Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece
Blanton Museum of Art

Combine a mystery and a masterpiece and what do you have? You have “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece,” a small, perfectly focused exhibition recently at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The show--which has also been seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa--comes with a backstory engaging enough to make museum-goers pay close attention.

Apple’s iPad is dominating the gadget buzz this winter, but a few years ago, we and others made a big deal about the “polyglot” iPod, turning it into a talisman of the globalized supply-chain. The point was to accent the global context in which U.S. prosperity must be maintained. Then we managed to find a mildly affirmative story of Apple’s superior ability to capture value by creatively managing seven suppliers located in four different nations with manufacturing dispersed across five different countries.

That was then, though. More salient today as an insight into America’s standing in a globalized production system may be the backstory of another consumer electronics sensation--Amazon’s Kindle e-reader--yet here the story has a darker hue.

Now that we’re a full week past the initial high-speed rail announcement, we’ve taken the time to resurvey some of the elements of this massive investment. Demand is one of those elements and it’s critical to projecting ridership.

Via Sarah Goodyear, it looks like a number of city and regional planners are starting to declare war on the cul-de-sac:

Are regional college education rates a stay against metro unemployment in bad times? It sure seems like it. Just take a look at the varied metropolitan area unemployment rates reported last week by the Metro Program’s quarterly MetroMonitor and its companion Mountain Monitor, the inaugural edition of which begins coverage of recession and recovery conditions in the metropolitan areas of the six-state Intermountain West. In that document, we noticed that the Mountain region’s third-quarter unemployment rates seemed to have a lot to do with metros’ college education levels, but we didn’t make too big a deal of it. Here, we thought we would belabor the point a bit more and ask why it’s so.

First, we’ll just note that others like Ed Glaeser have noted this connection before, and observe further that it’s hardly surprising that skills might explain metropolitan unemployment rates during the Great Recession given the huge and longstanding employment gap between skilled and unskilled workers at all other times.

Still, it really is striking to survey the extreme variation in unemployment rates revealed by the  MetroMonitor and MountainMonitor maps and connect it to local education levels. Nationally, highly educated metros like Washington DC, Bridgeport, Madison, and Des Moines (with BA attainment rates of 47.3, 42.7, 40.5, and 32.5 percent respectively) have much lower unemployment rates  than less educated metros like McAllen, Stockton, and Lakeland-Winter Haven (with BA attainment rates of 14.8, 16.8, and 17.7 percent, respectively), and this is not just because of regional or even state characteristics. Within the same state, there are still large and significant differences between well- and poorly-educated metros. For example, San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin are doing considerably better than their intra-state peers like Riverside, Bakersfield, and McAllen.

Jews usually go out to the movies on Christmas ... and then they go out to eat "Chinese." I've spent it writing. Below is my harvest. I wish you all good cheer.

Here are the motifs of my writing day. Alas, none of them cheery.

1. THE REAL GRIM REAPER: HOLY DAY VICTIMS IN IRAQ AND PAKISTAN

2. COLD COMMON SENSE ABOUT IRAN FROM, MIRABILI DICTU, "THE NEW YORK TIMES"

3. A WISE EUROPEAN FOREIGN MINISTER: "WE SHOULD SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST"

4. A SOBER "TIMES" PIECE ON ISRAELI MILITARY DOCTRINE

5. THE SON OF THE MAN WHO WAS KILLED BY TERRORISTS IN THE WEST BANK: "REVENGE IS NOT FOR JEWS"

6. THE PRESIDENT AND ONE DUMB JEWISH WOMAN, THE ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM CZARINA IN WASHINGTON

7. COPENHAGEN AND THE UNSEATING OF AMERICA AS A GREAT POWER

8. THE CHRISTMAS TERRORIST 

So here goes:

1. THE REAL GRIM REAPER: HOLY DAY VICTIMS IN IRAQ AND PAKISTAN

The latest edition of MetroMonitor--our ground-up view of the recession and recovery--is out today, looking at economic indicators through the third quarter of 2009. The bottom line: It’s still a big country. Some places had largely recovered by September, while others still hadn’t bottomed out yet. Check out the report for all the details, but here are a few amuse- bouches to whet your appetite:

The manufacturing belt surges… but it may be temporary. One of the big stories over the course of the recession has been the devastation wrought in “auto country,” particularly the upper Midwestern portion in metro areas like Detroit, Grand Rapids, Toledo, and Youngstown.  But during the months of July through September, output grew, and job loss slowed, in these and other auto-focused metro areas. Signs point to the cash-for-clunkers program, which seemed to have a hand in boosting auto and auto parts production in these and many other regions across the country. Whether the trend continues into the current quarter, after the program expired, remains to be seen.

Education continues to be a mainstay… but government is slipping. Employment in educational services continued to grow in the third quarter, rising by 1.4 percent overall, and increasing in 77 of the 100 largest metro areas. And many centers of education--Austin, Madison, Syracuse, Washington, D.C.--continue to rank among the best-performing metropolitan areas over the course of the recession. However, government employment--a mainstay over the past two years—showed signs of slipping in a number of metro areas, particularly those including state capitals where budget crises loom. Honolulu, Nashville, Baltimore, Columbia (SC), and Albany saw government job growth in the second quarter turn into job loss in the third quarter.

Too much going on today for this blogger to cover. Fortunately, I'm not alone on the beat...

Reform without a public option would still be a progressive victory. Chris Bowers

But if progressives give ground on the public option, what will they get in return? Ezra Klein

An important federal program that tends to fly under the radar received some unprecedented real estate this past weekend--an enormous spread on page A1 of Sunday’s New York Times.

Jason DeParle’s article, and some nifty interactive maps on the Times website, portray the recent rapid growth of the food stamp program, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or by its rather unfortunate acronym, SNAP. DeParle documents how, in the wake of welfare reform in the mid-1990s, successive administrations--from Clinton to Bush, and now Obama--have worked in a bipartisan fashion to erase the stigma that once haunted the program, and ensure that eligible families receive access to its benefits.

Because welfare reform transformed what was an individual entitlement into a block grant to states, cash welfare caseloads in many states have remained relatively flat despite the worst recession in generations. As a result, food stamps--which remain a federal entitlement--have become an even more important countercyclical tool for fighting poverty, and enrollment has expanded by about one-third since 2007. DeParle charts that rise over the past two years across a broad cross-section of U.S. communities, all of which are feeling the economic pain of rising foreclosures, mounting job losses, and declining family incomes.

 Last week, the Republican Governors Association held a conference outside Austin where the group predicted that the ideas-oriented campaigns of Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell would serve as harbingers of the 37 gubernatorial races next year--an issue I touched upon in a Continue reading "Governors Still Aiming For A Comeback"

Alex Jones is a husky man with short sandy hair, weary eyes, baby cheeks, and the kind of deep, gravelly voice made for horror-movie trailers. And it’s horror he has in mind. "Your New World Order will fall!" he screams through a megaphone at the shiny façade of a nondescript office building. "Humanity will defeat you!"

For the past decade or so, every time the US Census Bureau released new data, headlines would blare “Immigration Up in the US.”  More recent headlines have been hopeful: “Immigration offers Cleveland a chance to import the future.” Others wistful: “Current waves of immigrants offer hope for St. Louis' future.” But mostly, they just repeatedly announced that immigrants were still coming to the United States in large numbers. “Area Immigration Booming; Census Finds Steady Flow Despite Economy, 9/11 (2004),” “Census Shows Growth of Immigrants (2006),” and “Immigration at Record Levels (2007)”

So it may have surprised some then, when new data from the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey released last week showed that the U.S. foreign-born population dropped during the Great Recession of 2008, after 40 years of sustained growth. Those from the restrictionist camp would like to claim enforcement is working. Others wonder if the drop means more immigrants are emigrating or if just fewer are coming.

While the net decrease in the national immigrant population is small at around 100,000 (and it is not statistically significant for those who care), it does signal a leveling off or decline in the immigration flow.

After calling an extraordinary special session, the Roberts Court is now debating whether to reverse decades of cases that allow the government to restrict the campaign spending of corporations. Defending the regulation of corporate speech, Elena Kagan, in her first argument on behalf of the Obama administration, made a strategic concession.

The Supreme Court just released its opinion in Northwest Austin Utility District v. Holder, a case that raised questions about the constitutionality of enforcement mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act. As Jeff Rosen wrote last May, if the Court's conservative majority decided to overturn those provisions, it might have presented President Obama with a political opportunity:

At 6 P.M. on Tuesday night, Crystal Viagran is standing on a street corner in East Austin, Texas, holding an Obama sign above her head. In less than an hour, she ditches the sign and walks toward Govalle Elementary School, the primary voting and caucus site for Precinct 426, and picks up a manila packet containing all the instructions for conducting that night's precinct convention. Crystal, 32, who works as a student adviser at the University of Texas, her alma mater, was elected precinct convention chair in 2006 by a total of three votes. That's how many people showed up to caucus.

Freelance journalist Laurence Lowe is covering the Texas primary from Austin this week. Here, he reports on a looming logistical nightmare.

The Austin debate tonight between Hillary and Barack is on the mind of everyone I know today and is all anyone is talking to me about. I will be at the debate--each DNC and State Executive Committee member was given one ticket. I appreciated that since 43,000 people entered a lottery for 100 tickets.

David Holmes, a 34-year-old political/legislative consultant, is a Democratic superdelegate from Austin, Texas. He pledged to vote for Hillary Clinton about three weeks before the Iowa Caucus, but recently, there have been rumors that he’s thinking about switching his support to Obama. Let’s just say that he’s been getting a lot of phone calls lately. ...

Holmes agreed to keep a diary for TNR of his superdelegate experience.

It was predictable. That even the faculty, or a large portion of it, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas would have qualms about having the George W. Bush Presidential Library on campus. It was obvious. Now, SMU has not actually been designated as the querulous host. Baylor University in Waco and the University of Texas, not in Austin, God forbid, but Irving are also in the running. Or maybe trying to escape.

It would seem, on the face of it, that the only thing standing between George W. Bush and the presidency is a persistent reservation about his intellect. The doubts have crystallized around a reporter's now-famous pop quiz, in which the Texas governor could not identify various difficult-to-pronounce heads of state. Bush, according to many in the press, needs to wonk himself up, and fast. He needs to cocoon himself with all those Stanford Ph.D.s and reemerge with a deep, studied interest in the stability of Central Asia and the efficacy of scattered-site housing.

As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.

When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.