us toward My Polling Place, where you can input your address and zip code, and the site provides you the address of the polling place where you are to vote and a map to the the polling place. Very handy. Check it out.

Writing in this National Journal op-ed, Stuart Taylor is not particularly impressed with the quality of the two major parties’ Presidential candidates this year:

One candidate is an intellectually shallow, closed-minded, strangely smirking, free-spending, hard-right culture warrior who combines smug ideological certitude with stunning indifference to facts and evidence, who is obsessed with shifting the tax burden from the wealthiest Americans to future generations, who claims virtually unlimited power to suspend constitutional liberties, who has alienated millions of America’s onetime admirers abroad, and who has never made a mistake he would not repeat.
The other is a both-sides-of-tough-issues, unlikable, aloof, cheap-shotting, free-spending political careerist whose domestic policies might make the Bush deficits even worse, whose Iraq policy shifts with every political wind, and who has long been close to his party’s quasi-pacifist, lawsuit-loving Left.

Ouch!