Alright, fair warning. This is going to be long. And it’s probably not organized optimally. That’s the nature of blogging, I’m afraid. I think there’s a payoff to getting to the end, namely seeing what’s really rotten about the Heller decision (hint: it’s not that it overturns a handgun ban).

Let me preface things by noting for the record a) that I approve the substantive outcome of Heller, b) that you’ll know I’m planning to run for office in 5-10 years when I join a gun club, and c) the Democrats’ push for gun control, as Jim points out, has been the most idiotic tactical maneuver since the Judean People’s Front Suicide Squad last deployed, yet Democrats and liberals appear still not to have figured it out. Handgun bans are infringements on liberty that accomplish nothing besides fostering a (kinda justified) siege mentality among gun owners that will perpetuate their mistrust of the left indefinitely. Maybe once liberals get tired of whining about Heller, they’ll recognize what an enormous blessing it was for the political fortunes of the Democratic party.

That said, both Scalia’s majority opinion and Stevens’ dissent are really atrocious miscarriages of jurisprudence, and for parallel reasons, failing both as historical and conceptual analysis. (more…)

A lot of today’s fighting young progressives probably won’t really believe that movement liberalism ever did have any genuine “excesses” that helped turn voters away from the Democratic Party. But my God, the hysteria greeting the Heller decision among some parts of Netrootsia and Greater Liberalism makes me think some of today’s progressives are determined to repeat even the pointless mistakes of Leftism Past. The practical legal effect of Heller will be minimal. The practical effect on crime will be likewise. Mark Kleiman has made this case for years, persuasively to my view. (Unfortunately his current post on the topic is not link-rich, so you’ll have to do your own digging.) I say this as someone who was disposed to find evidence on the other side - statistical proof that more guns, as they say, meant less crime. What I could see of statistics from Britain and the US and elsewhere was that gun laws had no material effect whatsoever on the level of violent crime. The effects of gun control on the one hand and shall-issue concealed-carry on the other were utterly swamped by other factors, especially demographic ones.

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Hat tip to mlinksva at Freedom Democrats for pointing out this post by Cato’s Tim Lee on the problem of trying to rally the economic conservatives in America with the promise of “Free Market Republicans” versus “Socialist Democrats.” I’ve long felt that America has descended to the point of having two economically statist parties, with the major difference being which interest groups you felt more comfortable siding with (big oil or big ethanol? environmentalists or mining companies?).

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You know, call me a naive youth, but I’d been holding out a little hope that Barack Obama’s weaselly hedging on the new (awful) FISA bill was just a tactic to allow him to mitigate the risk of voting against a bill the White House, the RNC, and the McCain campaign is suggesting could be the difference between whether hard-working Americans live or die. I.e., Obama could have been trying to make himself sound like the voice of centrist, moderate, non-ideological wisdom, emphasizing his support for the bill in general and expressing his opposition to telecom immunity sotto voce, so that when it came up for a vote, he could claim that the immunity-free legislation he supported was a sensible compromise, and that the Republicans were extremists who insisted on getting 100% of what they wanted or else they’d walk. That might not have been a very effective tactic, given that Steny Hoyer has already quite voluntarily allowed the Republicans to frame their 99% non-compromise as a centrist, moderate, non-ideological compromise, but hey, it would have been consistent with Obama’s usual manner of positioning himself when he takes the liberal side in a lost cause. (Cf. his vote against confirming John Roberts on the Supreme Court.)

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Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President of the United States, Barack Obama, has apparently sold out by endorsing Steny Hoyer and the Democratic-controlled Congress’s plan to both give George Bush all the power he could want to eavesdrop on Americans’ international communications in secret, and grant retroactive immunity to lawless telecommunications companies (tho Obama says he will fight in the Senate to strip the immunity provision; that means he’ll make a pretty but futile speech, and then vote for a bill with amnesty that will pass the Senate, too). Well, yes, I am profoundly disappointed, but feel no sense of betrayal. Only a fool invests emotionally in any candidate; still greater fools expect the POTUS to be Our Savior. Indeed, such expectations of presidents have rendered the Executive office the danger it has become.

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Thanks to George Will, I think I have a better idea of the thrust of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s much-discussed new book on “libertarian paternalism,” Nudge. It’s not about distorting the tax code with a million new Pigovian prods. It is also, it should be noted, not remotely libertarianism pure. It’s a regulatory regime. It would impose some burdens on businesses and probably individuals. It does sound like an incremental improvement over existing nanny-state impulses, though. And the plain truth is, generalized libertarianism is unproven as a plan for human betterment. (There’s a rights-based case that side-steps the practicalities of whether every single possible reduction of governmental sway over our lives will make people happier and materially better off. A dedicated anarcho-capitalist is pretty sure life would be “better” without government, but thinks that what matters is that life without government would be more moral.) Meanwhile, past - managerial - approaches of liberalism to societal problems have often misfired spectacularly.

Lavender Newswire issues an “I told you so” in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s chickenshit statement on the FISA capitulation. Hey, fair game. However. From what I can tell, LNW was, as an institution, pro-Clinton during the primaries. And from what I can tell, Hillary Clinton has said jack one way or another about FISA, the Zombie Edition. Granted, she does inform the world that she’s secured $2.8 million in transportation grants for Oneida County, a subject on which Senator Obama has been shamefully silent. I’m not trying to pull a mere “So’s your old man” here. Just trying to make it clear that the Democratic Party’s problems on civil liberties and foreign policy go well beyond Barack Obama.

I completely agree with my awesome UO co-blogger, Thoreau: It’s time for Barack Obama to put his authority to use where it counts, stopping this corrupt telecom immunity bill making its way through the Congress this week. Otherwise, we’ll have a right to find his nods in the direction of civil liberties to be empty gestures; indeed, we’d be fools to regard them any other way.

As I wrote yesterday over at Unqualified Offerings:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is working eagerly with a Democratic-controlled Congress to grant George Bush all the power Bush wants to intercept Americans’ telephone calls and emails without warrants, and to retroactively grant immunity from civil or criminal sanction to the telecoms that have been assisting with Bush’s illegal eavesdropping for years — telecoms that heavily contribute to congresspeople of both parties, and which are in the middle of lawsuits they’d dearly love to see rendered moot by Hoyer’s efforts.

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To fully understand how sickening and outrageous this all is (and tell me, why did I vote a straight Dem ticket in ‘06 again?), read Greenwald. (Brief ad click-through.) I can’t do better than he does, as he has been working on this issue feverishly and my re-explaining it could only be a paraphrase of his posts. Then, contribute to this fund to put heat on Hoyer and the other Democrats who are acting like good little authoritarian GOP-bots.

Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal (6/18/2008)

Contact: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It’s moving that fast. If we don’t stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lymon, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, “The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration’s assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They’re American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them.”

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Andrew Sullivan is not the only one on the right who’s swooning over Obama, said Bruce Bartlett:

The largest group of Obamacons hail from the libertarian wing of the movement. And it’s not just Andrew Sullivan. Milton and Rose Friedman’s son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father’s cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama’s sympathy for school vouchers–a tendency that the Democratic primaries temporarily suppressed. Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications–the company that owns The Orange County Register–told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.

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On reason magazine’s website, it’s Kerry Howley versus Michael C. Moynihan on Sexism versus Hillary Clinton. Howley gets much the better of the argument when she writes

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Barack Obama appears to understand the Right-wing Noise Machine, and rather than getting all defensive and mewling whiney protests, he declares he is going to take it on: (more…)

Unless he absolutely needs her to beat McSame, I say no. She — and her prominent shills such as former CIA analyst, TeeVee talking head and blogger, Larry Johnson — has done too much damage to his campaign. And, as John Cole notes, the guy whom it seems she’s anointed to lobby Obama for the slot, Robert Johnson, has been among the nastiest. Quoth Cole from a Johnson interview: (more…)

If the Democratic primary season does not end soon with an official nominee — and heaven forefend if it extends to a brokered convention — I shall demand sedation from my physician and spend the months preceding the Democratic National Convention in a sensory-deprivation tank. And no, I am not only tired of the infantile, ginned -up media outrages over my candidate, Obama. Hillary Derangement Syndrome is alive as well.

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Look, I understand that the fight between Dems who are in HRC’s tank vs. Obama’s is going to get a bit heated. But if, as appears likely, Obama gets the Dem nomination, how is Larry Johnson’s endless vicious commentary about the Obamas going to do anything but help elect John McCain?

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I’m on deadline for a book review due tomorrow night so for the moment I only have more primary-blogging to offer. More in a day or two. Meantime, my cobloggers continue to put up awesome stuff.

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I’ve been supporting Obama. My mom, Blanche, is a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton. Since Obama supporters seem to be over-represented in the non-McCain blogosphere, I asked my mom to write a post about why she favors Clinton. Here is what I was sent: (more…)

Dr. T. gets it right:

Look, it’s really quite simple: If there were a significant population of undecided gray aliens in Pennsylvania, right now Hillary Clinton would be talking fondly about her abduction by aliens and all the life lessons learned on that space ship. She’d be scolding Barack Obama for the way he demeans them. Obama, in turn, would say that he understands their bitterness when the US government has spent decades promising change but instead dissecting their kin in Area 51.

Looks like PA is going to come right in at my 55-45 prediction. Okay, I said 55-44-1, with Edwards or somebody getting the votes of a handful of the disgusted and despairing. I award myself a biscuit anyhow. This has to count as the worst possible result for the Dems as a party: it’s the minimum spread to count as a decisive victory for Clinton, but not so decisive as to start a stampede away from Obama. Punksatawny Phil sees six more weeks of lapel pins and Balkan snipers - or rather, heh heh heh, their absence . . .

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Surely a blog dedicated to partisan coalition-building is not too cool for a primary predictions thread! Therefore I inaugurate it.

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The blogs respond to my post of yesterday. I respond to the blogs responding. That darn Mona says my participation here is “limited.” Limited! I’ll show her!

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Hello everyone. My name is Jim Henley and the brain trust here at AOTP has honored me with an invitation to guest-blog here for a bit. My home blog is Unqualified Offerings. If I have a claim to fame, which is doubtful, it is becoming pretty much the first “warblogger” after the atrocities of September 11, 2001 to represent the anti-interventionist tenets of libertarianism in what came to be called the blogosphere. Back then I thought of myself as a man of “the Right,” though not a “conservative,” and pitched my arguments against promiscuous war, untrammelled security prerogatives and nationalism in “right-wing” terms, trying to explain how militarism, hegemony and torture contravene libertarian and conservative principles of limited government, humility and prudence.

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MODERATORS:CHARLIE GIBSON, ABC NEWS
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS

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Obama really knows how to harsh a guy’s buzz.

A while back, I expressed the hope that he was to some extent a departure from establishment liberalism.  Establishment liberalism, I had previously argued, was the ideology of the professional and managerial New Middle Class, which managed the new large organizations that had sprung up in the corporate economy of the late nineteenth century, and wanted to manage society as a whole the same way they managed their corporations.  It was exemplified by Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life, called for the achievement of “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”

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The kind of thinking Jim Henley did in the period before the Iraq war, which he recounted in the excellent piece linked by Mona, is one reason why I find the Republicans’ “But everyone believed the case for war at the time!” defenses so lame. (Not to mention Hillary’s lame “But everyone believed it!” justification for accepting Bush’s case for war.)

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Mulling over Kevin Carson’s superb post below, I’ve been contemplating why it was that I tilted conservative/GOP in the 80s, and even supported the Robert Bork nomination to SCOTUS. For me, it came down to federalism, and a complete aversion to the manner in which the High Court and liberals had been abusing the Commerce Clause to intrude the federal government into matters that were at least Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon’s Commerce. FDR’s court-packing threat (which enabled the jurisprudence of the Commerce-Clause-means-any-area-in-which Congress-legislates) was not, to my mind, something cute to be winked at — if George W. Bush suggested such a measure his critics would rightly decry it as outrageous.

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Brad at Sadly, No! is flummoxed that one well-respected liberal blog has turned into a viciously anti-Obama site. More interestingly, in comments to his post, I find repeated the bizarre claim that I’ve quite often encountered elsewhere, to wit: that there is barely any difference between HRC and Obama’s positions.

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Jonathan Kulick over at Mark Kleiman’s worked out the rates for the prostitute hired by New York governor and former NY State Attorney general Eliot Spitzer at $1750/hr.

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After former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert resigned his Illinois congressional seat in 2007 (a district that mainly encompasses Chicago a district west of Chicago), and thus set in motion a special election, John McCain campaigned for Republican Jim Oberweis who ran against Democrat Bill Foster.

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