Shame on Obama and Clinton and the congressional Democrats (and about half the Republicans) for supporting this bill. For once, McCain and Bush are right on.

When Bush’s presidential veto is our last best hope that sanity will prevail over pork-barrel madness from a Democratic congress, I despair.

Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer said flatly Thursday that President Bush will veto the farm bill, setting up an election-year confrontation that could sorely test the loyalties of rural Republicans.

“I have visited face to face with our president and he was direct and clear,” Schafer said. “The president will veto this bill.”

Meeting with reporters at his department, the secretary was openly disdainful of new income caps in the farm bill, which seek to bar wealthy individuals from receiving direct payment subsidies. “Is there even one farm that would be removed from the program with these taxpayer-supported payouts?” Schafer asked in a mocking tone.

Budget gimmicks disguise as much as $10 billion in excess spending in the bill over the next decade, Schafer said, and he bluntly accused the authors of having “done a disservice to farmers and ranchers and importantly the taxpayers across this great land.”

But beyond the tough words, it is still an open question as to how far the administration will go to pressure Republicans to fall in line if the Democratic Congress should attempt to override a Bush veto.

Update: The bulk of this post was written before our recent server issues. Since then, the bill passed the house with a veto-proof majority and looks to cruise through the senate.

Then there is Goldstein’s pal, A. J. Strata, who thinks the militaristic foreign policy and economic disasters wrought during the past eight years would be as nothing to the voters, if only so many “purists” on the right would mellow about immigration. Really.

This is all tremendously amusing. Guys! The 60s are dead. The criticism of the Democrats as the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion” no longer scares America. Further, the reason so many today eschew the label “liberal” and opt for “progressive” is because — beginning with the rise of Reagan, Limbaugh and Fox, the L-word became an epithet — not because, as Goldstein avers, progressives are cynically hiding a disdain for liberals and in their hearts despise them. Again: an awful lot of liberals have adopted the term “progressive” to get around the way folks like Goldstein have rendered the former label a four-letter-word.

Ranting about Democrats, liberals and progressives as being fascists ain’t gonna save the GOP fellas. Tho it is a ploy so ironic as to be nearly unbearable.

That, as they say, is all.

In its zigzagging pursuit of a more nimble and effective form of authoritarian rule, China may be having a defining moment. Its harsh crackdown on discontented Tibetans bore the hallmarks of Beijing’s hard-line impulses. But its decision on Tuesday to scale back the elaborate domestic leg of the Olympic torch relay — after a flood of Internet protests calling it insensitive — is a sign that officials are not deaf to public sentiment. [snip]

Chinese Web sites remain heavily censored, and a brief flirtation with openness and responsiveness does not mean that China is headed toward Western-style democracy. On the contrary, if China manages to handle a big natural disaster better than the United States handled hurricane Katrina, the achievement may underscore Beijing’s contention that its largely nonideological brand of authoritarianism can deliver good government as well as fast growth.

I’ve recently read a book called “What does China Think” which does a good job of introducing the different intellectual schools of thoughts that currently exist (are allowed to exist) in China. One theme that pops up over and over again is a government that remains authoritarian but are more responsive to popular sentiments. China, in so many spheres, is a country on the move.

It’s an interesting trend to be observed for sure. But I don’t know exactly  how to <i>feel</i> about this. I’m sure the Chinese people prefer living under a responsive authoritarian regime than an unresponsive one. But part of me is also terrified that the Chinese government is going to do such a good job of placating their citizens that they are going to look at western democracy and say “no thanks.”

I used to take it for granted that as China gains in prosperity, openness and a demand for democracy will inevitably follow. I am no longer quite so sure.

The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years, the scientists say.

This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa.

It’s fascinating to contemplate what could have occurred. Would one race eventually rise dominant and vanquish the other? Or would they co-exist somehow and somehow continue to roughly their equivalent of this point in our history? Would people from the two groups fall in love and if so, would societal sanctions on such parings be considered moral? Racism, after all, would be quite sensible if the races were actually different.

This sort of findings affirm my belief as a moral relativist. After all, our very existence in our current form as human beings is such an unlikely accident. If things have turned out just slightly differently, our lives, societal organization,  cognitive activities, mating rituals might all be radically different. It’s hard for me to fathom faith in absolutes when it seems we are created in chaos.

The scene is New Orleans sometime in March, 2008. The leaders of the Religious Right are meeting to discuss the outcome of the Republican primary . . .

Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association, an early supporter of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, chided the group for cold-shouldering his candidate until it was too late. Others, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, disagreed. The meeting quickly threatened to dissolve into accusations, rebuttals, and recriminations.

Then, venerable Paul Weyrich—a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy (CNP)—raised his hand to speak. Weyrich is a man whose mortality is plain to see. A freak accident several years ago left him with a spinal injury, which ultimately led to both his legs being amputated in 2005. He now gets around in a motorized wheelchair. He is visibly paler and grayer than he was just a few years ago, a fact not lost on many of his friends in the room, some of whom had fought in the political trenches with him since the 1960s.

The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.”

In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.

In 2007 and 2008, the gatekeepers of the Religious Right failed their movement. As leaders of a political faction, it was their job to send the signals to their followers on whom to support. Instead, failing to make a firm decision, the followers sent the signal to them: Mike Huckabee. The Religious Right may well learn from its mistake and change its strategy in the future, but this failure to unite around one candidate is just one recent example of the failure of established gatekeepers to manage their flock . . . and keep out the wolves.

Old school politics, back before Barack and blogs, was a often seen as a system of factions forming alliances in order to control party nominations. Union presidents, African-American pastors, Religious Right leaders, and city-machine bosses picked their horse in the race and sent the message down to their followers on the ground. The rise of a more post-modern political system has complicated this system, and will continue to do so. We now have clothing lines endorsing political candidates. And that’s only one of the acts in our political circus.

It remains to be seen if the gatekeepers of the Religious Right will rally around John McCain–some of the signs aren’t encouraging for the former maverick. More important is the question of gatekeepers from for libertarianism . . .

. . .

. . .

Where are they? Hello?

Write David Boaz and David Kirby:

Campaign field directors know where to find other voter demographics. You find gun owners at the gun range or through the NRA, churchgoers at church, business owners through the Chamber of Commerce, union members through unions, black voters in churches and neighborhoods, and so on. Where do you find libertarians? There are no libertarian equivalents of the Christian
Coalition or MoveOn.org….

Note, interestingly, that Boaz and Kirby throw out the name of MoveOn.org…, a specific creation of the new Internet style to politics. When it comes to faith and ethnicity, both libertarians and liberals/progressives (the specific online version of this unique species) are more secular and more white than their other political peers. If libertarians are going organize they’ll benefit a lot from learning from the liberal blogosphere.

So far, Ron Paul has failed to show an ability to divert his fundraising base to libertarian Republican congressional candidates. The start of his presidential campaign showed a great potential for Ron Paul to become a gatekeeper of the libertarian movement even in defeat, but the revelation of his newsletters to the public at large and the disgraceful xenophobic tactics of his campaign left a sour note at the end. With this in mind, I turn to look for libertarian gatekeepers elsewhere.

My idea (and I post this largely to encourage discussion, so disagree where you do) is that the libertarian movement online will eventually grow to the point in which there will be “blogger gatekeepers” with libertarian versions of DailyKos, MyDD, OpenLeft, and the like. This is not to imply that the libertarian blogosphere will be hierarchical; I view the liberal blogosphere as very egalitarian and fluid–just look at the quick rise of OpenLeft and the decline of MyDD. Rather, the national libertarian blogosphere of the future may well suffer from too much information on candidates, issues, and causes. While Ron Paul was able to grab our temporary attention during the presidential primary, just imagine a congressional year where many libertarian candidates running–and even more locally. Simply flooding Digg would no longer be sufficient to get the word out.

The role of the major liberal blogs is to aid in the synthesis of information and to act as a platform of organizing. Blogs where the main blogger takes an unpopular stance, for example favoring an unpopular Democratic nominee, see their fortunes decline. Libertarians should embrace this free market of political news and encourage their own blog sites where people can congregate to share news and information. Perhaps we’ll even see a blog specializing in the intersection of liberalism and libertarianism . . .

RCMP officers used a taser to subdue an 82-year-old man in his hospital bed in Kamloops, B.C. last week. The man had become delusional and pulled a knife out of his pocket, police and nurses say. When he refused to drop the knife, the officers tased him three times.

“This is not about race. The cops always do this to white guys. There is plenty of footage of cops pulling out three white guys and beating them to shit..right? Oh wait, never mind.”

I’ll let Drew Carey and Reason.tv… describe the situation before adding my personal perspective:

Cory Maye is a victim of the politics of fear. As a child of the South with some experience in living and working in Mississippi, I understand first hand the Orwellian doublethink of many Southern conservatives. They see no problem in passing longs to encourage people to shoot first, ask questions later when they feel threatened in their homes. And then, in order to be “tough on crime,” they will turn around and pass legislation to encourage the continued militarization of the War on Drugs. Consider the following political ad from the 2007 election in Mississippi:

In many ways, I would argue that the present War on Drugs represents a problem of federalism–related to the balance of power question I posed previously. Yes, the federal government is in some (many?) ways expanding the War on Drugs beyond what some states would prefer–consider the situation in California and other states with medical marijuana. But far from stressing a federalist approach to the War on Drugs, which would allow states like Mississippi to continue with their draconian laws, I would argue that we need to fight for a broad defense at the national level of the civil liberties that would make the War on Drugs a thing of the past, in every state. It’s not enough for liberals and libertarians to fight to end the politics of fear in the blue states, and leave people like Cory Maye vulnerable in the red states. Defense of liberty is a national issue.

I now open up for disagreement. Preemptively, I would note that there is a difference between using military force to somehow spread freedom, liberty, and democracy at the point of a gun, and using the preexisting system established by our Constitution to protect freedom, liberty, and democracy through legal means.

Now, some have criticized — excoriated, even — Heinlein as being sexist. All I can say is he opened my young female eyes to the idea that female libido and sexuality were healthy, and nothing to be ashamed of. Further, his character Valentine Michael Smith, as well as Herbert’s Paul Atreides and Bene Gesserit witches caused me to look at how religion arises — and can be manipulated — all according to locale and circumstances.

Thus, this article, A Political History of SF, resonates with me, and reflects my own experience of the genre:

Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the stature to really break it, in Stranger In A Strange Land (1961) — a book that helped shape the hippie counterculture of the later 1960s.The Vietnam War broke it, at least for some. A mixed group of dissident classical liberals and anti-war radicals formed the Libertarian Party in 1971, repudiating both the right’s cultural conservatism and the left’s redistributionist statism.

This is worth noticing in a history of SF because the platform of the Libertarian Party read like a reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized form of the implicit politics of [John] Campbellian hard SF. This was not a coincidence; many of the founding Libertarians were science-fiction fans. They drew inspiration not merely from the polemical political science fiction of Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead (1943) [Mona adds: is any of Rand's fiction not purely polemical? I personally never had any use for it.]; Atlas Shrugged (1957) — but from the entire canon of Campbellian SF.

[...]

Heinlein’s personal evolution from New Deal left-liberal to Goldwater conservative to anti-statist radical both led and reflected larger trends. By the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1992, depictions of explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies had begun to filter into non-political SF works like Vernor Vinge’s Realtime sequence (1985)…

The author of the article eventually inquires:

It’s worth asking, then: is the intimate historical relationship between libertarian political thought and SF a mere accident, or is there an intrinsic connection? And not worth asking merely as a question about politics, either; we’ll understand SF and its history better if we know the answer.

[...]

The power to suppress free inquiry, to limit the choices and thwart the disruptive creativity of individuals, is the power to strangle the bright transcendant futures of optimistic SF. Tyrants, static societies, and power elites fear change above all else — their natural tendency is to suppress science, or seek to distort it for ideological ends (as, for example, Stalin did with Lysenkoism). In the narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy of the future.

SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this. Thus the genre’s long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for storylines in which . . . scientific breakthrough and free-enterprise economics blend into a seamless whole. These stances are not historical accidents, they are structural imperatives that follow from the lust for possibility. Ideological fashions come and go, and the field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of freedom.

Whether it is a combination of nature and nurture that predisposed me to accept the individualist politics that so pervades Sci-Fi, or whether the genre led me to such a place, is ultimately immaterial; the genre played a huge role in forming my political, philosophical and (ir)religious views. And I agree with the author of my cited and quoted article that those who mistake the genre as conservative “miss[ ] its underlying radicalism.”

*(Yes, I’m aware that Asimov was a liberal.)

It helps to go back…. In 2003, a pound of hamburger cost all of $2.20. More than two decades earlier, in 1980, it cost $1.86, which means that the nominal price of burger meat rose only 18 percent over a period in which the nominal hourly pay of the typical American worker rose 150 percent. Similar stories can be told about eggs, bananas, bread and frozen orange juice. Food was getting cheaper…. During the 1980s and 1990s, though, did you ever stop and marvel at what a small share of your paycheck you were spending at the supermarket? I didn’t. I also didn’t really notice that gas cost less in the late 1990s than it had in the 1980s…. Price increases are simply more noticeable — more salient, as psychologists would say — than price decreases….

The price of major appliances has been flat over the last year. Furniture is 1 percent less expensive. A decade ago, a basic four-door Toyota Corolla LE cost $16,018, according to the company. The 2009 basic model costs $16,650, and it’s a safer, more powerful, more fuel-efficient car than its predecessor….

Brad Sester looks at the rapid growth of assets that are owned by foreign governments. He calls this “The de facto nationalization of the global financial system“:

This isn’t just a product of high oil prices. In 1980, oil was quite high but emerging market official asset growth was about 0.5% of global GDP. It is now more like 2.5% of global GDP.

The main reason for the difference between the current era of high oil prices and 1980?

Asia, which imports oil, added to its official assets at an even faster pace than the oil exporting economies in 2007. That may not change in 2008, though the oil exporters are sure to give Asian oil importers a run for the title.

China’s foreign asset growth seems to have picked up to an absurd $200b a quarter pace. We still don’t really know, as China hasn’t indicated exactly how much foreign exchange was handed over to the CIC in the first quarter. And who knows what will happen in q2. China’s trade surplus usually builds over the course of the year, but rising oil may start to bite. But for all the uncertainty, China’s official asset growth will still be strong.

And if oil prices average $110b a barrel this quarter – and if the per barrel price needed to cover the oil-exporters import bill is about $50 a barrel – the external surplus of the oil exporters in the second quarter should be above $200b. If oil stays at its current level for the summer, that surplus will only get bigger. And most of that surplus goes to the state in one way or another. Some countries use their central bank. Russia’s reserves were up by over $25b in April alone, Saudi non-reserve foreign assets increased by around $40b in the first quarter; others use a sovereign fund.

Barring a major change, the Gulf and China could easily combine to add close to a trillion dollars to their official assets this year.

Nothing goes up forever. At some point, the pace of increase in official asset growth has to slow. But as of now, there isn’t much sign of a real slowdown.

Felix claimed not so long ago that the US was too big to fail. Certainly many emerging markets are doing their best to finance the US through its current troubles, and thus keep up demand for their oil and goods. But a part of me wonders if the rise in inflation in the Gulf and China and the difficulties both are facing trying to sterilize the rapid growth in the foreign assets is an indicator that there is a small risk that the US also might end up being a bit too large for the emerging world to save.

(We should pause for a moment to consider how completely obsolete the word “nationalization” is in this context - once upon a time the identity of the “nation” was never in doubt - it was always the same that controlled the land that the asset was sitting on. No longer.)

Brad Sester also takes a look at the degree to which China’s foreign investments are controlled by political factors:

The fact that the equivalent of China’s cabinet — though I suspect the inner core of the State Council is a more powerful group than a modern US cabinet — seems to be the key decision-making body is bound to shape the world’s perceptions of China’s outward investment. If many of the members of the United States’ National Security Council meetings also decided which foreign firms the US should buy, I would suspect that US investment abroad would be viewed with rather more suspicion. To date, China has not set up the institutions that manage its foreign investment in ways that insulate their decision-making from China’s top political leadership.

The extensive involvement of China’s top leaders reflects the fact that in many ways China are just starting to invest in foreign equities, so each big investment effectively sets a new precedent and therefore makes policy. It also may be a consequence of the decision to spread the management of China’s foreign exchange among different state institutions (SAFE, the CIC, the big state banks). That decision seems to have guaranteed that disputes over who gets to buy will go to the top level of China’s government to resolve.

First, in the spirit of Clinton’s much-blogged argument of the other day, let’s be perfectly blunt about discussing the intersection of electoral politics with race and gender. Clinton said, “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Now as a white guy who never completed college, I don’t know what’s up with these other bastards, but whatever. And I won’t add to the outrage about the racism Clinton opponents descry in her remarks. Instead, I’ll take the argument of her and her supporters that Clinton is simply calling attention to demographics.

So then. If Obama gets the nomination, he will have to work hard to raise his level of white support. Meanwhile, if Clinton wins the nomination, she’ll have to work hard to restore her level of African-American support, especially since she can only win the nomination by depriving an African-American candidate of the nomination by using pretty cutthroat tactics.

The prime truism of presidential politics is that, post-convention, you need to move to “the center.” One of the things that post-structuralist theory is pretty inarguably correct about is that, in America, “we” define the center as white and male. Nonwhite and non-male are regarded as marginal, the dark outskirts of a creamy vanilla filling.

What this means is that Obama’s need to play for white support dovetails precisely with every candidate’s imperative to “move to the center” as the campaign turns from summer to fall. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton will be needing to pay more attention to currying favor with African-American voters than she has in months: she’ll have to move “away from the center” at the very moment that, classically, a nominee is supposed to be embracing it.

The other reality is that national Democrats never win a majority of white men. They win elections by not losing white men absurdly and racking up huge majorities among minority voters. Hillary Clinton, a Democratic woman, is not going to beat white Republican male John McCain among white men in November. Period. And she’s going to come out of the primary with a very precarious standing among African-Americans.

As they say on TalkLeft, the above isn’t racist, it’s just recognizing reality.

Now, let’s make an allowance I made before elsewhere. If this were any normal election year, Obama would have been toast long since, and the most obviously doomed general-election candidate since George McGovern stood behind Thomas Eagleton “1000 percent.” We’re not just talking about electing America’s first black president. Okay, second, after Hillary’s hubby. That is, we’re not considering some black dude named “Harold Ford” or “Doug Wilder” or “John Smith.” We’re considering a black guy with a funny name to American ears. Whose middle name sounds Muslim in the GWOT era. Who wasn’t even born in the US was reared in the Third World. And is the most “liberal” major-party presidential candidate since Walter Mondale. In the era of American Presidential politics that may or may not now be concluding, that’s a count of like fifty strikes and no balls.

It’s not a normal election year - Iraq, the economy, corruption, the GOP’s stubborn continuing embrace of a despised incumbent, you know the litany. I don’t know if it’s abnormal enough to make Barack Obama the next president. But he’s already gotten further than he would have in “normal” times.

Quick postscript: Another perfectly blunt angle to consider is, who has the greater structural incentives to suck it up and vote for the Dem no matter how bitter they feel, white women or black people? I would say, white women, because of abortion and the Supreme Court. I can’t think of any damage continuing Republican dominance can do to specifically African-American interests that’s as salient as the threat to white women’s interests in reproductive liberty. The Supreme Court really is poised to tip pro-life with another GOP nominee or two.

UPDATE: Silly me. I confused Obama’s schooldays in Indonesia with his birth in Hawaii in draft one of this post.

We’ve been paying for the government to fund lies and propaganda defending its own tyrannical powers since well before Bush and 9/11.

Almost half of the economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey decided against answering a question on which presidential candidate offers the most responsible fiscal policies. However, Sen. John McCain was the clear favorite of those who answered the question.

Paul Krugman gives you permission to hate on  economists:

McCain offers the most responsible fiscal policies? Notice that this wasn’t about who you think will be most economically sound in general, or who you think would be better at fiscal management in practice — although even there, nothing in the Republican party’s past 30 years offers any reason to believe that it would be responsible in any way shape or form. But this question was about what the candidate is offering — and McCain’s proposals are, demonstrably, wildly irresponsible.

It’s true that the WSJ seems to have surveyed business economists rather than academics. But this is still shocking.

Go here and buy the poster if you love it as much as I do.

Why, I wonder, is not most of my generation dead of suicide or insane? Such imponderables keep me as agitated as poor Czar Walters.

The liberal strategy seems to work best when imagining a nation that on the whole favors liberty and freedom, but has regional majorities in favor of authoritarianism. But where does the standard libertarian approach work, in practice? If federalism is being called upon, how could libertarians hope to defeat the political will of a national majority in favor of authoritarianism?

Francis Fukuyama argues that in modern China and several European states of the past, it was decentralization and a weak central government that allowed for the abuse of liberty by regional authoritarians.

Americans traditionally distrust strong central government and champion a federalism that distributes powers to state and local governments. The logic of wanting to move government closer to the people is strong, but we often forget that tyranny can be imposed by local oligarchies as much as by centralized ones. In the history of the Anglophone world, it is not the ability of local authorities to check the central government but rather a balance of power between local authorities and a strong central government that is the true cradle of liberty.

The 19th century British legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in his book “Early Law and Custom,” pointed to this very fact in a fine essay titled “France and England.” He notes that the single most widespread complaint written in the cahiers produced on the eve of the French Revolution were complaints by peasants over encroachments of their property rights by seigneurial courts. According to Maine, judicial power in France was decentralized and under the control of the local aristocracy.

By contrast, from the time of the Norman conquest, the English monarchy had succeeded in establishing a strong, uniform and centralized system of justice. It was the king’s courts that protected non-elite groups from depredations by the local aristocracy. The failure of the French monarchy to impose similar constraints on local elites was one of the reasons the peasants who sacked manor houses during the revolution went straight to the room containing the titres to property that they felt had been stolen from them.

Many libertarians in the United States will admit that they aren’t anarchist, but still favor less government than the status quo. Could the same logic be extended to federalism and the balance of power? Too much centralization would be bad, but not enough would also be bad. In that case, however, couldn’t the same logic be used to argue in favor of even higher up levels of government? States and provinces keeping localities in line, nations keeping their states and provinces in line, and some international level of organizations keeping nations in line. But in that situation, who’s keeping the international organizations in line? Who is watching the watchers? And the watchers of the watchers. And the watchers of the watchers’ watchers . . .

members of the faculty with expertise in moral philosophy, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law. I ask you to instruct this committee to write of a public report to the Academic Senate no later than this Labor Day, advising the Senate of the pros and cons of actions that the Academic Senate might or might not take in the matter of Professor John Yoo . . .

Because, as the Professor puts it, “I am enough of a liberal and enough of an academic to believe that discussion of these issues will help.”

But there are problems!

One is, according to said Chair of said senate, even convening a committee to take up the question of Yoo’s alleged misfeasance would be “defamatory.” That’s curious. But the other objection makes one wonder what Berkeley is doing with all that tax and tuition money they rake in:

Besides that, there’s the practical problem of finding committee members with the expertise you outline.

Professor Drummond, excuse me, sir. My name is Jim Henley, blogging at Unqualified Offerings and The Art of the Possible, and I was just wondering - are you shitting me?!

Let me rephrase that. No, on second thought, let me retype that question in all caps with an even larger count of fissiparous interrobangs: ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!?!?!?!?!?!

Yeah, I bolded it too.

UC Berkeley, jewel in the crown of the California University system can’t fill a committee with “faculty with expertise in moral philosophy, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law?” I mean, ARE YOU - ahem. Point made.

See also the Editors.

The common ground between liberals and libertarians may seem narrow and potentially non-existent in the abstract. But I believe that the Art of the Possible’s about page presents a sharp line in the sand between authoritarians on the one side and liberals and libertarians on the other.

Reasonable people can have intellectually honest disagreements regarding some issues; for example, to what extent and when should the government regulate the economy? There are other issues, however, where all reasonable people stand on one side; for instance, should the government torture people?

There was someone else, long ago, who wrote similarly of nonnegotiable issues:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Torture is nonnegotiable. Sacrifice of our civil liberties is nonnegotiable. Intruding into the freedom of the press is nonnegotiable. For most of American history, even the conservatives joined in generally agreeing that there were certain lines that government should not cross. Yes, I say generally because there are obvious exceptions, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But there is a sense among today’s libertarians and liberals that the present violations of our most sacred civil liberties are not a temporary measure, but a permanent revolution in our system of government. And the established conservatives, the neo-conservatives, seem to agree that this is a permanent revolution . . . for the better.

While it is clear that some economic issues can transcend mere dollars and cents into becoming a fundamental question of one’s civil liberties, there is also a gray area where taxation and government spending are issues of degrees, not absolutes. An activist like Brad Spangler can bemoan the rise of minarchism and the decline of anarchism among the libertarian movement, but such a claim all the more supports the observation, “Reasonable people can have intellectually honest disagreements regarding some issues; for example, to what extent and when should the government regulate the economy?”

If libertarianism is increasingly tied to minarchism, not anarchism, and conservatism is increasingly alienated to any support of the rule of law, what is standing in the way of libertarians and liberals sitting down to find common ground?

Over at Freedom Democrats, blogger ka1igu1a notes that Congressmen Ron Paul and Barney Frank, despite their ideological and partisan differences, have started to work together on the issues where they share a common ground. If they can do it, why not others?

One of the primary divides between libertarians and liberals was identified by thoreau in a comment to Mona’s post:

But, well, you’ve gotta understand that a big portion of the libertarian movement spent a long time in bed with the right in part because they wedded themselves to a particular vision of a utopian future: A world with a completely unrestrained business sector. They persuaded themselves that this was an ethical imperative, and they invented hacktacular economic arguments for why it would work out beautifully for everyone in society.

As a “veteran” of Daily Kos, I can say from first hand experience that not only did a big portion of the libertarian movement linger in a relationship with conservatism because they adopted a particular vision of a libertarian world as a corporatist world, with shallow economic arguments for why it would be utopian and perfect, but liberals have also avoided a relationship with libertarianism because they firmly believe that libertarianism advocates a corporatist world and that the result of any free market policies would be bigger and badder corporations. Mark this down as the biggest challenge for libertarians wanting to work with liberals.

I come from an obviously biased perspective by self-identifying as a libertarian Democrat, but it would be very dangerous for the Democratic Party to ignore libertarian-leaning voters. They cannot be taken for granted. First, not all libertarians are ready to give up on the Republican Party. The presidential campaign of Ron Paul has done a lot to reignite some passion for the GOP among libertarian activists and is producing a bumper year of libertarian Republican congressional candidates, like BJ Lawson in North Carolina. It seems very likely that attempts to prolong the Ron Paul Revolution will continue, much like Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign continued to impact politics throughout the 1990s.

Secondly, not all Republicans are ready to give up on libertarians. On the more conservative end of the separated libertarian-conservative relationship, a new venture by Jon Henke, Patrick Ruffini, and Soren Dayton called “The Next Right” is promising to “give conservatives and libertarians a fertile space.”

If the marriage of libertarians and conservatives is to be saved, the conservatives have “some explaining to do.” And it must go beyond a shallow glossing over of the social intolerance and authoritarianism of the past eight years that some economic conservatives display, such as Grover Norquist in his latest book “Leave Us Alone.” The abysmal record of the GOP on gay rights is covered in a mere two pages, the blame resting on extremist groups that are pushing for “special privileges” while the Republican Party is more than happy to just sit back and let gays be “left alone.”

If, on the other hand, a new marriage between liberals and libertarians is to be established (consummated even?), there is work to be done. It will not just happen, people will have to make it happen. And that is why I am pleased to be joining with the other bloggers at the Art of the Possible.

The Bush administration has been extreme enough in its authoritarianism, flagrant law breaking, and flouting of basic human rights norms to cause fractures in the old GOP coalition. There is now the possibility of new political alliances forming. Speaking broadly, it may be that many of the factions in the Democratic Party, and some of the factions that call themselves “libertarian,” collectively represent a kind of loose anti-authoritarian coalition, or rather, the possibility of one. This site aims to facilitate conversation among those factions.

We bring together liberal and libertarian writers who agree on certain politically and morally enlightened essentials. Their discussions here serve to delineate the reasons why basic human rights must always be defended. Their disagreements, by contrast, will illustrate why forming new alliances is hard, and perhaps serve as a reminder as to why new alliances are so rare.

She’s not the “ideal”candidate. Is any candidate perfect according to one’s personal belief system?

In fact, I have pinpointed many of Hillary’s flaws for myself. In spite of them, I’m waiting tensely for the outcomes of today’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries, because she’s the candidate whom I back and I want her to WIN.

So why do I prefer Hillary Clinton for president?

In my lifetime, I want to vote for America’s first female President. The arc of my personal history includes on-the-job experiences when I was paid less than a male colleague who was doing exactly the same work as I. He was put on a career track that would groom him for promotion. I was not. I also remember the year, during my teaching career, when I became pregnant and was ordered to leave after the fifth month, with the admonition,”You’re lucky we’ll take you back next year.” I returned the following September, to learn that I would be paid on the same step of the pay guide as I had been the preceding year, even though the teachers’ contract stated that any teacher who had taught for the entire first semester of an academic year (as I had) would be moved to the next higher step. When I protested, the Superintendent replied, “But you went out because of pregnancy.”

Not only has Senator Obama never experienced such moments, he couldn’t have.

In 1995, however, Hillary told the UN World Conference on Women, in Beijing,
“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence us. It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. … It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilied against their will. Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely — and the right to be heard.”

Her words angered her Chinese hosts, the Indian delegates in the audience, and the U. S. State Department. I was proud of her for putting those ideas on the record before a global audience.

Whatever her current entanglements with campaign donors, and despite what I consider her egregious mistake, namely, choosing the head of Burson Marsteller as her chief campaign strategist, I’m convinced that the Hillary who spoke out in 1995 is still an integral part of her psyche. That is the ethos I want in the White House.

I perceive a (possibly unconscious, though this may be a charitable interpretation) anti-Hillary bias in the media coverage of this campaign. My acquaintance with the blog world is scanty, so I have no feel for the trends in this vital new aspect of current culture. It’s clear to me, however, that an attitude of “ambition in Barack is laudable, whereas in Hillary it’s abominable (How dare she? Why doesn’t she know her place?)” pervades much of what has been said (Sunday morning talk shows) and written about the Democratic contest. Even a man whom I admired as one of the Senate’s shining liberal lights, Patrick Leahy, demeaned himself in my eyes by demanding that Hillary withdraw so that Barack could have a certain shot at the nomination. So much for pluck and grit and stick-to-it-iveness as admirable qualities. Who decided that they were gender specific?

The 44th president will face one gigantic temptation: holding on to not only the imperial powers that had accrued to the executive branch by January 21, 2001, but also the near-dictatorial power that the incumbent has gathered unto the presidency since his first inauguration. With a Democratic majority in both houses of the legislative branch and a woman in the White House, we are most likely to witness an equalization of power in our national government. Obviously I’m unhappy to make such a sardonic comment. Yet I believe it’s accurate.

[UPDATE: May 7th, 2008: my mom sent a follow up and asked if I could add tthe following:]

Judging from behavior exhibited during the primary campaign, would a Democratic-dominated Congress oppose a President Obama as vigorously as it would feel free to check a female President Clinton? Unlikely.

Which leads me to speculate how the Fourth Estate (I include the blogosphere in this category) would treat a President Clinton. Definitely not as deferentially as they handled #43. Rather, they’re likely to rediscover that it’s their mission to inform the public (Optimistically, I prefer to believe that most will also remember that this must be done truthfully).

My offspring favor Obama. So I’ve mulled what is, to me, a mystery: why? Perhaps it’s a case of projection. In this young man, whom I perceive as an amorphous collection of well-meaning words and good intentions, they see themselves, or the selves they would like to believe they are. Yes, he’s a nice person, with an appealing personality, and a patina of glamor. Certainly he’s a gifted orator. Even more advantageously, his wife is an admirably strong and determined woman. However, is he as skilled and well-informed as Hillary? Does he grasp the workings of the interlocking inside-the-Beltway networks that influence policy making with the sophistication she has acquired? How well does he understand developments on the rest of the planet? How many countries has he visited? Has he met many national leaders, held conversations with them, learned how they view the United States? I’m sure that Hillary is much better informed than Barack on international affairs. I’m convinced that Hillary has demonstrated a greater ability to master details, inform herself thoroughly about issues with which the next president must deal (witness their discussion about health care during one of their debates). Barack has occasionally frightened me when he seemed to imply that, like the man he wants to replace, he might be an “I’ll learn on the job” executive.

Which brings me to one of Hillary’s strategic decisions as Senator: her tenure on the Military Affairs Committee. Obviously, she wanted this assignment to strengthen her credibility as Commander-in-Chief. Nevertheless, this background may prove invaluable as President Clinton faces the moment when realism dictates that the Department of Defense budget must be drastically cut if America’s civilian standard of living is to be regained and then maintained. With a history of having studied the military’s needs and goals, she will be empowered to declare that we cannot continue to throw dollars at all the brass hats’ pet projects but must first decide what our basic strategy is, (as for example, do we now follow the Petraeus orthodoxy that ours is an insurgency-fighting army, do we retain field artillery capability for battlefield combat, have we the wealth to afford both, must the air force and navy always get a chunk of DOD’s dollars that’s equal to the army’s). I’m hopeful that when her Office of Management and Budget prepares the Federal Year 2011 budget (the first one that will be completely under her control) she will have the guts to stand up to the military-industrial complex and declare that their parasitical hold on the nation’s priorities is over. I’m not confident that Obama either understands, or is willing, to go that route.

Alas! One basic expense President 44 will inherit is unavoidable: we will still need to subsidize our military presence in Iraq for some years to come, though it should be smaller than our present commitment.

On a raft of issues that matter to me, I feel that Hillary’s policies will provide outcomes I want: reversing the Bush tax cuts; restoring the social safety net as part of a larger thrust to help the middle class hold on and re-establish itself; providing universal, (eventually single-payer) health care; bringing back the concept that the federal government exists to enforce the laws on the books, with regulation as one of its primary tools; restoring the EPA to the defender of the environment that it was intended to be; rebuilding our country’s physical infrastructure; and, symbolically vital, strengthening Title IX. Would Barack provide what I would consider satisfactory results on each of these issues? Possibly. But he hasn’t convinced that they’re either important to him, or that he has the skills to achieve the needed results.

I’ve voted for the Democratic candidate for president in every election. This year, I’m tempted to cast a write-in for Hillary if Barack is the nominee, in part because of the behavior of some of his supporters towards her. I also know, that if the Democrats do not appear to be a shoo-in on Election Day, I’ll grit my teeth and give him my vote. Then I’ll pray for my country’s future with all the fervor I can summon.

By the by, I listened to the audio feed of MSNBC’s "Race to the White House" this evening on the way home, and man was the spin pro-Hillary.

Give Obama points for more consistently opposing the war, but he’s not so clear on the exit either.

The best you can say about Obama’s codicils to we’re leaving are that they do sound more contingent and temporary than Clinton’s, though of course that could be my Inner Shill talking. He says he’ll withdraw all combat troops but may send back "strike forces" to combat genocidal violence. But as Southeast Asia suggested in the 1970s, once America withdraws troops it’s politically harder to send them back. If one candidate is telling me "I’ll stay to do this little thing" while the other says "I may have to come back to do this little thing," the Lesser of Two Evils edge goes to the latter.

However, in an official position paper linked by Hopkins (pdf), the Obama campaign uses the dread term, "residual force." Here is what a residual force is: a force. So long as there are American troops in Iraq, particularly American troops immune to Iraqi law, Iraq will still be an American-occupied country. The political benefits of ending the Iraqi occupation come from ending the Iraqi occupation.

The reason to support Obama over Clinton and Clinton over McCain in re Iraq is not that either’s stated position is adequate to the moment. It’s just that the stated Dem positions commit the candidates to move in the direction of withdrawal. That opens the possibility - hope - that the momentum snowballs into a genuine withdrawal from the country. This sounds like thin gruel but it’s actually not my minimalist position for preferring the Dems to McCain. But that - is the subject of another post.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Glenn Greenwald burst into the blogosphere in October of 2005 at his former blogspot site, Unclaimed Territory. As a lawyer having practiced law in Manhattan for a decade, including litigating constitutional issues, he was well-equipped to analyze and eviscerate defenders of President George Bush’s ordering the National Security Agency (NSA) to secretly engage in warrantless interception of telephone calls and emails of U.S. persons, in blatant violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Indeed, when the New York Times broke the NSA story in December of ’05, Greenwald quickly emerged as the go-to guy for explaining, in readable terms, what FISA requires and why the Bush Administration’s extreme arguments for presidential “inherent authority” to violate any law the Executive doesn’t like – including FISA or bans on torture — were not only meritless, but virtually limitless and radically un-American.

Since establishing himself online as a premier expert on FISA, Greenwald has written three books: How Would a Patriot Act?, A Tragic Legacy, and the just-released Great American Hypocrites — all of which shot up to number one or close to it at Amazon. In February of 2007 he was invited to write at Salon, where he continues to blog. Greenwald has appeared on C-Span several times, such as when the Cato Institute sponsored him to discuss his second book, and also was a panelist addressing the state of the media at YearlyKos 2007. Additionally, he has written several articles for American Conservative magazine, and most recently a piece for The National Interest — The Perilous Punditocracy. He has discussed Bush’s FISA law-breaking, foreign policy and the rancid state of the American establishment media on radio shows too numerous to list. Currently, Greenwald is completing a study of Portugal’s drug-policy reforms for The Cato Institute.

Lately, Greenwald’s blogging has largely focused on the media and its slavish devotion to GOP-peddled narratives and trivialities, as well as the astonishing fact that various neoconservatives whose views have been demonstrated to have disastrous consequences, continue to hold respectable positions in the elite media. Greenwald pounds home the absurd reality that neoconservatives remain a staple as interview subjects on news programs and treated as if they are Serious foreign policy experts, notwithstanding their incredible track records of being wrong — Iraq! — and that they often agitate – explicitly or implicitly — for yet more wars.

He lives most often in Brazil with his domestic partner, because that nation recognizes their same-sex relationship as a legal basis for Greenwald’s residing there. The reciprocal is not true of the United States, where Greenwald’s Brazilian life partner could not qualify to reside here based “merely” on their domestic partnership.

[Editor's note: Any links to Greenwald's Salon posts above or below will require a BRIEF, quickly by-passable ad click-though the first time one such link is clicked. It is worth it.]

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AoTP: Glenn Greenwald, welcome and thank you for agreeing to this interview. To begin, we’d like to know how optimistic you are that The Way Things Are vis-a-vis imperialistic foreign policy holding nearly unquestioned status by an approving media — and even by most in both major political parties — can be changed so that the more humble foreign policy envisioned by the Founders could gain some traction?

GG: I’m relatively optimistic about this for one reason: Iraq. The extent of the occupation’s unpopularity can’t really be overstated. Huge numbers of Americans believe the invasion was a mistake, that they were misled into supporting the war, that it has made us less safe, etc. Those perceptions can’t but undermine the reflexive support Americans have had for invasions, bombings and wars. It has eroded the underlying premises that the Government espouses to convince citizens to support imperialistic policies. It has made Americans even more distrustful of official pronouncements from both the Government and establishment press. All of this has worked to erode the tools used to convince the citizenry to support our ongoing imperial project.

At the same time, none of this is going to be uprooted overnight. Our abandonment of our republican origins and pursuit of empire has developed over decades. Many of the concepts used to justify it are embedded in our political culture. Change is happening inexorably, but structural change of this sort, absent violent upheaval, is necessarily incremental.

AoTP: You are Jewish. Therefore, aren’t you “supposed to” advocate that the United States’ foreign policy interests and Israel’s are identical, and thus endorse extensive U.S. military intervention in the Middle East?

GG: There’s a misconception that American Jews largely support the neoconservative agenda. They simply don’t. Polling data on this question is unequivocally clear. A recent poll from the American Jewish Committee, surveying American Jewish opinion, found that in large numbers, they disapprove of the way the U.S. is handling its “campaign against terrorism” (59-31); overwhelmingly believe the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq (67-27); believe that things are going “somewhat badly” or “very badly” in Iraq (76-23); and believe that the “surge” has either made things worse or has had no impact (68-30).

More strikingly, when asked whether they would support or oppose the United States taking military action against Iran, a large majority — 57-35% — say they would oppose such action, even if it were being undertaken “to prevent [Iran] from developing nuclear weapons.” While Jews hold views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which are quite pessimistic about the prospects for Israel’s ability to achieve a lasting peace with its “Arab neighbors,” even there, a plurality (46-43) supports the establishment of a Palestinian state.

People like Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman are not only a small minority among Americans generally, they represent a minority of American Jews. Another recent poll, this one from the nonpartisan Israel Project, found that the vast majority of American Jewish voters have priorities that are indistinguishable from American voters generally, and it is only a small minority of those voters for whom Israel is a top priority: “Three quarters of the American Jewish community say that there are other issues more important than Israel,” . . .only 23 percent of the Jewish population listed Israel as a top issue. . .While 51% of the respondents acknowledged that the economy and jobs were their major concern, only 7% cited the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the threat of Iran.”

AoTP: In your second book, A Tragic Legacy, you lay the blame for U.S. war-mongering, especially in the Middle East, largely at the feet of neconservatives, while allowing that there are also some “garden variety hawks” involved in the equation. Many neoconservatives hold elite positions in the Establishment media and are regularly consulted on cable news. What do you think motivates neoconservatives, and why do they remain so popular in “high places?”

GG: The term “neoconservatives” now encompasses a large group of people, so it’s difficult to describe “their” motives as though they’re a monolith. Some believe generally that the U.S. should be a militaristic society and ought to dominate the world by military force, and thus have as their top priority the building up of an Enemy to justify those policies. Others, of course, have deep — really primary — allegiances to Israel, and perceive that endless domination of the Middle East by the U.S. is in the interests of Israel.

They are able to occupy high positions because the central premise of our political culture is that those who favor war and militarism are strong and patriotic, while those who oppose it are weak and subversive. Until that premise is uprooted, neoconservatives will have a place at the table of power, no matter how discredited and radical they are exposed to be.

AoTP: Your blogger profile rose exponentially when you became arguably the best source for understanding FISA, and the implications of the Bush’s claimed authorities for years of violating it. You were absolutely dogged on the matter, both in your legal analyses and insistence that the issue should be an important scandal. Do you take satisfaction from your work in that regard, and to what extent do you think some justice and correctives have resulted?

GG: I absolutely think that the work of bloggers (and their readers), along with related activist groups, changed the outcome of the FISA and surveillance debates. There was a long period of time after the NSA story was first revealed by the NYT when there was almost nobody other than a small handful of people writing about the NSA lawbreaking specifically and especially the theories of the omnipotent Executive underlying all of it.

And the recent victory in the House, where House Democrats finally refused to comply with the President’s orders and refused to give him vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom amnesty, would not have happened without the work of bloggers and their readers. There just wasn’t anyone else interested in those issues, and the usually invulnerable bipartisan cast of Beltway lobbyists, pundits and other assorted operatives were all lined up in unison to make sure those measures passed. That’s a small victory, but I think it reveals a template for how these battles can be waged with increasing potency.

AoTP: You very seldom, if ever, write about gay and lesbian issues per se. Yet discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation directly affects where you live, since you and your domestic partner — who is Brazilian — cannot be together on any regular basis in the U.S. Do you hold strong views about anti-gay laws in your own country?

GG: The state of American law with regard to same-sex couples is an ongoing disgrace. America is one of the very few countries in the world — along side countries such as China and Yemen — to continue to ban HIV-positive individuals from immigrating. And the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government from extending any benefits (including immigration rights) to same-sex couples means that we put our gay citizens whose partners are foreign nationals in the excruciating predicament of being forced either to live apart from their life partner or live outside of their own country. That is reprehensible.

Most civilized countries, even those that don’t yet recognize same-sex marriage, refuse to put their citizens in that situation. Brazil was a military dictatorship until 1985. It has the largest Catholic population of any country in the world. And yet I’m able to obtain from the Brazilian government a permanent visa because my Brazilian partner’s government recognizes our relationship for immigration purposes, while the government of my supposedly “free,” liberty-loving country enacted a law explicitly barring such recognition.

AoTP: You’ve done an enormous amount of valuable, original investigative work at your blog, in magazine articles and in your books exposing the corruption of the Establishment media; it’s willingness to obediently spew GOP talking points and narratives about domestic and foreign policy, and to focus on petty and inane trivialities such as Obama’s bowling score or how much John Edwards pays for his haircuts. Some feel a resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine is at least a partial answer to our media malaise. Do you?

GG: I tend to be a First Amendment absolutist and cringe at the prospect of government regulation over our means of expression. I understand the sentiment behind the Fairness Doctrine. I believe that media consolidation under the control of an ever-shrinking number of large, homogeneous corporations is a serious threat to free political discourse and investigative journalism.

But I believe that developing alternatives to that monolith — such as those developing on the Internet and elsewhere — is a far more attractive solution to that problem. I don’t understand how anyone, after watching the abuses of the Bush administration for the last eight years, would want to vest in government officials the power to judge the content of what goes over the airwaves. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume competence and benign intent on the part of political officials when deciding how much power to give them. We ought to assume the worst about them — about their abilities, integrity and motives — and only then, based on those suppositions, should we decide how much power, and what specific powers, we’re willing to vest in them.

AoTP: You’ve been holding up various mainstream media figures to contemptuous examination: WaPo’s Fred Hiatt, Joe Klein, Mark Halperin (former Political Director of ABC News and now a political analyst for Time Magazine and editor at large), John Harris (former National Political Editor of The Washington Post), Brian Williams and Peggy Noonan are just a few examples. Do you envision that your focus on the media’s sins will continue?

GG: The subversion of our Republic, its political values and our constitutional framework could not have occurred without the full-scale complicity of a corrupt and vapid establishment media, so it’s vital that the focus remain on them. I think there are two vital goals to pursue — (1) revealing what that establishment is and the function it fulfills in order to shame and discredit its members as much as possible (so as to modify their behavior and lessen their influence), and (2) building alternatives so that ideas and information can be disseminated widely without having to rely on those corrupt media institutions.

AoTP: During a recent blogging heads debate you had with Megan McArdle, she repeatedly insisted that the Founders saw no special role for the press, and that including freedom of the press in the First Amendment did not signify otherwise. Yet Thomas Jefferson said: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Could you expand on why you disagree with McArdle about the role a free press was and is supposed to play in our republic?

GG: Many of the Founders themselves used a free press to achieve all sorts of political goals. Their writings were rambunctious, adversarial, harsh, and even hostile. For obvious reasons, their primary concern was to create as many checks as possible on abuse of government power, and a vibrant press that would serve as a watchdog over the political class was — as both their actions and words conclusively prove — a key instrument in achieving that. They didn’t protect press freedoms in the First Amendment because they thought it was unimportant. Anyone with even a basic understanding of the dynamic the Founders envisioned for preserving liberty knows the central role they envisioned for a free press.

AoTP: Are there contemporary journalists whose work you do admire?

GG: Yes. There are many journalists, even in the establishment press, who do superb work. The Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage almost single-handedly cast light on the administration’s use of signing statements to proclaim a presidential right to float above the law. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest engaged in exemplary investigative journalism to reveal the existence of CIA Black Sites throughout Eastern Europe where we disappear our detainees beyond even the monitoring of international human rights agencies. Reporters at McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) did an enormous amount of work, in obscurity, to debunk key administration claims prior to the invasion of Iraq. And there are all sorts of great investigative journalists working independently, on blogs, and in other venues.

The problems of the establishment media, the reason it exists as a propaganda amplifier for the government, are systemic. But there are absolutely individual reporters devoted to fulfilling the most noble functions of journalism. They’re just far too small in number to affect the overall impact that the establishment media has.

AoTP: With reference to your being nearly a First Amendment absolutist, when you you were practicing law you defended the extremely racist and anti-Semitic Matt Hale in several civil cases prior to his criminal conviction, and you’ve blogged rather extensively in opposition to “hate speech” crimes. Was free speech imperiled in the Hale civil cases, as you saw it?

GG: Absolutely. Very well-funded groups were trying to create new precedent where groups with unpopular views could be held liable for the actions they “inspired” with their words. They were trying to subject Matthew Hale and his Church to bankruptcy-inducing civil liability based on the theory that the expression of his White Supremacist ideas led others to go and commit acts of violence against minorities.

The threat to free speech from such pernicious theories is manifest. If you give a speech about the domestic threat posed by Islamic groups inside the U.S. and someone hears you and goes and kills a Muslim — of if you give a speech on the evils of corporate power and someone hears you and is inspired to go kill a CEO — these theories would mean you could be liable for those acts. It would render free speech a nullity.

That has been tried before. In the South, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were attempts to bankrupt the NAACP and various chapters by claiming that boycotts they sponsored inspired people to commit violence in order to enforce them. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that such theories of liability are barred by the First Amendment. But, as always, people don’t care much when the same efforts are made to whatever group happens to be the one expressing the Hated Ideas of the day. That’s why the Founders barred attempts like that with the guarantees enshrined in the First Amendment.

AoTP: The About page at our site describes how we are pursuing a dialogue between, on the one hand, liberals, and on the other, libertarians who have been made unwelcome by a GOP/neocon-dominated-conservative-movement which many libertarians cannot support. Do you find value in such a project — which has antecedents in liberal blogger’s Markos Moulitsas arguing the case for “libertarian Democrats” at Cato Unbound, and calling for an alignment between libertarians and Democrats? (Kos’s a