The Crossed Pond

Here’s how bad the 2008 Farm Bill is: The New York Times and National Review agree about it.

And so does the President. But it won’t be vetoed, of course. Somehow, some way, Bush will find a way to sign it, as Presidents always do.

The farm bill has become a sort of quadrennial trip into the abyss for me. Every sane person in America hates it, and agricultural subsidies generally; yet every four years, it gets worse and more subsidy-laden. It is the ultimate example of narrow interests looting the treasury because nobody else cares enough to mobilize to stop them.

If only there were a Presidential candidate who were willing to take meaningful stands against agricultural subsidies at great political peril. Oh, wait…

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. So sue me.

Hey. I know this blog has a fair few LP activists as readers, as well as Ron Paul folks generally. I’ve got a writing assignment at present that focuses on telling the story of Ron’s 1988 run for President on the LP ticket. I know the broad strokes, but wasn’t personally involved in any of that.

If anybody feels they have a pretty good grasp of that, or better yet have some first hand knowledge of it, please contact me, baporterATgmailDOTcom. I’m looking at you, JoyfulCynic and Kaligula, but really anyone who thinks they might be of use to fill me in or even just orient me, please drop me a line. It’d be much appreciated.

Thanks.

I wrote here, and in the comments section, about the remarkable request by Archbishop Joseph Naumann that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius deny herself communion. A particularly cogent and persuasive criticism of the Bishop’s actions has been written by Patrick Whelan at Catholic Democrats. Again, this issue is one on which I cannot comment very freely, save to say that if the situation intensifies very much more, it will be hard for me to keep my job next year.

Meanwhile, Sullivan links to this astonishing incident: one of America’s more cogent Catholic pro-life advocates is denied the sacrament merely because he endorsed Obama.

I wonder if the people initiating these actions recognize exactly how their behavior is perceived by outsiders. In the course of my job, I spend a great deal of time educating Catholic youth on how to become effective public advocates for the church’s agenda, including pro-life advocacy. One of the hardest things to teach the kids is that the mere expression of what they believe to be truths is not sufficient; that one has to appeal to the pre-existing beliefs and concerns of one’s audience, not all of whom are Catholic, to achieve a change in behavior. I often wish that the leaders of the church would provide more cogent examples of this type of persuasion.

Somewhere in me, there is a post analogizing this sort of behavior to that of the Libertarian Party. Surely one of the most important things about principles is that you advocate and promote them effectively; if they are not to be translated into real, tangible good, then what are they for?

The KC-45 is an air refuelling tanker designed by Northrup-Grumman to replace the US military’s obsolete fleet. The contract for the new plane was initially awarded to Boeing on a non-competitive basis. John McCain blocked this, demanding a competitive bid process, which was won by Northrup-Grumman. This led to McCain’s boasting that he’d saved the taxpayers millions of dollars, Democrats whining that McCain had jacked things up and screwed over an American contractor (see Adam’s post), and eventually a formal, and to all appearences specious, protest by Boeing.

This has now led to a point at which Northrup-Grumman apparently feels compelled to defend the bid through, of all things, banner ads on political websites. I will be frank: I am not quite sure that readers of RCP are going to be sufficiently psyched up by these ads to call their congresspersons and DEMAND that Northrup-Grumman be awarded the contract. But if they aren’t, then why is N-G running them? How, exactly, does this bring pressure to bear on decisionmakers? I’m genuinely confused by this strategy.

How delightful, in any event, that disputes over the bidding process for military contracts now play themselves out in the field of political opinion.

Our blogroll mate Danny Finkelstein, who spent five years working 9 to 5 prepping Prime Ministers for their question times, has some advice for John McCain on his suggestion (that sent Rojas all a-twitter).

I hope McCain pressures Obama on this one. Be nice to get quick-thinking back “in” as a valued asset for Presidents and legislators.

Just a personal note, after 10 long years of on-again off-again studentry, I finally finished my bachelor’s degree. I’ll be graduating with a degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Creative Writing here shortly.

It’s good to finally be done with. I quite like being a perpetual student, and I don’t regret the many things I was able to do by getting the degree piecemeal as I have (right up until the finish line: I effectively dropped out last semester to devote myself fully to Ron Paul stuff, the 527, and various other political work), but it is nice to no longer have it hanging over me.

Not sure where I’ll be along to next. Very likely at some point I’ll get an MFA, but probably not for a few years. I’ll be spending the next few months job-hunting.

Morehouse College, a traditionally African-American institution, graduates its first white valedictorian…a former Kansas City-area speech competitor who turned down a full ride at Columbia to attend. Not everyone is pleased:

“I don’t necessarily support him being here, but because he’s here and we can’t discriminate against other races, I support him and his mission to be successful in life,” says Muhammad, a junior. “I just kind of wish he had done it at a different institution.”

“I think that it should be a wake-up call to an all black campus,” says Muhammad. “At Morehouse we’re supposed to be at the top as black men. We only have a few white students and to see a white student will rise to this - is something unsettling to me because it shows that we need to work harder.”

That last bit, frankly, strikes me as a very enlightened and mature response to the situation. If only all instances of racial rivalry could be resolved by attempts to elevate one’s own game…

I can’t help but notice that any one of dozens of professors could have denied Packwood valedictorian status, and conferred it on an African-American student instead, by awarding him a B or lower at any time in his undergraduate career. Yet not a single one of them did so. I have to think that speaks pretty highly of Morehouse as an educational institution.

Advocates of affirmative action in public universities frequently make the argument that a diverse student body is in itself an aid to institutional excellence. I wonder what they’d have to say about this incident, and what the students of Morehouse would have to say on the subject.

TNR is having a contest. Because what the House Republicans really need now, more than anything else, is a catchy slogan.

Following even more scandal, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a favorite around here, has suddenly become very concerned with text message privacy as a policy issue.

DETROIT — Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick issued what appears to be an about-face on the city’s technology policy to employees today, which tells staffers that their text messages are private even if the city pays for the electronic devices used to send the messages.

Kilpatrick early in his first term signed off on a directive to his staff that “all electronic communications” sent on city equipment should be considered public. The directive comes amid ongoing criminal proceedings about text messages Kilpatrick sent on his city-issued SkyTel pager that are now the linchpin of prosecutors’ claims he perjured himself during a police whistle-blower trial last year and obstructed justice afterward with an $8.4 million settlement.

The new memo reads:

“Whether the city does or does not pay for the devices, you will have certain privacy rights in the personal messages that you send and receive,” the memo reads, which was signed by Kilpatrick.

It is dated April 15, 2008, but it was distributed to many employees and Detroit City Council members today.

“City policies are always subject to review and update,” Kilpatrick spokesman James Canning said in a statement today

Just because I’m going to be arguing with Rojas and Adam about this all campaign season, I may mark off a few well-put expressions of my own feelings on the matter.

In this case, Josh Marshall:

As the general election begins to ramp up, it’s worth marking off a number of Sen. McCain’s claims that are demonstrably bogus, despite being accepted more or less at face value by national political press.

First, McCain a critic of President Bush’s war policies?

Please.

Sen. McCain has consistently supported all of the president’s war policies. His dissents have been atmospheric and marginal, at best.

Indeed, his embrace of the advisors, outside supporters and policies of President Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy shows that it is President Bush’s failed foreign policies that he is most intent on continuing and expanding. Whatever McCain might do on cutting upper-income taxes is clearly not something he’s got his heart in. These are topics he doesn’t have a great deal of interest in and he’s espousing policies he denounced only four or five years ago. They are simply the necessary scaffolding of building a conservative coalition to support his war policies where are his real interest very evidently remains.

On foreign policy, McCain is 100% with President Bush’s policies.

Given the president’s abysmal public approval ratings, it’s in the Democrats’ obvious political interest to portray a McCain presidency as a continuation of President Bush’s foreign policy. But this charge has the benefit of being true. Simply listen to what he says. On every particular, it’s staying true to President Bush’s course.

I will give McCain a little more credit than that. Though the phrase is great, “atmospheric and marginal at best” under-values the very real dissents on a few key points of execution that McCain made (and certainly didn’t have to) in the first 9 months or so of the war.

However, I think that proponents of McCain OVERvalue the degree to which his judgment, which is clearly superior to Bush’s (damning with faint praise), plays. Namely, he is constructing for himself a political reality in which he is tied, arguably MORE than Bush is now (should McCain win on it), to a certain rose-tinted view and corresponding course of action, to the point that, I believe, overrides whatever good judgment he might have exhibited on the initial execution. There is, simply put, no reality which can be accepted under a McCain administration other than the one that McCain is now painting. It’s not just that he is putting forward the idea that we must stay in Iraq forever. He is summarily dismissing even raising the possibility that he might be wrong. It is not even a point valid enough to bring to the conversation. That is something beyond “stay the course”. It is “there is no other course”. Adam (for instance), might agree with that assessment as it stands today, but even he regularly concedes that at some point, some threshold might be reached where it is time to reassess. Not so with McCain, as he makes amply, amply clear every time he speaks. Adam at least has the fortitude to admit that at some point, it might turn out to have become clear that he was wrong. Not so with McCain. The possibility itself is verboten. Off-limits. The Future Of Which We Shall Not Speak, i.e. “every other future besides the one that McCain foresees for us”. This is not just a campaign-trail rhetorical issue. It is built into the very framework, of policy, of character, of debate, of everything.

In any case, Marshall is correct in saying that, AT EVERY POINT, McCain has backed every administration play on which his call could make a difference. The only few things he’s had criticisms on were, conveniently, not things which were ever subject to a vote. McCain was there, from Day One, and at every point. McCain the Critic is a role infinitesimally small in comparison to McCain the Enabler. McCain the Critic is a role that, indeed, has existed. But it’s dwarfed by the real legacy of John McCain on Iraq, to such an extent that I have a hard time understanding how people can give an honest look at it and even argue the point.

And, McCain’s vision for Iraq is not unclear. It’s telling, to me—almost ridiculously emblematic—that McCain’s address on Iraq today was not a honest appraisal of possibilities, strategies, challenges, and goals. It was, instead, literally, feigned clairvoyance. It was not “this is how it might happen”. It was “here is the future”. Again, not just a rhetorical trick. It’s the core of the matter with McCain. It can be no other way.

In South Park Parlance, his entire Iraq strategy is Step 3: Profit.

Step 1 was George W. Bush.

Step 2: ???

Given McCain’s inflexibility on Iraq, which he has shown throughout the course of the war and which he promises as an explicit foundation of his campaign, I find it hard to understand how anybody who has been unhappy with the Iraq war or the Bush/neocon running of it can recommend McCain. McCain would, in some very limited senses, be an improvement, but it would be an improvement that was…

Well, maybe Josh was right.

“Atmospheric and marginal” comes to mind.

Another special election, another blood red district sending a Democrat to Washington. This time, it’s Travis Childers in Mississippi.

Bonus: this was, like in LA a few weeks back, another hotly contested race in which the GOP went great guns at trying to negatively tie the Democrat to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. That (still) doesn’t appear to be working. Bonus bonus: Dick Cheney was sent in to make an appearance on Monday.

The House is now 236-199 Democratic, with the GOP having fallen officially below 200 seats.

Addendum:

BLITZER: Very quickly, is Howard Dean in trouble?

BEGALA: He — yes, he’s in trouble, in that campaign managers, candidates, are really angry with him. He has raised $74 million and spent $64 million. He says it’s a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That’s not how you build a party. You win elections. That’s how you build a party.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Bush this morning was in Israel, giving a speech to the Knesset to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary, and in it, he included a passage which most people are quite rightly reading as a direct swipe at Obama and Bush’s most explicit entry yet into the rhetorical battle in this season’s Presidential election.

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Republicans—including McCain and Lieberman—half-heartedly agree. Democrats, as expected, are pushing back (of note: Biden’s response, which begins with the simple clause: “This is bulls#*t”).

What strikes me, however, is how ill-conceived the attack was, tactically. Bush’s people obviously have a higher opinion of the weight that Americans give to his pronouncements than I, or most people, do, and clearly there’s a facet of Bush protecting his legacy here. But make no mistake, Bush just handed Obama and the Democrats an incredible neutralization of this talking point. He handed it to them out of thin air, for no good reason. The “Obama plans to meet with evil people and talk to them!” outrage is, no two ways about it, a principle arrow in the McCain campaign’s quiver, judging by how much they go to it. It was pretty obviously going to be a central talking point in the thin litany of complains that McCain plans to air against Obama’s War on Terrorism perspective. And Bush just did the equivalent of snatching it out of McCain’s bow, spit-shining it, accidentally half-snapping it in half, knocking the head off, and returning it.

Now, the Democrats can (quite rightly) conflate McCain’s talking point on this with Bush’s (less than elegant) smear overseas. Coming from McCain is one thing. Coming from Bush is quite another, but here he is, standing in Israel, inexorably intertwining himself with McCain on this one, and dispatching it in such an obvious and ham-fisted way as to smother all the shine off it, probably forever. In his first attempt at actually trying to help McCain, he makes the equivalent of an own-goal assist.

You just know somewhere in the bowels of the McCain Strategy Team, furious phone calls are going out to the President’s sanctum saying “Next time you want to help, please, just don’t.”

So now the California courts have ruled that homosexual couples are entitled to the title of “marriage”. The basis for their ruling is, in part, that the state legislature had already conveyed broad partnership rights to homosexual couples, and that to deny them the accompanying status of formal marriage was therefore unconstitutional.

Fair enough. Here is what I think will happen now:

There have been three major groups contending over the gay marriage debate. The first are people who oppose any sort of recognition for same-sex couples. The second are people (including myself) who support the recognition of same-sex couples as entirely equal under the law, and who would convey the title of “marriage” upon them.

The third group consists of people who believe that homosexual couples should not suffer from discrimination in terms of the legal benefits of marriage (inheritance, hospital visitation, tax status, and so on) but who are uncomfortable according the status of “marriage” to those relationships.

For the past several rounds of legislative votes, group number three has operated in alliance with group number two, seeking to ensure that homosexual couples have their rights protected, and not quibbling over labels. Today’s decision in California destroys that partnership. Group three voters no longer have the option of recognizing “civil unions” legally, as the courts will transform any such recognition into full-on gay marriage. They will now have to decide whether their qualms about the sanctity of marriage matter more than their compassion for homosexual couples who’d be denied recognition…and the decision has been forced upon them by the legal actions of the pro-marriage lobby.

In short, the opponents of gay rights have just been handed a potent wedge with which to pry away supporters of civil unions from the gay marriage lobby. This is what happens when you try to impose your will through the use of the judiciary. Sadly, the fight to win marriage rights through legislative consensus building just got a lot harder…and that means the courts may become EVEN MORE prominent as a mechanism for forced change on this issue, which will intensify public resistance. This issue is beginning to take on the same overtones as abortion.

Another legitimate policy objection for Libertarians to consider. Certainly a lot more relevant than “he’s not radical enough.”

The bottom line is that I won’t be voting for Barr in November, and I’m not at all sure that I’d vote for him if I were in Denver. It will still be extremely obnoxious if the LP throws him overboard because he doesn’t read the right books.

3. Saddam
2. Shi’ites
1. FARC

The Republican presidential contender also envisions April’s annual angst replaced by a simpler flat tax, illegal immigrants living humanely under a temporary worker program, and political partisanship stemmed by weekly news conferences and British-style question periods with joint meetings of Congress

A careful scientific analysis of this proposal reveals it to have an astonishing Rule-Win Quotient (RWQ) of 74.6, making it the Best Idea Ever (McCain’s previous high was an impressive 9.42 for “end ethanol subsidies”).

I have been waiting for an American equivalent to Prime Ministers’ Question Time for DECADES. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime. And what sheer, brazen cojones, for a candidate to say, “Elect me and I’ll let Congress grill me weekly.” Once again, McCain demonstrates his willingness to put himself on the line–agree or disagree with him on the issues, his sheer political courage is unquestionable.

Would this curb partisanship, as McCain proposes? Never in hell. What it WOULD do is impose a dramatically higher level of rigor and accountability on the Presidency; the ability to think on one’s feet would become a political prerequisite for the job. And that can only be a good thing. A very, very, very good thing. It also represents the kind of awesome, script-free, regularly conducted political theatre that can get the public interested in the policy process again. Finally, it recognizes and formalizes the legitimacy of legislative inquiry–not control, but inquiry–into the actions of the executive branch. Anyone concerned about the recent trend towards unchecked and unquestioned executive authority ought to rejoice.

We need to get this locked in. Let’s get Obama on record for-or-against on this–my guess is that he’d be forced to agree to it.

Oh…and everyone involved in the showdowns should be required to refer to each other as “My Right Honorable Friend”. You know, just because.

Both parties face major challenges and have little time to alter the dynamics of the election to their advantage. Recognizing underlying problems and correcting them within a matter of a couple of months is one of the supreme challenges in politics. Whichever party does that fast and well will benefit come November.

Boy, it’s hard to imagine how the Bush administration ever managed to part ways with a genius of this magnitude, isn’t it?

As you probably already know, like a daredevil parachutist picking the last feasible moment to open their parachute, John Edwards has bravely endorsed Barack Obama.

As it’s all over the news and as it appears to be only a small and perhaps final nail in Clinton’s coffin, I am only posting this so that we can get one (hopefully) last look at John Edwards’ gun fingers.

There’s a lot of talk of imminent Republican electoral apocalypse (one particularly handsome person comments on it here) and last night’s special election loss in what really looked like a very safe Republican district in Louisiana is another timely reminder to that tiny remaining fraction of GOP playmakers that don’t already hang on our every word.

At this stage, John McCain may actually be the most popular Republican in the country. That’s damning with faint praise, though, and as Newt Gingrich says, the party is more likely to bring McCain down than he is to bring them up. Another factor is that McCain’s polling against Obama is surely currently supported by those Clinton voters that say they won’t vote for Obama, but no one can believe that at least a significant fraction (and I would guess 70%+) of them will calm down and switch to Obama. When that hits the polling, I can imagine that McCain’s going to tank and Republicans will panic. Of course, it doesn’t much matter when they start to panic because they’re probably already dead in the water anyhow.

The Republican campaign strategy since 2006 appears to have been “pick a national Democrat figure and try to associate every local candidate with them”; it didn’t work when Pelosi was the strawman back in 2006 and it isn’t working this time around with Clinton or Obama. There isn’t long left to concoct a strategy that ameliorates years of incompetent government and populist overspending whilst at the same time generates an attractive message to voters. In any event, other than McCain and a handful of others, I think that the Republicans richly deserve the electoral whirlwind they appear to face; my concern is that the country doesn’t deserve the Democrats, more than that the Republicans don’t deserve electoral oblivion.

Sully has a great article (via Yuval Levin, who is supportive of Sullivan’s point of view) on the weird situation regarding immigration for people with HIV. Now, during my own immigration process I had to be tested for a standard variety of diseases (and in the course of which I discovered that the TB vaccination I had as a child is no longer effective, although that saved me the money for a chest X-ray) and HIV was one of those, but the weird thing is, that of all the communicable diseases about which the US is understandably concerned, HIV is the only one that absolutely bars you from becoming a permanent resident.

Luckily for me, I don’t have any of those diseases. Sully, however, as most people will know, is HIV-positive. This means that after 25 years of being here, he still has to leave the country to get his ‘O’ visa renewed every year and request an HIV-waiver (and the ‘O’ visa, that can be indefinitely renewed like that, is a rare beast). Now, that “leave the country for a visa” thing is scary and a hassle. You ideally ought to return to your own country, but you can (if you manage to book an appointment during the approximately 2 hours there are appointments available to be booked three months in advance) go to Canada or Mexico to do it at a US Consulate. However, the fact is that if for some reason you are refused a visa — and I understand that the officers in the Consulate have a fair amount of discretion in that regard — you just can’t get back in, at least not without a long, painful and expensive legal battle in which the odds are stacked against you.

This might make sense if HIV was known to be the deadly and easily-communicable scourge that people originally believed it to be, but it’s clearly not, in the US. Sully has a steady gig and is highly employable and able to support his own health insurance costs, not to mention paying a presumably healthy amount of taxes and medicare and social security contributions. I am sure that, if they had to vote on it, most legislators would vote to scale back the anti-HIV immigration restrictions to a reasonable level, proportionate to the (known) nature of the disease. But, of course, they don’t have to vote on it and because it’s not going to affect that many people, the fact that it’s more stupid government legislation doesn’t matter much.

Give Sully some love, next administration and Congress!

As many of our American readers will know, baseball homerun record-holder Barry Bonds is being prosecuted for allegedly perjuring himself during his Grand Jury testimony, testimony during which he had been granted immunity for any crimes relating to the use of performance-enhancing drugs; the prosecution theory is that he lied nevertheless because he suspected, rightly, that his testimony would be leaked and that the public would decide that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs and was thus a cheat (a conclusion which, I contend, they may have reached anyhow because the standard required is not that of legal guilt).

Anyhow, Bonds’ legal team asked for the prosecution’s case to be thrown out on the grounds that the charges were badly put together; presiding Judge Susan Illston agreed that the charges were defective but didn’t throw out the case, instead ordering the prosecution to rework the charges. The prosecution has done that, parcelling each alleged offence of perjury (plus the one charge of obstruction of justice) into its own charge, with the result that five charges (four of perjury and one of obstruction) have now become fifteen. Assuming that the aim is to avoid any felony conviction in order to buttress Bonds’ increasingly hard-to-believe claims of innocence of doping, this doesn’t seem like a step forward for team Bonds, although maybe it’ll still work out OK for him.

In any case, this is aside from the question of whether the use or production or distribution or steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs should be illegal. Some, such as Carl Lewis, have called for more government intervention (of course, Lewis isn’t operating without at least a small cloud of doubt himself). I don’t think that it’s a government issue but I do, as a fan, want the governing bodies of the sports I watch to do as much as is reasonable to stop it. Some people call for more tolerance of the use of performance-enhancing drugs to match the fact that, for example, steroids and human growth hormone are being used in many sports. Some people, I imagine, would just like to see the limits of enhanced human performance; after all, athletes eating the right foods is, when you look closely at it, just a matter of getting the right chemicals, in the right quantities, into their bodies to enhance performance and no one’s complaining about that.

All that is aside from the point I wish to make, however. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the current laws and the current official stance by governing bodies that might encourage sportsmen to lie during on-oath testimony in order to avoid sporting sanction, if we are to be a nation of laws, giving false testimony on oath has to be a criminal offence (and, in my opinion, it’s a serious one). We don’t get to decide which laws are good and which ones are bad and then, on an individual basis, use that to decide which laws we can break and then complain about the punishment. Clinton should probably have gone down for perjury; Libby should have gone to prison for it because he was convicted for it. Bonds, well, he’s got a trial to win, but if he loses, I think that he should pay the legal price, even though I think that he was lying to avoid sanction by a hypocritical Major League Baseball in the course a legal proceeding investigating something that shouldn’t be illegal. Testimony on oath has to be enforced if the legal system is to work properly at all.

Meanwhile, the baseball Player’s Association, hilariously, is worried that the reason Bonds didn’t get pursued by any Major League Teams since the end of his contract with the San Francisco Giants is because of collusion against Bonds. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a team did take him, for all that he’s toxic at the moment, but they are in the amusing situation of trying to protect the professional interests of a player that pretty much everyone thinks took steroids, thus defending a situation where their other members feel obvious pressure to take the same stuff even though it has serious risks to their health. Such is the nature of the task of representing a group of individuals, I guess; it’s hard to represent the group and the individuals at the same time. Diddums.

There was a service interruption last night, on into this morning, for which we humbly apologise. Brad has been sent to a remote part of a foreign island where he will be tortured until he confesses that it was all his fault.

Labour MP (and former minister) Frank Field, whose attack on Gordon Brown I listed here when commenting on Brown’s current travails, has given a public apology in the House of Commons (the apology follows the congratulations he gives the Chancellor of the Exchequer for redressing the affects of the recent unrepentent abolition of the 10p tax rate that had been announced a year before and went into place earlier this year).

Now, it’s easier for Field to be magnanimous — he’s won, after all — but I have always felt that Field, for all that I dislike his pinko politics, is a class act.

There are several legitimate ideological reasons to deny Bob Barr the Libertarian Party nomination for President. Several of them are listed here. I can definitely see Libertarians rejecting a candidate who supports widespread intervention abroad or who supports the drug war. These are not trivial objections, and I look forward to seeing the party hash them out at the convention next weekend.

That having been said: these legitmate objections do not stand alone. No, as the LP has a habit of doing, these perfectly reasonable questions of policy are getting tangled up in yet another purity purge. Take it away, Joshua Katz:

The Ron Paul campaign opened many people to hearing about freedom – the LP must now run a candidate who can continue to feed this interest, in addition to attracting more. To do this, the candidate must be uncompromisingly radical – people can only be inspired by a candidate able to present, in a convincing way, the hope of a world without coercion. It is imperative that the LP put forward a consistent, principled libertarian, one well-versed in the libertarian scholarship, in order to continue the educational task. Every day, I meet people who are reading Bastiat, Mises, Hoppe, Rothbard, and Menger because of Ron Paul. I have students who are asking questions about liberty, and about Mises, because they saw my Ron Paul poster and looked him up. A Republican retread, who is moderate on issues which require radicalism, will not attract the same interest.

Ah, the old bait-and-switch. Yet again, the same party which trots out the Nolan quiz as a means of defining an entire quadrant of the population as their allies wants to cast aside all of those potential supporters in favor of the “uncompromisingly radical.” And now it’s not even about the actual policy stances anymore. It’s about what books you read.

The party has wandered in the wilderness for 35+ years. Every time it moves towards actually influencing the course of public policy, those in power within the party choose to saw off the limb the rest of us are standing on. Now, with the Ron Paul movement drawing inprecedented interest in pro-liberty ideologies, some within the party want to jettison potential of a mass movement, one involving pro-liberty thinkers of varying intensities and orientations, in favor of an ideological reeducation camp.

The party needs to be very careful about how it handles this weekend’s opportunity. A Bob Barr nomination is not an absolute necessity, but it will be very interesting to see on what grounds he loses the nomination. One thing the Ron Paul movement has taught us is that the Libertarian Party is not a necessary ingredient in the movement towards greater personal freedom. The Ron Paul movement WILL go on, one way or another. This tone adopted this weekend will help determine whether the LP assumes a leadership role within the movement, or whether, to them, purity of thought is more important than, you know, actually increasing individual liberty in the real world.

In which case, the rest of us will leave them behind.

It’s not just British parents displaying parenting excellence. One Australian man has had a small run-in with a policeman with no sense of priorities:

A car driver in Australia has been fined for strapping down his beer rather than his young child.

Police said they were “shocked and appalled” when they pulled over the car south of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory.

They said the 30-can pack of beer was strapped down between two adults in the back, with the five-year-old child unrestrained on the floor.

One might argue that stories like this — there’s no surprise stuff like this happens, after all — are almost the lowest of the low-hanging journalistic fruit (only to be improved upon if the family in question are dirty immigrants). Of course, such an argument would then cast blog posts referring to them, such as this one, in the worst possible light; we can never have that.

NB: Regarding the title, ‘Clunk click’ was a component of years of television advertising exhorting and latterly threatening British drivers to wear their seat belts. ‘Clunk’ is the shutting of the car door and ‘click’ is the fastening of the seatbelt. I seem to recall one ad that said ‘clunk click or you’ll be nicked’ but I can’t find direct reference to it now.

Just FYI.

I could post 20 off the top of my head, but I’m going to restrain myself and post them one at a time. Here’s one that, being a British show, doesn’t have a theme tune by Mike Post.

In the 1970s, there was a great British police show called “The Sweeney”, set in London amidst the activities of the Flying Squad (the Metropolitan Police’s armed robbery unit, called “Sweeney Todd” in rhyming slang and somewhat famous for their “hands on” policing). The show was all kinds of awesome and featured two of Britain’s most popular actors through the next 30 years or so, the (now deceased) John Thaw as Jack Regan and Denis Waterman as George Carter.

So, the opening theme (and note the most excellent intro from Thames Television, which takes me back; not sure it dates back to the original run of the Sweeney, although it could, I suppose):

Season One of the show is now available on region 1 DVD (and the whole thing is available on region 2); hopefully they’ll release all four seasons and the two movies over here. Here’s a clip with one of the iconic lines from the show:

As an added bonus, the whole theme tune, with a video in the style of the opening credits, plus the “we’re the sweeney…” line at the end. Can’t say fairer than that, guv:

Gluttons for punishment might like the lower-tempo end theme:

In the US Congress, we see at least one example of destructive mass behaviour that feeds on itself. Nearly all the members put earmarks into bills because, why, if they don’t, the other members will. Their own constituents will (rightly) feel that they are being robbed by the Congress and they’re not even getting anything back. So, in the end, most all of them do it for fear that taking a stand on it is basically just screwing themselves.

I was reminded of legislator behaviour when reading about a new theory as to why locusts swarm. In essence, the theory is that the juvenile locusts are scared of some of their fellow locusts that are cannibalistic and group together in response; they tend to stay together once they can fly and then instead of individual locusts zipping around looking for food, you have huge swarms of locusts all looking for food in the same place, which is bad news if you’re a farmer whose property is in their way.

In both cases we see destructive behaviour on the part of lower members of the Animal Kingdom driven by fear of other members of the group. One wonders if the collective noun for legislators might best be ’swarm’, although my personal favourite remains a ‘brothel of legislators’.

Tortured comparison of the day status: Complete

Gordon Brown’s tenure as British Prime Minister is not turning out to be a happy one (in contrast, I would say, to his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer). From the spanking received by Labour in the recent local elections through awkward memoirs and on to suggestions, angrily dismissed by his allies, that he won’t be around in a year or two, he’s not exactly operating a smoothly-oiled machine. I think that a bunch of this was brewed under Tony Blair’s tenure — ironically, possibly with help from Brown and allies who wanted Tony out and Gordon in — but the party’s state reminds me a bit of what happened to the Tories once Margaret Thatcher was deposed, with John Major unable to hold the party together as the long-suppressed fractures became more evident.

If Brown can turn this around — assuming the Tories don’t implode and hand him a victory in the next General Election — it’ll be some feat.

There’s an absolute thunderclap of a political rumor circulating regarding the Obama VP slot. Nobody is willing to go on the record to confirm it; however, the buzz is that the Obama camp is weighing the possibility of a national unity ticket with Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican Governor of New Jersey.

This possibility, which hadn’t even entered my head during previous discussions of the VP derby, would be an absolutely spectacular strategic coup were Obama to pull it off. We have already discussed in some detail the utility (some would say necessity) of putting a woman on the ticket to mollify some of Hillary’s angry supporters. Our candidates of choice have been Kathleen Sebelius and, to a lesser extent, Claire McCaskill and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

Whitman would bring everything those candidates would to the table with the exception of Red State Cred. But the very fact that she governed for two terms as a Republican, and occupied a slot in the Bush cabinet before resigning due to difficulties with Dick Cheney, would more than make up the lack where open-minded conservatives are concerned.

Make no mistake, Whitman is a conservative, and I would argue that she’s a truer example of the breed than many who have recently appropriated the label. Here’s Whitman in her latest book discussing her take on the ideology:

The defining feature of the conservative viewpoint is a faith in the ability, and a respect for the right, of individuals to make their own decisions - economic, social, and spiritual - about their lives. The true conservative understands that government’s track record in respecting individual rights is poor when it dictates individual choices.

Amen to that; and here’s wishing the modern Republican party were more willing to recognize the principles she lists.

Moreover, Whitman is just about as perfect an exponent of Obama’s message of unity and transcendence as one could possibly hope for. The book quoted above is entitled It’s My Party, Too: Taking Back the Republican Party… And Bringing the Country Together Again. Her political action committee regularly works with groups like the Log Cabin Republicans in an effort to diversify the appeal of the party.

Would her longstanding Republican ties disqualify her? Not necessarily. Whitman is pro-choice and very supportive of environmental regulation (indeed, more so than I’m personally comfortable with), so she wouldn’t automatically alienate key Democratic interest groups. More to the point, giving her a place on the ticket would go a long, long way towards success in casting the race as a choice between the neoconservative candidate and the rest of America. A bolder bid for the political center is almost unimaginable.

Do I think this WILL happen? I definitely don’t. I have to think Whitman is unwilling to burn her GOP bridges so decisively. But if there’s a prospect of it occurring, Obama’s team would be insane not to seize it. I can’t think offhand of a VP pick who would be a smarter choice.