MATT YGLESIAS argues that, with the passage of Obamacare, the era of "big government liberalism" is over:

For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is largely over with liberals having largely won.

He goes on:

[P]rogressive efforts to expand the size of the welfare state are basically done. There are big items still on the progressive agenda. But they don’t really involve substantial new expenditures. Instead, you’re looking at carbon pricing, financial regulatory reform, and immigration reform as the medium-term agenda. Most broadly, questions about how to boost growth, how to deliver public services effectively, and about the appropriate balance of social investment between children and the elderly will take center stage.

I'd like to think this was true. But I don't see how it can be. I agree that the enactment of almost-universal health coverage checks off a huge item on the progressive "to do" list. But it doesn't change the most basic force in democratic politics: that voters like to vote themselves goodies at someone else's expense.

Once non-poor, non-elderly Americans get a taste of direct government subsidies for health insurance, they will ask for more. They will not always get it, because taxpayers vote, too, and the bond market doesn't care whether your back hurts. But often, they will get it. And the battle will go on.

To illustrate this point, here's a chart showing what has happened to federal health spending since 1970.

ONE of the delights of travelling around America is dipping into local papers. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the paper, the more heart-warming the news. In the idyllic suburb outside Houston where I was staying last week, this headline grabbed me: "Woodlands teenager Caldwell gets free ice cream for life".

AMERICA'S central bank boss takes a lot of flak for his supposed role in failing to prevent the recession. North Korea's top monetary man takes real bullets.

HAWAII is mulling a law aimed at slapping down the cranks who keep asking to see Barack Obama's birth certificate:

If the measure passed, the state Office of Information Practices could declare an individual a "vexatious requester" and restrict rights to government records for two years.

This seems unwise. Granted, the birthers are both nuts and annoying. But according to the AP, Hawaii only gets 10 to 20 requests like this each week. I would have expected the number to be far higher.

These people are not going to go away just because you tell them to get stuffed. On the contrary, anything that smacks of stonewalling will inflame their conspiratorial minds. The AP quotes a lawyer called Peter Fritz who argues that there is no need to punish repeated requests for records, when the state could just politely say it will answer each person's question only once.

THE FBI hunt criminals in cyberspace. This should come as no surprise. Many criminals are so stupid that they post incriminating information on social-networking sites. For example, as AP reports:

Federal authorities nabbed a man wanted on bank fraud charges after he started posting Facebook updates about the fun he was having in Mexico.

 This echoes a story I blogged about last year:

[P]olice in [High Point, North Carolina] were trying to figure out which local youths belonged to which street gangs and which gangs were involved in which types of crime.

It turned out that one of their most valuable sources of information was the gangs' own Facebook pages. Some gangbangers had posted pictures of themselves posing with guns, showing off their gang insignia and bragging about the money they were making. They also posted messages to each other, making it farcically simple for the police to figure out who was associated with whom. 

In principle, I have no problem with this kind of snooping. But there have to be rules. Under what circumstances, for example, is it OK for a police officer to impersonate someone else online? A watchdog group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) demanded, under the Freedom of Information Act, that various government agencies release their guidelines on the subject. This morning, it posted the response from the Department of Justice on its website.  

Different agencies have different rules. The IRS, for example, "clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information." But

[t]he good example set by the IRS is in stark contrast to the U.S. Marshals and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Neither organization found any documents...in response to EFF's request, suggesting they do not have any written policies or restrictions upon the use of [social-networking] websites.

So if you are a teenager, and an online "friend" asks if there will be booze at your birthday party, just say no. In cyberspace, no one knows who's a Fed.

MICHAEL LIND of the New America Foundation has written a nice, short essay arguing that America should favour skills rather than kinship ties in deciding which immigrants to admit. The current system, he says:

privileges immigrants who benefit from genetic relationships, while discriminating against potential immigrants from every region in the world who would contribute a great deal to American society but lack relatives in the U.S. It allows a small number of countries like Mexico and the Philippines to provide a disproportionate share of U.S. immigration, at the expense of much more populous countries like China and India.  The family preference system even discriminates against individuals in the over-represented countries who are not fortunate enough to have American relatives. 

In addition to being unfair, nepotism-based immigration harms the U.S. economy.  Family-based immigration is dominated by less-skilled immigrants.  They enter a labor market in which there was a glut of less-skilled labor even before the recession created the highest levels of mass unemployment since the Great Depression.

I basically agree, but would add three points. First, it is not a simple "either/or" choice. The best and the brightest have extended families too, and are more likely to come if they have the option of bringing them. Second, America can absorb more migrants than it currently admits, so it would be possible (albeit politically very hard) to let in more skilled migrants without reducing the number of family reunifications. Third, as Jim Manzi argues in National Affairs, raw talent matters more than skill:

[W]e should reconceptualize immigration as recruiting... [We should] set up recruiting offices looking for the best possible talent everywhere: from Mexico City to Beijing to Helsinki to Calcutta. Australia and Canada have demonstrated the practicality of skills-based immigration policies for many years. We should improve upon their example by using testing and other methods to apply a basic tenet of all human capital-intensive organizations managing for the long term: Always pick talent over skill. It would be great for America as a whole to have, say, 500,000 smart, motivated people move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens.

AS MANY people have observed, the anti-gay bill being mooted in Uganda is pretty rough stuff. It proposes the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" and jail terms for those who fail to inform on their gay neighbours.

Some observers claim that the bill was inspired by right-wing American preachers who have hoodwinked Africans into believing that they need to fight back against a western gay plot to homosexualise Africa. In "Globalising the Culture Wars", Kapya Kaoma claims that "As a direct result of this campaign [by American preachers such as Scott Lively], homophobia is on the rise in Africa." 

Philip Jenkins, a British academic (and former winner of "Mastermind", a British TV quiz show), argues that this is bunk. Gay-bashing in Uganda was common long before any American preachers showed up and gave unpleasant speeches. Rivalry between Islam and Christianity for adherents ensures that preachers of both faiths compete to offer the most anti-gay vision, because that is what a lot of Ugandans want. As in many parts of Africa, openly gay people risk being lynched. The idea that Africans are passive puppets waiting to be told what to do by Americans is both wrong and insulting, says Mr Jenkins.

My guess is that Africans will eventually tolerate gays. It is not so long ago that gay sex was illegal in many Western countries. In the 19th century in Britain, it was punishable by death. Yet now you have a rapid proliferation of states and countries endorsing gay marriage. Africa is still a really hard place to be gay, but perhaps not forever.

Meanwhile, here's an article about gay recruitment.

I HAVE long worried that we mainstream media scribes are pathetically out of touch. Now I have proof. According to Pew, the hottest topic in the blogosphere for the past week has been the lethal peril of hot dogs. And the corporate media have completely missed the story. Apparently, we've all been so fixated on health reform and Greece's impending default that we've failed to spot the danger that is literally under our noses.

That said, my son did once choke on a hot dog at a pool party. When he was about five, the greedy little so-and-so tried to swallow one whole. When I noticed him turning red and asphyxiating, I turned him upside down and slapped his back until he coughed it up. It was fortunate, in retrospect, that my wife had taught me how to do this the previous week.

I'LL say it up front. I think gun curbs are a good idea. I do concede, however, that the case for a right to bear arms in America has pretty solid constitutional foundations. I mean, it does say, right there in the text: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed". 

This blog post, however, is not about the ins and outs of Second-Amendment jurisprudence. The gun-lovers outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday pointed me to a website full of colourful pro-gun posters, which I would like to share with you.

Here's the obligatory English-bashing one.

Here's one of the most effective slogans: "When seconds count, cops are just minutes away"

Here's a picture of a guy in a bathrobe with a halberd.

Here's a cute one for the kids.

And here's my favourite.

UPDATE: My piece on the Chicago gun-rights case is now posted.

HAROLD FORD has an op-ed in the New York Times today explaining why he will not run for the US Senate from New York. My esteemed colleague at Democracy in America dismisses it as "exquisitely smarmy" and his exploratory campaign as "dismally tone-deaf". I'd be a bit kinder to the young carpet-bagger. I watched him on the stump when he ran for the Senate from Tennessee in 2006, and I'd say he has an immense political talent. What he lacks is somewhere to call home, and in politics that can be fatal. 

In Tennessee, he was considered too socially liberal. I recall interviewing him with a Tennessean journalist who asked him a string of questions, all of which were about guns or hunting. That he only lost by a few points was, in retrospect, impressive.

When he moved to New York, he had the opposite problem. All the things he used to say to please crowds in Tennessee were still on record, and they made him sound, to liberal New Yorkers, like a knuckle-dragging right-winger. 

Here's my account of Mr Ford trying to woo conservative Tennesseans in 2006:

At [a] Kiwanis Club, where several members are boycotting his speech simply because he is a Democrat, Mr Ford boasts that he has never voted for an unbalanced budget, that he would never hire an illegal immigrant and that he gets “jumped on” a little by his own party because he goes to church a lot and loves Jesus.

This audience is not predisposed to like him, but they do. He says George Bush should have greater powers to thwart terrorists. He proposes to shut the borders to new immigrants for 45 days, to find out who's here and what they're up to. He wants to eliminate the tax code's bias against marriage—between a man and a woman, that is.

I've no idea how much of this stuff he actually believed. In person, Mr Ford always struck me as bright and rather thoughtful. But some circles cannot be squared.  

"SAM WALTON had a good idea," says one of the customers outside the Wal-Mart in Forrest City, Arkansas. "Put everything in one place and sell it cheap." There is no better place to find a random sample of voters than a Wal-Mart parking lot. Pretty much everyone shops here, especially in the state that spawned the world's biggest retailer. 

Black Arkansans, unsurprisingly, still feel that Barack Obama is their man. But every white guy I talk to in the Wal-Mart parking lot disapproves of the president. They don't say anything personally rude about him, but they sure don't like what he's doing to America. He "might bankrupt the country" with his "medical debacle", says one, adding that he "appears to be a bit of a socialist".

The issue of government spending comes up again and again. "I don't like the way they're giving away all that money," says Steve Roberts, a welder. "I think you should work for your money." Wal-Mart shoppers watch the pennies, it seems, and wish their government would do the same. 

The local member of Congress, a Democrat called Marion Berry, is retiring this year. As our correspondent in Little Rock describes in this week's print edition, this makes it quite possible that a Republican will capture the seat. Mr Berry is the one who slammed President Obama for not taking seriously the threat to Blue Dog (ie, conservative) Democrats this year. He claims that when Blue Dogs told him they feared a repeat of the Republican landslide of 1994, Mr Obama replied that the "big difference" between now and 1994 was "You’ve got me." Either this was a joke or it was unbelievably obtuse.

For Democrats in conservative districts, Mr Obama has become a serious liability. Many of their constituents think the country is being run by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and would like to send more Republicans to Congress to restore some balance. And a surprising number of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are giving up without a fight. In Arkansas, two out of three Democratic House members are retiring. Just across the border in Tennessee, John Tanner, a founder of the Blue Dog coalition, is calling it a day. From Senator Evan Bayh in Indiana to Senator Byron Dorgan in North Dakota, the list goes on. This is going to be a tough year for Democrats. The only bright spot I can see is that David Paterson is going to stand aside and let someone less hopeless defend the New York governorship for Democrats.