Daniel Larison has written a lot about what a disappointment Barack Obama is from an anti-interventionist perspective: the amount of “humanitarian interventionism” in his rhetoric, the “sensible, serious” and idiotic assertion that we need to expand the most bloated military in the world, and too much willingness to accept the hawkish rhetorical frame on Iran. But Larison’s new post on John McCain’s harsh anti-Russia rhetoric suggests why, despite everything, Obama is the better anti-interventionist candidate of the two people who might really win the White House by far. Obama will disappoint us around the Third World in general and the Middle East in particular with his willingness to continue “engaging” with the region using Predators and MRAPs. But he shows no evidence of wanting to start a new Cold War with Russia or, for that matter, China. McCain and the “defense” “intellectuals” around him would like to do both. This isn’t surprising: rebuking George isn’t going to justify a new round of massive military hardware spending. Worsening relations with Russia and China will. A McCain presidency would waste vastly more money on great-power conflicts we shouldn’t exacerbate, and return the risk of nuclear war from the Museum of Old Fears to a prominent place our daily mental furniture.

Jennifer Abel just posted this at her blog:

I’m toying with the idea of abandoning libertarianism just long enough to buy a Che Guevara T-shirt and lead a Glorious Revolution of the Proletariat. And when this day arrives, the first mofos up against the wall will be the CEO, investors and executives of a loathsome company called oDesk.

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I was mulling over Will Wilkinson’s quickie environmentalism post as possible fodder for here. Since then it’s become widely linked and controversial. In a follow-up, Will responds to his critics. I’m not endorsing or disclaiming his arguments in this latter post. Honestly, I’m mostly trying to get a post up before August 6 passes with no post! My quick reaction to the first post was, "Will’s being too blithe here." But the matter needs reflection.

Should Catholics asked to stick $1 in the church box before lighting a holy candle in offering for their prayers be met with mandatory signs that the church is making the wicks available only as “entertainment?” A new law in the UK requires fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers and mediums to so describe their services upfront, and as that first link shows James Randi’s Swift site not only approves, but thinks the same should apply to various religionists. Indeed, in a more recent post, Randi’s site declares: (more…)

As I see it, the rule is either

1. White candidates are sometimes presidential;
2. Black candidates are sometimes presumptuous.

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Via Jesse Walker on the mutualists yahoogroup, The Nation prints an excerpt from Naomi Klein’s and Avi Lewis’ introduction to Sin Patron, a book on the recuperated enterprises of Argentina.  My favorite passage: (more…)

One last thing before I leave for the Holy Land: Anyone who hasn’t yet seen this needs to drop everything and watch.

Contra David Weigel’s prediction (linked below) that John McCain’s lies about Barack Obama would blow up in his face, Daniel Larison notes that McCain has a history of getting away with this sort of thing:

Back in January, the media criticized McCain for his lies about Romney, but ultimately forgave him on the twisted grounds that he doesn’t enjoy lying, and so he remained their hero. The same will happen concerning McCain’s lies about Obama.

Ah, but McCain laying about Obama and McCain lying about Romney are not ceteris paribus cases. Everyone hates Mitt Romney. (more…)

Myself, I’ve used Firefox almost exclusively as a web browser for over three years. But if you are using IE and at some sites it is causing you to crash, here is why.

Staying classy, the McCain campaign launches a new Spanish-language ad trying to drive a wedge between Obama and Latinos by dwelling on the senator’s failure to call out Latin American states or cities during his speech in Berlin. This is the kind of high-risk strategy Team McCain will have to pursue to have a shot at winning, but it seems to me a potentially fatal mistake for them to launch these sorts of ridiculous attacks this early. The evidence is mounting that the mainstream media are not only falling out of love with McCain, but losing all patience with him — including his most preposterously stalwart defenders. And it’s only the beginning of August. The conventions are still weeks away. Unless the Obama campaign is struck by sudden fatal incompetence, the likeliest way for this campaign to play out is surely the scenario David Weigel envisions: “at the rate McCain’s cranking out attack ads and lines about Obama lusting “to lose the war,” the higher the odds he’ll wreck his image. And then Obama can say whatever he wants about McCain without much blowback. I can’t believe McCain doesn’t remember how this works.”

Sincere thanks to Rick Perlstein and Eve Fairbanks, whose (apparently independent) detection of Riefenstahlian themes in John McCain’s execrable “celeb” ad makes my view that the shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were meant (in part) to play on racial anxiety about black man/white woman pairings the sensible centrist position. Now, nobody besides the most preposterous of pro-McCain hacks is actually defending the content of the ad, but the fact that people I respect and admire immediately found it as obvious that there are no racial undertones to the ad as I found that there are such undertones gives me pause (and I hope, gives them pause too). Don’t just take my word for it; here’s Robert George, who appears to be of at least two minds on the question, noting that the fear-of-miscegenation trope has particular resonance when the women concerned are blondes. In other words, this is not an open-and-shut case.

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The Etonian, Oxonian, Bullingdonian Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson endorses. Which only serves to underscore the McCain campaign’s point that Senator Obama’s global popularity makes him comparable to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

There’s an old wistful joke I heard frequently in my days as a Dissentnik to the effect that if you asked the old New York intellectuals about their favorite flavor of ice cream, their answer would begin with an analysis of the division of labor in ancient Babylon. The roots of the latest round of hostilities among rival Jewish political camps — in addition to the Daniel Levy summary Jim links downblog, check out Todd Gitlin — stretch back at least as far the origin of the admonition within the community not to air out grievances “in front of the goyim.” That’s what makes the apoplexy over Joe Klein’s references to “Jewish neoconservatives” and “divided loyalties” so silly. Head over to Commentary’s “about” page. Notice the fourth tab down on the TOC on the left, “Israel, Jews, & Judaism,” falling underneath “Politics and Society,” “American & the World,” and “Culture & Religion.” Now have a look at their mission statement:

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards. [my emphases]

In other words, the magazine that regards itself as “the flagship of neoconservatism” regards the question of “the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel” as on a par with the most important of all political questions. More precisely, of course that’s Commentary’s position. It is a Jewish neoconservative magazine, until recently funded by the American Jewish Committee, whose fundamental political allegiances are to a set of now-familiar foreign policy positions both for the United States and Israel. What exactly is one supposed to make of a group of strutting, ignorant, dishonest, censorious Jewish bullies who accuse other Jews of being anti-Semites and self-loathers for pointing out their divided loyalties when the bullies themselves advertise those divided loyalties prominently on the website of their “flagship” publication? What Joe Klein’s statement of the obvious — and the Commentary apparatchiks’ increasingly embarrassing failure to enforce the equation of stating the obvious with anti-Semitism — has helpfully demonstrated is that these bullies are as powerless as Polonius and his wagging finger unless people choose to be afraid of them. (more…)

People who, unlike your correspondent, didn’t drop out of MIT claim to have solved the solar-energy-storage problem. The libertarians in our audience should note that federal grants were involved.

I agree with a great deal of what Daniel Levy writes in the Huffington Post about the battle between Joe Klein and Commentary’s blogger stable, but he does offer the opportunity to critically examine a commonplace among liberal Jews, which is to say, the vast majority of Jews, since the Iraq War: (more…)

Many commenters noted a recent attempt at an “on the one hand, on the other hand” piece on Barack Obama’s European trip by the New York Times, in which News Analysis-er Steven Erlanger took Obama to task for being “vague” on, among other issues, “chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on American poultry imports.” As the host of AOTP’s Happy Funtime Animal Hour, I of course perked right up!

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Once and apparently no longer future McCain strategist John Weaver got a load of the maverick’s latest spot — that would be what Atrios aptly calls the “uppity negro who wants to fuck your sister” ad — and he’s had enough: (more…)

Not “General Betray-us,” but this attempt to capture the youth vote what vote exactly? by likening support of Barack Obama to herpes. Well done folks. Glad to see you’re putting your members’ dues to good use:

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In due course, I should have something more substantive to say about all this (you can probably guess where my sympathies lie), but for now, I’d just like to pose the open question of whether gentiles find this sort of thing remotely interesting. I’m not referring to the debate over US foreign policy towards Israel and the middle East, which includes a surfeit of material that should hold most people’s attention, but the second- and third-order rearguard action amongst neocon and anti-neocon Jews over who is and isn’t a true friend to Israel, a self-loather, etc. I’d guess that bitchy infighting is generally amusing, all the more so when it involves infighting over who truly represents maybe 1% of the electorate, and especially given what must be the immensely entertaining paranoid insecurities of one of the sides in the squabble, but only up to a point. After that, it becomes as byzantine and dull as Keith Gessen’s feud with Gawker. (Not exactly relatedly (but this doesn’t seem to deserve its own post), I might be missing the point and/or joke Spencer Ackerman is trying to make here, but it seems neither mysterious nor disappointing to me why the Hill didn’t assign Jackie Kucinich to do a write-up of how hot her step-mother is.) But my intuition about what the non-chosen make of Semitic royal rumbles is surely corrupted by lifelong exposure to them, so I’d like to open up the floor especially to those of you who aren’t fellow Red Sea pedestrians. A corollary question: more Jew/Israel content at AotP, or no?

It’s good that Ezra Klein is kicking off the inevitable word games with the name of the likeliest next VPOTUS, Tim Kaine, but I would have expected him to do a little more than Kaine-can/can’t puns given the richness of the material. We are, after all, talking about the most ubiquitous fantasy villain name ever.

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Dick Armey just now on MSNBC: “John McCain knows that tax bills originate in the House of Representatives.” So let none say that Senator McCain doesn’t have a goddamned clue what he’s talking about. He’s seen that Schoolhouse Rock video, like, twice.

We’re adding a book page to this site. Here we list political books that were recommended by one of the writers of this site. I’ll also list these books here. For the most part, I’ll leave it to the individual writers to mention, in the comments, why they feel certain books are good. Do also see Matt of 37 Signals comments about Omnivore’s Dilemma. Those of you who admire Kevin Carson’s insightful writing on this weblog will also want to buy his book. Personally, I’ve been meaning to buy “Seeing Like A State” since I first read about it over at Crooked Timber.

If you’ve been meaning to buy any of these books, I hope you’ll buy them by clicking through to Amazon from this site. Since we get some small commission through Amazon’s affiliate program, you’d be helping us out with the expense of running the site.

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Glenn Greenwald gets him some learning from Democratic party hacksolon Ed Kilgore:

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Our researcher and sometimes editor — as well as intelligent person on whom to bounce ideas off — Jennifer Abel, is on the list of speakers at the 2008 Connecticut Liberty Forum: A Call To Action in Promoting and Protecting Liberty In Connecticut. Scroll down — Jennifer is the knock-out redhead. Congrats, Jennifer!

A further word about my musings on how to shift the judicial and regulatory system to be more congenial to personal liberty (by means of maximally severe punishment of violations of what laws and regulations remain): According to the framework I’ve sketched, drunk drivers would get away with their DUI if they didn’t get caught, and face no punishment at all, whereas drunk drivers who get caught would face punishment; that is (duh) already the case, but the difference is that in my framework, those who get caught would face never being able to drive legally again, so the gulf between the two outcomes, despite there not being any inherent moral or public-interest difference between the two cases, would be greatly amplified.

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My post downblog on Bob Novak’s hit-and-run on an elderly pedestrian sparked a debate on access to driver’s licenses and whether senior citizens should be required to retake their driver’s tests. Of course, because seniors vote in disproportionate numbers and have powerful lobbies representing them, any policy of singling them out for increased scrutiny is a non-starter. But that’s not so bad, ultimately, because raising the standards on driving tests, and requiring re-tests at regular intervals throughout one’s life — perhaps every 5 years, perhaps every 10, perhaps every 20 — would be both fairer and better policy. The fact is that there are all sorts of reasons why one’s competence behind the wheel can decline, some related to aging, many others related to any number of chronic physical and mental conditions that can strike at a variety of ages. And though such a policy shift would (obviously) impose new restrictions on drivers, a) the benefit — namely fewer drivers on the road and much greater competence among them, hence much safer roads — presumably outweighs the burden of spending a few hours at the DMV every so often, and b) there is no real legitimate libertarian concern in the first place, because except on privately owned tracks, getting behind the wheel doesn’t just impose risks on a driver and those who voluntarily ride with her. And perhaps most importantly, c) significantly ratcheting up the standards for acquiring a driver’s license can be a stepping stone to making society friendlier to liberty in general. With greater confidence that drivers are for all intents and purposes uniformly competent to handle high-speed driving situations, for example, there shouldn’t be any barrier on non-libertarian grounds to raising speed limits and/or creating autobahn-type options which would, in turn, greatly ease road congestion and traffic-induced stress, and thus be a boon both to productivity and overall quality of life (even if only at the margins).

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AOTP readers are more than familiar with a large cross-section of the strong, and arguably decisive objections to voting for Senator Obama. But the problems we libertarians/civil-libertarians/anti-warriors have had with the candidate, especially recently, hardly exhaust the very good reasons to oppose him. Someone for whom opposition to abortion rights and other forms of reproductive freedom is more salient than any other issue would be more or less rationally obligated to support any marginally better (by those lights) alternative. Likewise with gay marriage and other social conservative issues. A sufficiently rich person motivated exclusively or nearly so by short-term self-interest — especially on the assumption that restrictions on liberty don’t really apply to persons of sufficient wealth — would have a clear rationale for supporting Senator McCain, which conclusion could only really be shifted by an antecedent shift in that person’s priors (i.e., getting her to take other factors into consideration besides her marginal tax rate). There’s lots more where those examples came from, and there are people who can make the good case against Obama much more persuasively than I can.

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Granted, having enemies with axes to grind is just part of the job description of being the most uniformly detested man in Washington. But seriously, what would be fair odds on a bet that Bob Novak is telling the truth when he says he didn’t notice the pedestrian he hit, and that eye-witness David Bono is not telling the truth when he says that the victim of Novak’s hit and run was “sort of splayed into the windshield”? (The two propositions are logically compatible of course, but if both are true Novak has no business holding a driver’s license.) I don’t think I’d take less than 10:1. Also — can we keep it real here? — what are the odds Novak hasn’t, at some point in his long journalistic career, killed at least one pedestrian in a hit and run and gotten off scot-free. Not to make light of an increasingly serious situation — quite the opposite actually — can we at last have a long-overdue national conversation about requiring the elderly to retake their driving tests? Even without the accidents due to inattention or dulled senses, driving 35 m.p.h. in a 65 m.p.h. zone with the emergency brake on is fucking dangerous. What other licenses are good for life with no upkeep required? And do any of those confer the right to place other people’s lives at risk?

Back when depraved torture enthusiast, dissembler, and Princeton admissions error (it happens) Michael Goldfarb officially began collecting paychecks directly from the McCain campaign instead of the Substandard, John Schwenkler tried to make the point that McCain’s hiring of Goldfarb reflected poorly on Honest John given a) Goldfarb’s depravity across a spectrum of issues, and b) Goldfarb’s resemblance to the more sociopathic elements of the Bush administration, the latter of which doesn’t aid Team McCain’s efforts to dodge the “McSame” label. For that, John was taken to task by, among others, Reihan Salam and James Joyner, who noted that Goldfarb was hired to head up the campaign’s online communications — a job for which his work experience from Time.com to the Substandard presumably qualified him, and in which role, in any case, he would not be shaping the candidate or the campaign’s beliefs, but rather, expressing whatever beliefs the campaign instructed him to express. Though true, this defense of Goldfarb (or at least his employment) misses the crux of the matter, which is that yes, Goldfarb was not brought on board to drag the campaign down to his level of loathsomeness; contrarily, one only hires Michael Goldfarb as one’s communications point man if one is already thoroughly loathsome. There is no shortage of talented young-ish McCain-backing writers with ample new media experience who could do a fine job in Goldfarb’s position — the (GOP affiliators among) David Brooks’ Dirty Dozen, incl. Reihan and Ross Douthat, come to mind — without, to put it in McCainian terms, utterly destroying the campaign’s claim to honor. They hired Goldfarb because they never had any honor in the first place.

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Since I devoted far, far more words than Dick Morris deserves last week to dousing the Dickster’s fatuous column about a supposedly tied race between the presidential candidates, it would behoove me to point out that a trend towards McCain over the last couple of weeks is discernible at this point, as reflected in both FiveThirtyEight’s analysis and the rolling average of polls, both of which are converging on a 2 point Obama lead. By the same token, the notion that the race is tied remains spurious.¹ For these reasons, as well as those adduced in my prior post, I would caution Obama supporters that today’s Ras poll showing Obama ahead in Florida, and yesterday’s Ras poll showing McCain ahead in Ohio, are considerably more likely to be statistical noise than accurate representations of the conditions of either state race. (Indeed, outlying surveys ought to dampen confidence in Ras’s accuracy as against other pollster — not that Ras is particularly bad (or good), but rather that the field of polling is so fraught with error that an individual survey is a nigh-on-worthless datum.) Not that that is going to deter partisans from trumpeting the results they like or ignoring the results they don’t.

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The most valuable consequence of the Maliki government’s unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama’s 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of US forces is not the blow it deals to the John McCain campaign, but that it has forced the war party to drop their ridiculous pseudo-humanitarian, pseudo-democratic conceit, and choose either naked imperialism, or abandoning their position.

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Daniel Larison, who knows better, throws caution to the wind and decides to defend the credibility of a Dick Morris column. Has anyone ever made money on that bet? In the Morris column in question, Tricky Dick puts forward the thesis that the presidential race is in fact tied, and times it perfectly to coincide with the late week dip last week in Obama’s numbers in one prominent daily tracking poll, but not to coincide with those numbers predictably reverting to the mean of a modest but unequivocal and stable Obama lead. Having completed that sleight of hand — have you spotted how he knew which card was yours? he’s resting every word of his column on a single poll from which, at the time of his writing, drawing any strong conclusions was literally unintelligible, and which was contradicted by nearly simultaneous polls; and did I mention that the solitary result upon which the whole charade hangs happens to conform perfectly to P. Dicky’s pre-existing biases?; really now, I’ve seen birthday magicians whose tricks showed fewer seams and took longer to crack — the Dickster then projects his own biases onto the electorate as a whole, under the pseudo-objective guise of listing Obama’s flip-flops on salient issues in the campaign, thereby (since he presents neither evidence nor argument for their salience) just gruesomely begging the question a second time (the first time being his mendacious assertion of an Obama ex-lead). In other words, bullshit from top to bottom, an effort tha not only fails to add any value, but destroys existing value. In yet other words, exactly what one expects from a Dick Morris column.

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In “Rule Brittania,” Daniel wrote:

At its best, the American revolution was about some pretty great ideals. It’s just very hard to see how the war could have been fought over those ideals, because there’s no obvious sense in which the early American republic realized those ideals better than Hanoverian Britain — nor any obvious sense in which the United States was ever meant to realize them better than Britain.

Jackson turned a comment in that thread into a post:  “Was the American Revolution Justified?“  I’d like to do the same.

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Republican Congressman Adam Putnam of Florida is worried that Barack Obama will destroy the GOP in the South this November. He’s not worried that much about Obama carrying, say, Florida against John McCain. What worries him as a Republican member of the House of Representatives is the possibility of strong African-American turnout in the South combined with whites who may vote for McCain the Maverick at the top of the ticket, but swing to the Democrats down ballot.

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Tomorrow nite (Wed.), at 7 p.m. EDT, I will host this site’s first chat in The Lobby. (And first join AoTP,if you have not done so already.)Topics will sometimes be designated, but tomorrow evening we will simply get to know one another and take suggestions for future chat topics and possible guests.

Please let us see you there!

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Doing research for an article about US-Iranian relations coming (relatively) soon to a newsstand near you, I encountered some eye-grabbing verses from the Shahnameh (”book of great kings”), the national epic not only of Persia/Iran, but the whole expanse of the Airyanem Vaejah (modern Persian: Iran-vez, whence the name “Iran”), the “Aryan lands” divinely consecrated by Ahura Mazda and civilized by Cyrus the Great (Old Persian: Kurush Xsyathiya Vazraka) and his descendants. The epic poem was composed by Ferdowsi c. 1000 years after the birth of Jesus and somewhere between 1100 and 7000 years after the birth of Zoroaster (Avestan: Zarathushtra, modern Persian: Zartosht). It includes these lines: (more…)

[I wrote this as a comment but I'm changing it into a post]

Downblog, Daniel Koffler wrote:

“At its best, the American revolution was about some pretty great ideals. It’s just very hard to see how the war could have been fought over those ideals, because there’s no obvious sense in which the early American republic realized those ideals better than Hanoverian Britain — nor any obvious sense in which the United States was ever meant to realize them better than Britain.”

As I understand the issue, the British colonists in North America felt they had the same rights as citizens of England. The long (1642-1688) revolutionary struggle in England ended in 1688 with the passage of the English Bill of Rights, and the colonists were under the impression that this bill covered them. Thomas Jefferson makes this view plain in his 1774 “A Summary View of the Rights of British America“:

[Our] complaints which are excited by many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations, attempted to be made by the legislature of one part of the empire, upon those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.

As far as I can tell, the British Pariliment was also originally under the impression that The Bill Of Rights covered all subjects of the King. However, in the 1760s there arose a new view which came to dominate Pariliment. In this new view, the rights detailed in The Bill Of Rights were a special set of priviledges that the King had granted those citizens who lived in England. These were no longer universal rights, nor did they come from God. They were gifts given by the King, and therefore the King (or Pariliment, apparently, acting in the King’s name) could take them back at any time. As Thomas Jefferson was to often point out, this was exactly the argument that King Charles had made in 1642, and it was exactly the reason that the English people had rebelled and put King Charles to death.

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A heartfelt congratulations to Sarah Silverman, a phenomenal talent, a living testament to the decline in Christopher Hitchens’ acuity (is there really anything surprising about the fact that his defense of the Iraq war has deteriorated into a denial of the principle of scarcity?), and scourge of dolts like Lambert who confuse feminism with hating fun. Silverman appears to have finally woken up one morning from restless dreams to discover that her bedmate was a monstrous vermin. At last, after five long years of wandering out of the land of Egypt and into the House of Bondage, there is no reason for feeling residually guilty about being a fan of hers. So congratulations as well to America and the broader English-speaking world (presumably her comedy suffers in translation). Note that the news comes during the July 4th season, and on Bastille Day. I doubt those are coincidences. USA #1!

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Downblog, re: the flap over the New Yorker cover, I asked in passing: “Anyone care to wager how long it will take an idiot at Commentary or the Substandard to suggest that the joke is really on the New Yorker, since in their parallel epistemic universe Obama does have troubling connections to radical Islam…The over/under is 4:30 pm EST, today, Monday.” Sure enough, Abe Greenwald at Commentary, in two posts timestamped 10:02 and 11:55 am, respectively, first writes: “In assuming that the serious Right seeks to burlesque Obama as the embodiment of our anti-American nightmares, the New Yorker burlesques itself.” And then, still commenting on the New Yorker not quite two hours later, he adds: “You know, if Obama is going to keep ex-terrorists around, he should at least utilize them.” Attaway, old sport, the credibility of the Commentary brand isn’t going to maintain itself. Anyway, the unders have it.

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As expected, the witless overreaction to a Bernie Mac riff that Mona mentioned has metastasized into regions of the internet where irony goes to die. And boy oh boy, the combination of exemplary hackery and hysteria yields a mighty entertaining synthesis. Take this bit of apoplexy from Lambert of Corrente Wire, the lead blogger of one of the most prominent pro-Clinton blogs during the primaries. He (I think he’s a he) writes: (more…)