Courtesy of Charles Dickens.
KERRY AND LANGSTON HUGHES: He’s edited a book of Hughes’ poetry as a tie-in for the election. Noah has the details.
LIBERTARIANS FOR BUSH: A reader writes in:
You posed the question “Why would libertarians vote for Bush?” Well, I hold many libertarian views, hate the war on drugs, and yet support Bush emphatically. Why? Well, I don’t think the left will do anything to remediate the drug problem right now (to be fair, they can’t without getting whacked). But the left does and will support infringements such as anti-smoking laws, seatbelt laws, hate crime laws (and maybe hate speech laws soon?) and so on. I assert that, overall, the much greater threats to our civil liberties emanate from the left.
Furthermore, the left will infringe upon us with ever greater spending, ever spiraling entitlement programs, and ever more punitive taxation. If you believe that a Kerry administration will reduce the deficit, I think you must be smoking some of that “stronger” pot! Income taxes are regressive and damaging to productivity and personal incentive, not to mention a blatant and expensive method of redistributing wealth.
I guess my problem with this is that it would be extremely hard to raise spending and borrowing as swiftly as Bush has and I simply do not trust him to restrain spending in the second term. He clearly doesn’t care about the size of government, unless attacking it wins him votes. I don’t see much difference between Bush Republicanism and Kerry liberalism on nanny-state issues – Bush is a strong supporter of hate crime laws, for example, (except for the gays, who are uniquely excluded from such protections). I guess I believe that supporting a Republican who is anathema to libertarian conservatives is a bad thing in general. But, hey, it’s not as if Kerry is that great either.
NOT SO STRONG: The new super-pot notion is rebutted – at least in Britain.
The Dish 