After Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D – Pa.) switch to the Democratic Party yesterday, I decided to check out a piece he wrote for The New York Review of Books, “The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs.” In the piece Specter details his plans to reintroduce legislation designed to limit executive power that failed to … Read more
For an allegedly “grotesque” (but, thankfully, “innocuous”) confusion, Sam Barr’s equation of liberty and equally is pretty well-founded empirically. Think about the history of America. Think about the struggle to integrate non-land-owners, Catholics, Jews, women, blacks and now gays. Surely, as Sam notes, all this expanded both liberty and equality at once. One way to … Read more
I probably can’t add much to what Steve Benen said, but I feel compelled to comment on Byron York’s recent column on “the black-white divide in Obama’s popularity.” York’s entire column is a laundry list of poll numbers showing that Obama is more popular among blacks than whites. His conclusion? “Black Americans will be a … Read more
GM has come forward this morning and announced that the only way they will survive is to be nationalized. That’s right, they are voluntarily asking to be taken over by the Department of the Treasury. This seems worrying, for a number of obvious reasons. If they’re incorporated into the government and that becomes the status … Read more
To begin with, the confusion is grotesque, not the inestimable Samuel Barr – I must post if only to stress that. Said grotesquerie is an innocuous, though unfortunate, consequence of progressivism, in the same manner that my ineptitude at mathematics (which could only charitably be called grotesque) is an unfortate consequence of being a social … Read more
I know that Daniel is only trying to soften his blows, but really, I don’t think my argument can be “innocuous” and “unfortunate” at the same time. Come on, tell me what you really think! I can appreciate how it seems that liberals are always in the business of telling people what rights they do … Read more
With all this talk about gay marriage, we eventually have to come to the question: Who decides? Who gets to say whether we will have gay marriage or not? And that question eventually becomes, Is it okay for courts to legalize gay marriage if legislatures won’t? Publius over at Obsidian Wings has some interesting thoughts … Read more
When the Secretary of State does things like visit Lebanon to express her not-so-subtly-veiled hope that Hezbollah will not win the elections, I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing. One does not have to wish for a Hezbollah victory to have some doubts about the real wisdom of our involving ourselves so heavily in … Read more
Danny B, who thankfully is the first person ever to accuse me of “grotesque confusion” (in those exact terms at least), takes the true libertarian line on gay marriage. Yet the degree to which he grants some pretty questionable conservative assumptions surprises me. I’m not sure exactly what Daniel means by “civil society,” but surely … Read more
Marriage isn’t really one of my issues, and as HPR’s libertarian-in-residence (though I’d proudly call myself an American reactionary) the entire gay marriage debacle is not one of my priorities. There are a couple things I’d like to point out in response to the post below, first being the grotesque confusion of liberty and equality … Read more