Month: April 2009

Question: What makes Erick Erickson so mad that he stokes revolution? He writes:

At what point do [citizens] get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?…Were I in Washington State, I’d be cleaning my gun right about now waiting to protect my property from the coming riots or the government apparatchiks coming to enforce nonsensical legislation.

Answer: "a ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution."

Yglesias gets his licks in.

He's the sad little British hack who's just figured out how to get Drudge to gin up the traffic for his Telegraph blog. This was his scoop today: Obama gave the Queen an iPod! And she already has one! Yes, this was news. Except, of course, it wasn't. Here's the Guardian's account:

Perhaps stung by suggestions that his gift of a box DVD set to Gordon Brown in Washington did not convey the requisite degree of warmth, the First Visitors brought a gift for the Queen that managed to combine thoughtfulness, modernity and a dash of history: an iPod loaded with video footage of her 2007 visit to Virginia. The Queen repayed the compliment with a very personal present of her own – a signed portrait of herself and Prince Philip.

The president also gave the monarch a rare songbook signed by Richard Rogers.

Three hairs were allegedly removed.

Doug at Balloon Juice takes a whack:

“Work versus welfare broadly conceived”? It’s the latest variation on compassionate conservatism and “Sam’s Club conservatism”, some nonspecific crap about how you don’t want to screw the poor, you just want to make sure they’re really sweating for the scraps you throw to them. Really, this kind of thing is so contentless that it it should be explained with Boehner-style bubble diagrams.

May the Lord protect me from compassionate conservatism. There's nothing compassionate about this, and it's very distant from redirecting public money to favored Christianist constituencies. It's about centering conservatism back on its individualist, free enterprise, small, transparent and effective government roots. Since I offered many details of the kinds of policies I'm against, it's hard to see how this is "contentless." I know it's a very rough and ready framework. And I know too that many of us are both makers and takers. The point is to do all we can to encourage the making and minimize the taking.

A reader writes:

Since we are on the topic of Cannabis and the fact that our system is highly out of whack with regard to the application of justice here, one of your respondents troubled me: the person that wrote about how they felt it was absurd that they had to convict someone for something almost everyone in the room was guilty of. The absurd part is that they felt that they had to convict.

I think it is a travesty that we don’t teach people about one of the primary purposes of a jury system. American democracy is protected by three boxes, the ballot, the jury and the ammo box, in that order. Jury nullification is ALWAYS an option. If you find it absurd to convict someone on the basis that you think the law is unjust or incorrect, it’s not just your right, but your duty, to acquit.

Maybe some jury nullifications are a way to pick apart these stupid laws.

Yglesias tweets:

I find "Shadow Government" to be overpraised, hackish, and unimpressive; obviously not cut out to be a serious foreign policy blogger.

See for yourself. Matt's cranky.

A new and serious study finds its effects far worse than marijuana:

Abnormalities have been seen in brain structure volume, white matter quality, and activation to cognitive tasks, even in youth with as little as 1-2 years of heavy drinking and consumption levels of 20 drinks per month, especially if >4-5 drinks are consumed on a single occasion. Heavy marijuana users show some subtle anomalies too, but generally not the same degree of divergence from demographically similar non-using adolescents.

The pot-prohibitionists have no arguments any more. And at some point, even in America, that has to matter, no?

Tim Montgomerie tries to translate for NRO:

In one year's time David Cameron is likely to be the world's most senior conservative leader. American conservatives can find much to admire in his social and fiscal conservatism. His "realism" on foreign policy and enthusiasm for the green lobby will be more problematic.

Yes, the pursuit of the national interest in foreign policy is indeed secondary at NRO to nation-building, and utopian scheme to turn Iraqi and Afghan culture into modern Western democracies by the use of armed force and massive amounts of US taxpayers' money. And for some reason, they're still peddling climate change denialism, rather than smart alternatives to cap and trade. As for fiscal conservatism, NRO fully supported a president whose spending made even Gordon Brown seem like a tightwad. And here's Cameron's social conservatism:

I stood up in front of a Conservative conference, my first one as leader, and said that marriage was important, and as far as I was concerned it didn’t matter whether it was between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and a woman. No other Conservative leader has ever done that. I don’t think any Labour leader has done that. Even since then.

Cameron actually supports family life for all people, unlike NRO which opposes all rights for gay couples, on theological grounds, and has not even endorsed minimal civil unions. President Bush tried to amend the US constitution to prevent any gay couples from having any civil protections for ever. His view is that being gay and committed was so un-American it had to be forbidden in the constitution itself, a position NRO supported.

Apart from that, American and British conservatives really are in synch, aren't they?

E.D. Kain rounds them up. But he missed mine.