Month: September 2008

Bob Barr re-thinks the war on drugs.

Megan’s two cents on the government buyout:

…it might be fun to let the financial markets collapse catastrophically in order to teach people that they oughtn’t to speculate, either on securities or government bailouts.  On the other hand, the Great Depression sort of sucked, and not just for people who took a flyer on AT&T at 87.

Going forward, of course, we should take pains to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, first among them ensuring that the shareholders and managers suffer for the mistakes made by their firms—and of course, by refusing to make those sorts of implied guarantees for ostensibly private companies.  Perhaps we should even pass a law forbidding the government to bail out insolvent banks.  But we already lost this round.

Yglesias thwacks Kagan. Not that it will do any good. Kagan knows the truth. He knew there were WMDs in Iraq and that Iraq would be a perfect model for Arab democracy. Why should we doubt him about anything else now?

Stunning pictures of protesters at the RNC. More here. Money quote from a photographer:

By the time I realized I was at the center of the conflict it was too late. The bombs and tear gas were exploding all around me and cops were screaming at everyone to go south toward the bridge. I yelled to one cop "I’m media! Where do I go?!" but he pointed his rubber bullet gun at me and yelled "Go to the fucking bridge!" It was utter chaos. The police were throwing gas and bombs in between the bridge and people being told to go to the bridge. Poor aim? Amid the mayhem I managed to click away a few frames, but I couldn’t help but notice what was going on. They had surrounded the area and were corralling what seemed like 300 people, including a large number of media and legal observers, onto the bridge for a mass arrest.

If you aren’t creeped out by what has been going on these past two weeks in America, you are not paying attention.

The latest sign of disturbing detachment from what’s actually happening in his campaign – or just a gaffe? Here’s the quote:

"The fact is that she’s coming out in the next couple of days with interviews with numerous people. She’s very well versed at that, she’s been a governor … She’ll be doing a lot of conversations with the media, but we wanted to touch base with the American people first."

Who apart from total toady, Charlie Gibson, whose performance in the ABC News debate was a disgrace to serious journalism? Who?

And does the McCain campaign think the readers of blogs and newspapers are not the American people?

Razib makes an important point:

…many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us, and constructing predictive models which have been shown to have great utility, that that means that they as scientists can simply transfer their godlike powers to other domains with the greatest of ease. But as the abof ove should make clear I believe this is a false perception, because the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand.

Jonah Lehrer seconds. One of the greatest errors of modernity is simply conflating the truths of one world of experience with the truths of another. I guess Michael Oakeshott instilled in me the sense that this confusion is the central intellectual problem of modernity. It is indeed at the root of a great deal of our difficulties. It is a mistake to apply the truths of science to that of history or aesthetics or politics. They are simply different categories of understanding the world. And the most profound mistake in human thought is to conflate the claims of religion with the claims of politics, and to conflate the truth-claims of the eternal with the truth-claims of the now.

This is the core argument of my book. I believe it is the core insight of conservatism. If it is, the current Republican party is almost the perfect nemesis of the conservatism I still proudly hold. And I have reluctantly come to believe that too. Which is why I want to see this current GOP defeated, whatever mask it is currently wearing, and however many reservations I might have about the Democratic party.

Underneath, today’s GOP is a very dangerous and deluded animal.

Josh Marshall says it well:

…let’s be frank. [McCain] might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one’s control — not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It’s easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes.

Just stay calm and keep your focus on reality. In the end, reality will win. We just don’t know what it is yet, with a candidate the nation has only really known for two weeks – and then without the central, critical presence of an actual press allowed to ask questions.

I’m not stupid enough to predict anything.

And we should stop thinking about the horse race. We need to think about: Who best can win the war on terror? Who best can extricate us from Iraq? Who best can handle Pakistan? Who best can manage the financial meltdown? Who best will rid us of addiction to foreign oil? Who best can unite the country? Who best can tackle the enormous debt the Bush-Cheney years have landed us with? Who best can restore America’s core abhorrence of torture?

I don’t think the answer to that question at this point is even slightly difficult. I was expecting some agony this fall in sticking with Obama. I don’t agree with all his policies. But after the last month, this isn’t hard. Obama must be elected. And we must do everything we can to ensure he is – for America and the world.

Factcheck.org doesn’t appreciate McCain messing with their facts. The McCain camp is the most dishonest I have seen since the Clintons’.

Despite the photograph above, and mounds of public record, Reihan defends Palin’s massive public lie on the Bridge to Nowhere. He also hasn’t responded to this comment:

Palin supported the bridge. There are videos and pictures of her supporting the bridge. There is a video of her where she says she can read the writing on the wall about the bridge and that the political climate did not make accepting the money to build the bridge a wise move.

She didn’t tell the congress anything about building or not building the bridge, but she kept the earmark money and Alaska built an approach road to where the bridge was going to be. So she supposedly said, “I don’t want your stinking money for the bridge, we’ll build it ourselves. Oh by the way, that only applies to the bridge, we’ll take your money to build the approach road."

She does seem to have scaled back on earmarks, but she was very very earmark friendly earlier in her administration and as mayor of Wasaillia. Again, all this is available in news reports and on video.

Reihan, you are the last person I thought would be engaging in partisan spin. I thought you wanted a new party.

Also read Larison.

Since the press isn’t allowed to ask Palin questions to her face, they have started to pose them publicly.