Andrew Sullivan highlights some “good news about smoking,” touting a new study that shows smoking may reduce one’s risk of Parkinson’s. Sullivan quotes David Harsanyi, who asks:

My only question is how many major news organizations will give this politically incorrect fact the attention it deserves? If eating tofu lowered your risk of Parkinson’s by 54 percent would it be a front-page story? Should it be a front-page story if tobacco does the trick?

I recently heard cutting off your head is a sure-fire way to prevent brain cancer. I wonder why I haven’t seen this on the front-page..

In a new column up on TNR, Jon Chait takes Mayor Bloomberg to task over his promises of non-partisanship:

“Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” So declared New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg upon renouncing his membership in the GOP last week. The problem, of course, is that people don’t agree on what “real results” or “good ideas” are. Cutting taxes? Raising taxes? Funding stem-cell research? Banning stem-cell research? This is exactly why we have partisan battles in the first place.

Since when is partisanship synonymous with disagreement? Like Tom DeLay before him, Chait (and his party-happy buddies) seems quick to misconstrue just what “partisan” really means.

Politicians of the non-partisan stripe (Bloomberg, Obama, etc.) aren’t looking to do away with political disagreement (who would be? That shit would be undemocratic.) Like many Americans, they’re hoping to put an end to the ridiculous team-based political mindset—a debilitating process wherein a line is drawn in the partisan sand, on either side of which political players line-up and duke it out, concerned not with what’s working but more with who’s winning.

Pro-partisan gadflys like Chait (apparently) and Delay seem to enjoy this type of political “fighting” out of some sort of nerdy attraction to the gritty sport of it all (see Greg Sargent’s constant boxing terminology, and nauseating overuse of the verb “to slam”). But every sport has it’s own limited appeal, and the growing ranks of undeclared voters seems to indicate that a lot of Americans aren’t really into petty political bickering, especially not when such fights become less about differences in policy position and more on promoting party unity and winning one for the home team.

This type of misanalysis is especially puzzling coming from Brendan Nyhan, a guy who throws a weepy hissy fit anytime a political pundit tows the party line rather than speaking truth to ideological party power.

And what prompted Jon Chait to go from knocking the liberal blogosphere for its insistence on ideological purity to knocking Bloomberg for his insistence of not adhering to ideological purity?

People have been lamenting the death of hip hop for about half as long as hip hop has been around, a whiney autophobia that Mos Def best undercut with the right-on observation that “people talk about hip hop like it’s some giant living in the hillside coming down to visit the townspeople.”

Matt Taibbi’s current column up on ad busters on the supposed sorry state of American liberalism is one of those giant in the hillsides type crybaby laments.

The liberalism Taibbi objects to—snooty college kids in Chaiman Mao t-shirts and “noisy Upper West side cocktail parties”—has little, if anything, to do with the Democratic party or the current left-of-center punditsphere.

If anything, the overdeveloped self-righteous urge to Fight The Power that defines these groups (as Taibbi describes it) has turned off any of the smelly dreadlocked/snotty Banana Republic-frocked masses from supporting anything as The Man-ish as a modern day political party.

Ross Douthat’s not buying it either:

The right had the left on the ropes for a long time, but for now, at least, it’s the other way around. Public opinion is going liberalism’s way on everything from gay marriage to taxes to health care to poverty to global warming, and the Iraq War has temporarily undone conservatism’s long-running advantage on foreign policy.

I think they’re largely talking past each other. Matt Taibbi’s smelly liberal giant in the hillside just isn’t coming down to get with the townspeople anymore. The rising wave of public support of left-leaning policy has come about largely because the conservative equivalent of the Chairman-clad masses has taken over the Republican party, a rhetorical extremism that is fundamentally unpalatable to anyone to the left of Ann Coulter.

While the Republicans were staging wide-scale revolts against the likes of Lincoln Chaffee, the Democrats were busy embracing and celebrating guys like Barack Obama and Jim Webb, ideological liberals who approach their liberalism under fundamentally conservative world views of public restraint and personal responsibility. The lunatic fringe Taibbi rightfully finds so disagreeable is largely an isolated entity, with little to no bearing on the current political landscape (and let’s hope it stays that way).

Taibbi should stick to making fun of dying popes.

What planet is David Broder from?

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have abandoned their cautious advocacy of a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces and now are defending votes to cut off support for troops fighting insurgents in Iraq.

They are able to escape the charge of abandoning U.S. combat troops only because they knew when they voted that their Republican colleagues in Congress, joined by a few Democrats, would keep the funds flowing at least for a few more months. But if Clinton or Obama is nominated, that vote is certain to loom large in the general election campaign.

If President Bush was comfortable enough to veto the first war funding bill (due to what he perceived to be inadequacies of the legislation) without fear of jeopardizing the troops, then Clinton and Obama should feel just as comfortable voting against a war funding bill they disprove of for the same reasons. It’s not that the two relied on the generosity of their Republican colleagues to pass a bill they needed to vote against for political expediency—Clinton and Obama hoped this bill wouldn’t pass, such that another supplemental, one with clear benchmarks tied to an extended withdrawal, could be voted on and sent to the President.

That’s the way war funding legislation works, David. Unfunded troops, abandoned by legislators and forced to wage thrifty battle in the desserts of Anbar, was never an option and has never been an option, not during Bush’s veto nor during Clinton and Obama’s votes against the benchmark-free bill.

Andrew Sullivan raises a common argument re. the current immigration debate, inspired by a quote by Steve Sailer (ewww):

(N)ot enough attention has been paid to the altogether welcome move in the current immigration bill to put brains and talent before family connections in determining who gets to become an American. It’s long overdue.

It’s not long overdue, and it’s a terrible idea. Immigration policy should be set with an eye toward the future, not the immediate present. Sure, brainy Mexicans coming here for advanced careers in engineering and software development would probably provide a boon to our current economy and would most likely have a slightly easier time assimilating to American civic life. But what about the next generation, their sons and daughters?

It isn’t too controversial to note that children raised in stable, two-parent homes have a much easier time assimilating to life as US citizens, no matter how far back their American family trees may reach. This is even more so the case for the sons and daughters of recent immigrants—strong family unity produces strong American kids. Any first generation Americans coming of age in broken immigrant families (simply because their mothers or fathers or supportive grandparents weren’t “brainy” enough to make the cut) will have a much harder time developing into prosperous US citizens (attending American schools, becoming productive in American jobs) than would children born into thriving, uninterrupted families.

Preference for immigrant brains over family unity is short-sighted and wrong-headed; it’s the cultural and civic well being of the second, third, fourth and fifth generations we should be concerning ourselves with, and for those folks it’s a strong family structure, not a brainy skillset, that is the biggest factor in their early growth as productive Americans.

Ross Douthat is right to pick apart Dana Stevens’ strange analysis of abortion-politics ala Judd Appatow’s Knocked Up. And while I think his analysis of the film is pretty spot-on, he’s a bit off the mark here:

Stevens is right that a typical young, upwardly-mobile, apparently-secular female professional who gets pregnant from a one-night stand with a loserish guy is a prime candidate to get an abortion, and the Knocked Up scenario is, in that regard, sociologically unlikely.

Replace “upwardly mobile” and “pregnant from a one-nigh stand with a loserish guy” with “poor and struggling” and “victim of a date rape” and I think you have a clearer candidate.

Had Alison not had the steady, well-paying job, and the in-house support system of her sister and brother-in-law, I’m sure the decision to carry the child to term would have been a lot more agonizing.

The Onion’s on the case of a widespread MySpace friendship meltdown:

The outage, which occurred late Saturday night, is believed to be the result of a complicated wallpaper upload for the page of a former VH1 I Love New York contestant, which triggered a chain reaction of web browser crashes and server shutdowns.

It truly is the question of the 2008 election, but this graf is absurd:

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is an “experience” candidate who built his presidential platform around the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Terrorism, he says, is something “that I understand better than anyone who is running for president of the United States.”

I fail to see how a socially liberal Republican former municipal mayor is the candidate of experience not change.

And if surviving the 9/11 attacks is prerequisite enough to be President of the United States then I know a number of downtown New York City hot dog vendors who should be in line for prime appointments at DOJ and Homeland Security.

Andrew Sullivan seems to think no TV is good for the body, good for the soul, going so far as to approvingly post this letter from a reader:

If I were married with a 13-year-old today, I would make a very similar proposal. If my child did not watch TV for a year I would give my child $1,000 for the first year, $2,000 for the second year, $3,000 for the third year, and so on until he/she was 18. Any time during which my child watched TV would reset the progression. I might also offer the same bonuses for not drinking any soft drinks/highly sugared drinks as well as not eating from fast food chains.

Sugar soda and fast food is one thing, but encouraging your children not to watch any television comes at the inevitable expense of emotionally and culturally retarding them for the rest of their lives. No Lost? No Sopranos? No Daily Show? No Wire? No Colbert? No Meet the Press? No Office? No Simpsons? It’d be like paying your child not to read.

Though there’s always been a lot of crap on the set, TV is not inherently bad for you. In fact, it’s one the greatest blessings of the last hundred years. Without TV there’d be no civil rights movement, no feminist movement, no gay rights. Television is the 20th century’s great illuminating equalizer, the one, pioneering medium that first brought other people’s lives right into the comfort of our living rooms, finally ending America’s long, nasty love affair with segregation and the separate-but-equal.

Shame shame.

Like many grunge rockers, I never really knew understood what “Yellow Ledbetter” was really all about, though it spoke to me in many shades of flannel.

Had I known Eddie Vedder was really looking for some Democrats to make him some fries, things may have been different:

Michael “Axis of Evil” Gerson brings up a common misconception of the pro-choice, anti-abortion position:

The question naturally arises: Why does Giuliani “hate” abortion? No one feels moral outrage about an appendectomy. Clearly he is implying his support for the Catholic belief that an innocent life is being taken. And here the problems begin.

That’s stupid. There is plenty of stuff that is patently immoral and worthy of hate that falls far short of murder. Polygomy, for instance, which is apparently the worst thing Mitt Romney can even imagine.

For those who do not believe life begins at conception, abortion is not the termination of life, but the termination of pregnancy, a state of womanhood that fosters life. Ending that state can conceivably be seen as morally problematic without amounting to murder.

I have no qualms with those who view abortion as immoral; it is a costly, risky, somewhat gruesome procedure that is, at times, horribly necessary. The world would be a better place without abortion, no doubt, but only in so much as the world would be a better place without unwanted pregnancy.

The termination of a problematic pregnancy is a difficult, morally challenging decision, not because it amounts to murder, but because the termination of a life-fostering state of womanhood comes with a lot of emotional/ethical strings attached, ethics that fall far short of all-out “murder.”

That said, if pregnancy is nothing but a state of womanhood then legislating around that state is a clear violation of due process (no matter what legal gymnastics Antonin Scalia may be capable of).

Matt Yglesias hypes some terrible environmental policy by way of Governor Richardson:

I particularly liked his insistence on the idea that most people underplay the role of transportation and land use policy in the energy puzzle…More fuel efficiency is good, and more renewable energy is also good, but we’re also going to need people to drive less. And that’s going to mean that we’ll need policies that make it realistic for people to do so — mass-transit, but also transit-friendly, high-density constructions.

Trying to jam high-density construction into local policy from a national initiative is a terrible, terrible idea. Communities oppose it, and nobody’s going to be too enthusiastic about drastically changing the American way of life (for the worse) out of fear of environmental collapse.

People moved to the suburbs because the convenience of cars allowed them to live better lives on less money. Nobody’s going to move away from that lifestyle unless that convenience is taken away from them (ie drastically higher gas prices) and doing so artificially will never fly with the electorate.

We’ve got to figure out a way to make money off of environmental innovation, such that American lives become more convenient through technological progress. That means renewable fuel and sustainable power. We don’t need to revert back to an urban American landscape with all the overtaxed school systems, high-crime, and crazy housing costs (for limited space) that entails.