This is something: a top Goldman Sachs executive very publicly quits today, announcing in a New York Times op-ed that the top investment bank is no longer a place he’s proud to work. Why? Excerpt:

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

More:

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

Rick Santorum won both Alabama and Mississippi primaries tonight. If Gingrich hadn’t been in the race, Santorum would have crushed Romney. Romney and his SuperPAC outspent Santorum and his SuperPAC by four to one in Alabama and Mississippi, and outspent Gingrich and his SuperPAC by three to one. And still!

What a freaking mess this GOP race is. Some coronation that Romney convention is going to be.

I like Michael Brendan Dougherty’s tweet on this:

Catholic Republican wins the Cotton South. – Sci-Fi headlines from 1948

UPDATE: You see that Ron Paul scored only in the single digits tonight? I guess he’s just keeping his powder dry. Heh.

Albino marmot piss? I dunno. Any of you ever had this stuff, purportedly the most popular beer in Hungary?

Noting polling showing that nearly six in 10 Americans believe the Afghan war is no longer worth fighting, Clark Stooksbury asks:

So, Americans, will you remember this the next time it seems like such a good idea to go into war and perhaps be a bit more skeptical? Oh, who am I kidding?

Yeah you right. The new CBS/NYT poll finds a majority of Americans (51 percent) support taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon. Only 36 percent oppose. The rest don’t know. (See the poll result in this PDF, on page 22). When asked what the US should do if Israel attacks Iran, 47 percent said support Israel, 42 percent said “stay out of it.”

Hey, wait!:

In the head-to-head matchups, Mr. Obama also maintained much of the advantage he had built in the last year among important constituencies, including women, although he lost some support among women over the past month, even as the debate raged over birth control insurance coverage.

Says the New York Times/CBS News poll. See the graphic here.  Obama lost 12 points with women voters since the last NYT/CBS poll, in February. Don’t these women understand that the Republicans hate women, and want to help the Catholic Church make birth control illegal? Where have they been?

Seriously, though, there’s some interesting data from that poll about the whole birth control mandate debate. The issue, it turns out, is a loser for the Democrats. According to the poll findings, 51 percent of voters say all employers should have the right to opt out of providing contraception coverage; only 40 percent say it should be mandated. When asked if religious employers should have that right, the numbers cut even worse against the Democratic position: 57 percent come down on the side of opt-out, versus 36 percent for the mandate.

Here are further surprising numbers from this poll: 51 percent of those polled say that this issue is about women’s health and rights, but only 37 percent say the issue is about religious freedom. And yet, a substantial majority believes religious employers should have the liberty to opt out. Interesting.

Oh, and get this: 64 percent of those polled say they favor the use of artificial birth control, versus 21 percent who think it’s wrong (the rest don’t have an opinion). Isn’t that interesting? You hear that “98 percent of all women who have had sex have used birth control” stat thrown around all the time, but this poll says that at least one in five adults thinks artificial contraception is immoral. I didn’t see a male-female breakdown on that figure, though.

Ross Douthat has a really interesting post about race and American politics. He takes issue with Jonathan Chait’s contention that white identity politics holds the GOP together. Ross concedes that there’s something to that, but that introducing race into the discussion makes it hard to discern important differences. Ross says that works both ways, then analyzes how the appeal of the Democratic Party among Hispanics depends on an explicit promise to make Hispanics beneficiaries “with very explicit and specific promises of special legal treatment (in hiring, government contracting, college admissions, immigration policy, etc.) based on their ethno-racial background.

If these promises help cement a new Democratic majority, then (to repurpose Chait’s analysis) the new progressive era he envisions will depend, no less than the conservative era that preceded it, on “ethnocentrism” and “racial resentment” and “ingroup solidarity.” If anything, the racial element will be even more explicit: Chait’s emerging Democratic majority will be less a rational coalition of ideological interests and more a kind of a race-based spoils system, in which progressive elites exploit a system of racial preferences designed to provide temporary assistance to the descendants of slaves to supply a permanent form of race-based patronage for America’s fastest-growing ethnic group.

Is this an unfairly reductionist take on liberalism, the Hispanic vote and Democratic coalition politics? Absolutely. But it’s no more reductionist or unfair than Chait’s race-based analysis of what makes modern conservatism tick.

Robert Wright sees a coming split. Excerpt:

Are we really ready to go to war against two million Christians? According to Tony Karon’s reporting in Time, President Assad hopes to keep Christians in his coalition by harnessing their fear of a radical Islamist takeover.

So far they seem to be sticking with him, and word of their allegiance is reaching American Christians. The evangelical press is reporting that Syrian Christians fear Assad’s fall and is quoting them as warning against foreign intervention. Catholic periodicals convey similar concerns, and illustrate them with, for example, reports that Syrian rebels are using Christians as human shields. And Jihad Watch, the right-wing website run by Robert Spencer, a Catholic, bemoans what will happen to Syrian Christians as “Assad’s enemies divide the spoils of the fallen regime.” (Spencer has in the past been skeptical of interventions, but he reaches conservative Christians who have been less skeptical.) The alliance between neocons and conservative Christians that has worked in the past is going to be harder to put together this time.

There can be no doubt that Assad is a wicked man. There can be no doubt that Assad’s fall would be as disastrous for the ancient Christian population of Syria as Saddam’s fall was for the Christians of Iraq. Not that most American Christians cared. From the NYT:

Iraq’s dwindling Christians, driven from their homes by attacks and intimidation, are beginning to abandon the havens they had found in the country’s north, discouraged by unemployment and a creeping fear that the violence they had fled was catching up to them.

Their quiet exodus to Turkey, Jordan, Europe and the United States is the latest chapter of a seemingly inexorable decline that many religious leaders say tolls the twilight of Christianity in a land where city skylines have long been marked by both minarets and church steeples. Recent assessments say that Iraq’s Christian population has now fallen by more than half since the 2003 American invasion, and with the military’s departure, some Christians say they lost a protector of last resort.

Which state has 12 percent of America’s population, but one-third of its welfare recipients? You got it.

Research finds that the way US colleges and universities are set up today puts working-class students at a disadvantage:

Colleges that urge first-generation students to be more independent — to express themselves, find their passions, and realize their individual potential — may be putting some of those students at an academic disadvantage.

Researchers call it a “cultural mismatch.” The seemingly positive values of empowering oneself and influencing the world — qualities that are often touted at universities — contradict the values of students with working-class backgrounds, who may have been raised to prize interdependent traits such as responding to others’ needs and being part of a community, a new study suggests.

“Culture can be really powerful in making people feel like they belong” in a college environment, said Nicole Stephens, the lead author of the study. “If you feel like you belong, it can really shape your academic achievement.”

When students find themselves in a college that doesn’t reflect their interdependent values, they flounder, researchers say. This is especially true for students who are the first in their families to go to college, according to the new study, which is from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.