To travel around America today is to find a country also deeply concerned about education, competition, health care and pensions. It is a country worried about how its kids are going to find jobs, retire and take care of elderly parents. But instead of focusing on a new New Deal to address the insecurities of the age of globalization, the president set off on his second term to take apart the old New Deal, trying to privatize Social Security, only feeding people's anxiety. It won't fly.

If this is how Mr. Bush intends to use his political capital, that's his business. But if he had a vice president with an eye on 2008, I have to believe he or she would be saying to the president right now: "Hey boss. What are you doing? Where are you going? How am I going to get elected running on this dog's breakfast of antiscience, head-in-the-sand policies?"

Tom Friedman pulls no punches in this latest column.

In case you missed it, Lawrence Kotlikoff's The Coming Generational Storm is now available in an updated paperback edition for only $11.53 at Amazon. Sample chapters (including the new foreword by the authors) are available from MIT Press. You may recall that "Storm" was named one of Barron's 25 best books of 2004 and was a forbes.com top ten business book for 2004. If you can't read, "don't have time for a book", or simply prefer moving pictures to written words, you can watch a one-hour presentation by Kotlikoff.

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(Burns offers Homer a check for $2,000. All he has to do is sign this form.)

Homer: Wait a minute, I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.
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On a related topic, How Scary Is the Deficit? When China decides to stop funding the war in Iraq, the GWOT, your education, and your next McMansion, will you still vote for the politicians who have to double your income taxes even as they undo the New Deal? (Oh, you didn't know? Get wise to the impending meltdown; sell your house before it's too late.) But don't be too quick to lay all the blame on your elected officials; they can't help it. You see, political ideology is genetically transmitted:

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors.

The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes.

We urge political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

Run, Dick, Run

Since 1961, more than 50 senators have run for president and they have all lost.

Sometimes in their quests to perform greater acts of service, people lose contact with their animating passion. And the irony is that the Frist of years past, the Tennessee Republican, the brilliant and passionate health care expert, is exactly the person the country could use.

Power corrupts?

What Makes Bill Frist Run?

As the information revolution continues to influence the development of global consciousness and public participation in affairs of state, the US government must find a more appropriate balance between vigorously protecting a limited field of state secrets and fostering a culture of public accountability, transparency and openness appropriate for a networked information age.

High levels of secrecy have become a national liability in the information age. With massive amounts of relevant information on most topics now available on the Internet and elsewhere, relevance does not come from hoarding information. Instead, it comes from developing and identifying appropriate filters to sort through masses of data, and by building relationships with those, often outside of government, who have the most immediate access to relevant information.

The US government must shed all but the most critical secrecy components of its post-War architecture and institutional culture if its foreign policy institutions are to maintain their relevance in a networked world.

The Perils of Secrecy in an Information Age

We show that network theory, combined with the analysis of roll-call votes using singular value decomposition, successfully uncovers political and organizational correlations between committees in the House.

A network analysis of committees in the US House of Representatives [PDF]

Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy? The signs are not good.

Is Persuasion Dead?

By working together, these Davids could be a match for the Goliaths and forge the change the intelligence community has needed since long before September 11.

Ending interagency feuds

So it is best from a career standpoint to play it safe ... and the drumbeat of criticisms of the intelligence agencies as risk-averse will, ironically, make them play even safer by underscoring the career repercussions of an intelligence failure.

Maybe if we made them wear uniforms, they would act more like professional athletes. Instead of agencies, we'd have leagues, with annual drafts, and free agents, and salary caps.

Imagine the Ivy League graduate proudly exclaiming to his family: "I got drafted! I made the team!"

Danger in 'Fixing' CIA

But, in fact, this world of binary outcomes is an illusion.

The Illusion of 'Either-Or' Politics

David Zucchino and Sean Naylor, both "embedded" with units in the thick of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively, perform the traditional journalist’s function of telling truth to power. Their books and their messages deserve careful scrutiny.

Shocked and Awed: Defense Transformation in Iraq and Afghanistan

We all know someone that's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen?

Decius wrote:
This is not a bad set of observations, but it avoids the fallacy I think is most common.

You're emotionally invested in a particular outcome, and you see the idea at hand as being related to that outcome, and so you are unwilling to sacrifice it because you feel that sacrificing it means sacrificing your ultimate objective.

This is one of Powell's Rules:

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

which has been memed at

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid9831/

Why smart people defend bad ideas