The Dish

Alan Johnson notes that the confrontation between Gillian Duffy and Gordon Brown was not just a gaffe but a symptom:

In three critical areas the Labour Party is seen among significant layers of working class people to have ignored their anxieties and denied them a voice: economic globalization, European integration, and mass immigration. Each subject has been declared off political limits.

In the US, the white working class has been affected mainly by the first but not the second and third. Notice that almost all the immigration is white and from the EU, so racism, let alone bigotry, cannot explain resistance. This explains resistance:

The Labour government predicted 57,000 immigrants would come to the UK when it opened up to all the new accession countries from Central and Eastern Europe when the EU was enlarged. Around 800,000 came.

Britain is a tiny country, compared with the US. Adding close to a million new workers from abroad in a few years, when followed by a steep recession, makes immigration – legal immigration – a legitimate public issue. Dismissing concerns as bigotry is symptomatic of the disconnect many of Labour's base feel about their erstwhile party. I suspect this is a key reason why David Cameron may well be the next prime minister. In fact, my own sense is that things have shifted decisively in the Tory direction, poisoned chalice though government may be.

Fallows goes for the jugulaire.

Friedersdorf writes an open letter in a bid to bust open conservative epistemic closure.

A. C. Grayling tries to make a distinction:

Minds are not brains. Please note that I do not intend anything non-materialistic by this remark; minds are not some ethereal spiritual stuff a la Descartes. What I mean is that while each of us has his own brain, the mind that each of us has is the product of more than that brain; it is in important part the result of the social interaction with other brains. As essentially social animals, humans are nodes in complex networks from which their mental lives derive most of their content. A single mind is, accordingly, the result of interaction between many brains, and this is not something that shows up on a fMRI scan. The historical, social, educational, and philosophical dimensions of the constitution of individual character and sensibility are vastly more than the electrochemistry of brain matter by itself. Neuroscience is an exciting and fascinating endeavour which is teaching us a great deal about brains and the way some aspects of mind are instantiated in them, but by definition it cannot (and I don't for a moment suppose that it claims to) teach us even most of what we would like to know about minds and mental life.

Have you seen it before?

Nate Silver sketches out the Lib Dem dilemma. If Labour bleeds enough support for the Lib Dems to get more seats than Labour, the Tories will probably have gained enough Labour votes for a majority:

Obviously the [Lib Dems] want as much of the vote as possible. But their realistic upside is probably a hung parliament in which Labour does embarrassingly poorly and they become the de facto second party. If the model is right, however (yes, I'm going to keep caveating that), and if Cameron gets another point or two out of the debate, it may be hard for them to overtake Labour in the seat count whilst simultaneously denying Conservatives a majority.

Frum defends Arizona's law. He argues that the "true benefit of Arizona’s new law…is not deportation, but deterrence". Echoing a common criticism, he also blames the federal government for not acting:

The experience of the past two years has shown that migration responds swiftly to changing incentives. The Center for Immigration Studies has tracked monthly Census data for young Hispanic males with low levels of education — a good proxy for the illegal immigrant population. Between the summer of 2007 and the first quarter of 2009, that population actually declined. Extrapolating from survey figures, CIS estimates that the illegal population in the U.S. dropped by1.7 million during the recession. The number of illegals entering the country fell by about one-third while the number returning home doubled .

States and counties that have strengthened enforcement have seen declines in the population of non-English-speaking students in local schools (another good proxy for the illegal immigrant population).

Arizona’s law seeks a similar effect.

Max Fisher rounds up reaction to the Navy's decision to allow women to serve on submarines. Many of the arguments mirror DADT:

The Christian Science Monitor's Taraneh Ghajar Jerven argues, "there is no evidence that integrating crews will undermine national security or cause social disruption. In fact, the practice of submarine crew integration has been successful for Canada, Australia, Norway, and Sweden. A study commissioned for NATO found that on Canadian Victoria-class submarines, 'Women have been seamlessly integrated into the environment with few problems. No attempts have been made to segregate the genders, and no special provision has been made for bunking or shower facilities.'"

A reader writes:

Thought I'd write to tell you that the air is already pretty bad in New Orleans due to this oil spill. I smelled something "funny" in the air about midday today and it got gradually more noticeable as the day went by. Then I saw this report on the local paper's website. My wife and I just walked our dog for about 20 minutes and my nose is now burning, not terribly, but it is burning. And the reports are saying this oil well won't be capped for at least 4 weeks! If there hasn't been outrage yet, there will be when the oil slick actually reaches the shore. The air is going to be twice as bad especially when it gets hotter. 

The only recommendations from health officials that I read were to "stay indoors' and "use air conditioning". What a crock. Help us raise some hell for someone to do something about this because having your air polluted like this can make you feel pretty helpless.

(Photo: A general view of a small island in the wetlands of St. Bernard Parish near the Gulf of Mexico on April 28, 2010 near New Orleans, Louisiana. An estimated leak of 1,000-5,000 barrels of oil a day are still leaking into the gulf from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead. By Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Steve Chapman hunts for answers.