Prosthetic Conscience

Via The Left Conservative.

Not so keen on his anti-immigration policies, but at least he puts the blame in the right place (employers and trade agreements). His campaign is kind of sloppy and goofy, but he’s surely better than Graham.

It’s an interesting argument, but he’s focusing mainly on countries that use much less oil than the US does. The effects of their subsidies are, like the effects of their oil consumption in general, marginal in any case.

Hillarious comments thread. The best:

My ideas really are basically the ideas that were at the core of the bipartisan, establishment consensus throughout the Cold War years.

Haven’t read your book (yet), MY, but my problem with that lone statement is …

… that said consensus was nuts. I mean, Planter’s Mixed Nuts nutty, with the cashews all gone.

The paranoia about International Communism, the idea that “credibility” was worth any price, the deluded belief that America could do anything it set its mind to (cf. “Green Lantern theory”) … that was NOT the fenced-off hunting preserve of the GOP, sir.

That was Truman’s administration, that was Kennedy’s, that was Johnson’s. They weren’t just scared of being painted as “pink” (Johnson may be a partial exception). They BELIEVED in the Cold War.

The fundamentally fact-free nature of CW paranoia is in no way better demonstrated than by its wholesale mapping onto to the Global War Against Islamofascism.

So for those of us whom you are trying to draw into reading your book, please don’t say how the liberal CW establishment was right on foreign policy. Because they weren’t.

Brilliant.

Via Wikileaks. Summary: How to train death squads and quash revolutions from San Salvador to you

This is just ridiculous. The point of bike safety regulations like requiring bikes to have headlights at night is to protect the safety of the cyclist. Those cops messed that cyclist up well-nigh as much as if he’d been clipped by a car, for “resisting arrest”, when his original offense wasn’t even arrestable. But the police department has closed ranks around the offenders.