Month: April 2012

Immigration from Mexico is way down (pdf):

The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.

After four decades that brought 12 million currentimmigrants—most of whomcame illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States hasstopped and may have reversed, according to a new analysis of government data from both countries by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and broader economic conditions in Mexico.

Avlon notes an interesting wrinkle in one possible tax deduction Romney might or might not try to remove: state taxes. It would hit the residents of blue states hardest. But also – critically – some swing states: Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Personally, I think, like John, that any pol prepared to state a tax deduction he would remove deserves praise. But what this kind of thing shows is that picking and choosing tax deductions creates huge political problems, as they affect this or that constituency disproportionately. Hence my support for a massive, sweeping end to all of them, if necessary, to raise revenues and reduce rates.

The smaller-bore you are, the more likely you are to get bitten to death by particular interests. The bigger you are, the more able to leverage the public good against private advantage.

Farhad Manjoo attacks the genre:

Editorial cartoons are solo efforts in an era when political art has become a collaborative, crowdsourced affair. Many of today’s most powerful political images were put together by anonymous people on Reddit, where Photoshoppers find them and create ever-more-inspired versions. This collaboration is critical—while a single cartoon might get lost in the media din, an ongoing game of image-based one-upmanship is impossible to miss. Consider, for instance, the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme. [The image of Lt. Pike pasted into the 1819 painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull] —which started it all—makes a profound point about police brutality by itself.

Another example is the above illustration, which any regular Dish reader should recognize by now. The image, like those described by Manjoo, went through several layers of collaborative revision. It began as a photo by the AP freelancer Mannie Garcia, then stylized by Shepard Fairey into his famous poster, then remixed by University of Illinois grad student Mike Rosulek to honor Charles Darwin for his 200th birthday. A final layer of meaning was our placement of Rosulek's image into blog posts alluding to the theme of Obama's long-game strategy: very gradual change we can believe in.

Explained:

Obama has strong approval ratings among college-educated whites. Obama’s demographic firewall is not insurmountable, but it has placed Romney in a difficult position – either persuade college-educated Obama supporters, or win states that Republicans typically lose.

Dana Dunham manages to recreate a late nineteenth century gloss for his very twenty-first century portraits. These portraits are huge and created with a specific process:

The double exposure is made in camera using one negative. The liquid emulsion is brushed onto watercolor paper under the red lights of the darkroom, and then exposed with the photographic negative. The darkroom chemistry is brushed on after the exposure has been made and is applied in a fashion that has become very natural to my intuition as a craftsman. The variations of the brush strokes of the emulsion and the painterly qualities of the chemistry dripping down the photograph presents to the viewer an image that is not only photographic, but also inherently related to printmaking and painting.

A Provincetowner in the summers, he asked me to sit for one. It's after the jump.

Harry Enten does delegate math:

I expect Mitt Romney to win all the delegates in Connecticut, Delaware and New York for a total of 134, plus another nine delegates in Rhode Island's proportional primary. Romney should eventually win most, if not all, the delegates in Pennsylvania, but there is no real relationship between tomorrow's Quaker state popular vote and delegate count. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul should win three or four delegates each in Rhode Island.

First Read will be watching Romney's share of the vote:

[T]his is the first primary day where Romney doesn’t face any real competition. So when we watch the returns, we’ll get a good idea of the true anti-Romney vote tonight. Does he get at least 50% in all of these contests? What about 60%? 70%?

Dubstep breakdancing?

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)

Slavoj Zizek takes a stab at answering the question:

So why are we witnessing the rise of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence today? Precisely because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as the basis of mass violence – in other words, since the hegemonic ideology enjoins us to enjoy life and to realize our truest selves – it is almost impossible for the majority of people to overcome their revulsion at the prospect of killing another human being.

Most people today are spontaneously moral: the idea of torturing or killing another human being is deeply traumatic for them. So, in order to make them do it, a larger "sacred" Cause is needed, something that makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. There are, of course, cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be anaesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to another's suffering. For this, a sacred Cause is needed: without this Cause, we would have to feel all the burden of what we did, with no Absolute on whom to put the ultimate responsibility.

A few things. First: the banality of this observation is its most striking feature. Second, I haven't seen a big increase in Christian or Buddhist violence. The issue is primarily with extreme Islam, which in turn has provoked reactions in Africa and elsewhere. Third, how many "spontaneously moral" people do you know? Me neither. Slavoj Zizek must be one of the most over-rated pseuds out there right now.

They are extremely rare, and when they occur, excruciatingly mangled. Which reminds me: when will Tom Friedman's error about stimulus-funded road-work outside Washington's Union Station be corrected? Or are columnists at the NYT less responsible for corrections than the average blogger?