From RR

• Judge orders release of Guantánamo detainee. Imprisoned since 2002. No wonder they hate us.
• Abortion hurts. Catholic theology says it’s murder before this point but the bill is better than nothing.
• A major turning point. Warfare is becoming what you might call open-source.
• The demise of the GOP. Splitting the vote and thus putting Obama in again doesn’t faze me. None of it matters really. The Democratic Party, which was once somewhat libertarian under the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Martin van Buren, and Grover Cleveland, was transformed by William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson into a party that essentially believes in “as much government as necessary.” Bryan was a well-meaning Christian, interestingly maligned in the fictional ‘Inherit the Wind’. A lesson from history which is why I don’t buy Wallis’s or vintage Falwell’s politics. (I give the late pastor credit for showing how conservatives can be ecumenical without compromise.) Democrats were the “original” neocons who got the U.S. into World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia for supposedly idealistic reasons, not because America was ever actually threatened. Republicans essentially believe in “Limited government, kinda, sorta, maybe, except when Big Government caters to my interests and prejudices.” Democrats at least have a coherent philosophy: government for its own sake. Republicans are almost completely unprincipled and intellectually bankrupt.
• Legislation and law in a free society.
• Jefferson vs Lincoln: America must choose.
• Ron Paul vs the naysayers.
• Today’s populist right’s resemblance to the New Left. Not surprising and not bad. Early, clean-cut Carl Oglesby said the same thing; that the two never came together meant the tragedy that was the ’60s. The problems are the same essentially, rednecks and hippies all over again: the populist right are not the principled Old Right but red-state fascists so people dismiss them and the left are still a bunch of spoilt middle-class kids who want the government to support them (and force their views on you).
• Libertarianism and the Tea Party. Barry Hess sees the potential.
• The very qualities that have helped transform the Tea Party into a political juggernaut — its lack of central organization, its wide-open invitation for anyone to start their own local group — make it vulnerable to abuse by those with an agenda that extends beyond fiscal conservatism.
• Soda bad, juice good? Like making the package green to sell to SWPLs.
• Toyota’s coerced confession.
• A brief history of British gun control.
• Prosecuting Bush for war crimes.
• Why believe Osama bin Laden.
• Criminalising our way to utopia.
• Democrats and the millennial generation.
• Both left and right are wrong about drones.

Labels: England, history, libertarianism, politics