Monthly Archive: August 2011
False Evidence, DNA, and Innocence
Rufus notes the rumor that the West Memphis Three are about to be (or, it seems, have been) freed. Several problems with the Wikipedia article, but: The West Memphis Three are three men who...
West Memphis Freed
Wow! The scuttlebutt has it that the West Memphis Three are about to be released from prison via a (somewhat bizarre) plea deal. No word yet as to what Eddie Vedder will due with...
Times Square Isn’t the Free Market
What would a world of unfettered free markets look like? If you fear everything turning into Times Square–style advertising, you can probably rest a little easier, at least on that point: About a year...
The Adventures of the Delineator: The Mark of the Assassin
~ by Jon Stonger From the Logs of Captain Dave: “Get the money upfront,” hissed Doc hissingly in my ear. We were sitting in a shady bar on the second planet in the Scorchemal...
Beer, neoliberalism, and unions
Matt Yglesias returns to the subject of beer and the deregulation of the beer industry during the Carter industry. I’m going to take a bit of credit for the debate that was sparked around...
NPR’s Recent Top 100 List
This isn’t quite important enough to front-page center, but it’s good enough for the sidebar.
Hawks to the left of me, hawks to the right…here I am…
Kevin Drum writes: But Will [Wilkinson]— along with Jon Stewart and all the others who think the media is being unfair toward Ron Paul — is missing the single biggest difference between Paul and...
Scott Sumner on Past Mistakes
I wish more people in government would read Scott Sumner’s blog: I once read all the New York Times from the 1930s (on microfilm.) You can’t even imagine how frustrating it was. They knew...
Why Don’t Liberals Care About Foreign Policy?
~by Ryan B. Now, not to pick on Matt Yglesias, because I don’t think he’s necessarily worse than most of the center-left-type bloggers out there, but he recently put up two posts that rubbed...
The Media and Ron Paul
So you’ve all seen the Jon Stewart clip about the media ignoring Ron Paul. Here are my thoughts. First, the media are ignoring Ron Paul. This is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning....
Pop-tarts and prophets: on the emptiness of our politics
Inspired by this very good Mike Konczal post on Mitt Romney’s idea to privatize unemployment insurance, Corey Robin has taken the conversation to a realm that’s pretty undervalued, even implicitly verboten, in much of...
Game of Thrones blogging
I can’t stress enough how much I like blogging about A Song of Ice and Fire at the League. The one problem is I sometimes don’t have an idea of what I want to...
Individualism & Society
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with...
Elsewhere, Yonder and Hereabouts
At Forbes I have three posts for your consideration: First, a meditation on the Civil War, tragedy, and justice with a tie-in to the war on drugs riffing off of a post by Ta-Nehisi...
Rioters versus Bankers
Theodore Dalrymple has long been my favorite conservative. Here he shows why, discussing the comparison between the UK rioters and the boomtime bankers: The comparison is alarming for several reasons. First, it disregards the...
You break the peace, you buy the war
A Washington Post article brings up an old idea that’s gone from common sense to the fringes of the political sphere — the so-called war tax: Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), believes such a levy...
Krauthammer & Me: The American Constitution Works
~by Tom Van Dyke It’s ugly and it’s inefficient, but: Krauthammer echoes my own admiration for the American system of federal government—national, yet federal, as in sharing power with the more local level, the...
The Conservative Moment Calls for a Cultural Crusader
~by E.C. Gach What some currently scanning the GOP field seem to miss is the complete disdain many (most?) conservatives have for President Obama. At best, he’s prevented the country from enjoying the economic...
No one Cuomo should have all that power
Over the past couple of years, there’s been many people wondering why it is, exactly, that Washington seems so utterly indifferent towards stimulating the economy. Some people have hypothesized that it’s because DC itself...
