Unqualified Offerings

I wondered a very wrong, outside-the-box thing tonight on the ride home, about pork-barrel spending. Is it, from a libertarian perspective, the worst thing in the federal budget? I invite readers and bloggers to explain to me that it is. But, here’s a devil’s advocacy case:
As has been pointed out, there isn’t much of it, [...]

On the other hand, I read a lot about how Sunni tribal leaders and insurgents have “turned against AQI,” and how we’re paying them to – er, supporting them with financing and logistics in their fight against AQI. But actual reporting on what they’re doing to fight AQI is scarce. Aside from pocketing our money [...]

Spencer Ackerman tackles the question of whether we are or aren’t “arming” Sunni militias, aka “concerned local nationals,” and whether that would mean General Petraeus lied in his testimony this week. He digs up a press conference with “Major General Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. troops in northern Iraq, on those terms in June“:
[Question] (on [...]

By Mona
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Only three things must be known about Kay S. Hymowitz’ Op-Ed in today’s WSJ. First, the title — Freedom Fetishists :The cultural contradictions of libertarianism. Second,Hymowitz published the same screed in this September’s issue of the neocon rag, Commentary. And third, she cites Glenn Reynolds not as just a [...]

Yglesias considers the problem of the Middle East not turning into a regional conflagration after an American withdrawal:
What, in short, if things turn out to be basically okay for America and for Americans? Well, that’d be good, it seems to me. But it would also call into question a lot of habits of mind, past [...]

Dear Atrios: I’m about twelve years older than you. When I was a teen and you were a toddler, and for a time after that, the media was very liberal. How do I know? I remember! Also, there used to be no ATMs. We had things called “traveler’s checks” that you bought at the bank [...]

Thers at Whiskey Fire has a sobering reconsideration of the article from last week about former disputants in Northern Ireland and South Africa kibitzing on possible Iraqi reconciliation paths. I completely agree with Thers that
The point, then, of the NI example for Iraq, ought to have been pretty simple: in a relatively small and self [...]