Unqualified Offerings

Blogging in haste this morning, I relied on my memory of what Daniel Larison wrote about Obama and Wright contemporaneously rather than going back to confirm my recollection. This was not just lazy and unjust but erroneous. If you look especially at Larison’s discussion of the first "post-Wright poll" and his first reaction piece to [...]

Veronique de Rugy confirms your worst suspicions about "The Trillion-Dollar War" and its phony funding process, the "emergency supplemental appropriations" scam. It’s a damned fine piece of work. Since her focus is the corruption and decadence of the budget process itself, she charitably underplays the question of whether the outrageous expense of the Iraq War [...]

Any decent parent should be able to, while singing a child goodnights, switch among the lyrics to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", "Ba Ba Black Sheep" and the Alphabet Song on the fly. e.g.
Twinkle twinkle have you any wool? H-I-J-K what you are . . .

By Thoreau
I just need to vent a bit before I drop off the radar for a while.  In the next 24 hours I need to grade a stack of labs (not due for a week, but the rest of the week is even worse for finding time to grade), give a lecture, finish preparing a [...]

Publius explains how Obama gets it wrong: too much economic determinism.
By the by, I hate Obama’s anti-trade rhetoric. Not out of attachment to any specific deal (e.g. Colombia), but the tenor of it – elites colluding with foreigners are ruining the country – is extremely illiberal, however "progressive." It fosters xenophobia as surely as neocon [...]

Daniel Larison should of course critique Obama’s “bittergate” remarks if he wants. He’s a blogger; that’s what we do. He should feel free to offer the most unflattering analysis possible: he’s an ideological opponent of Obama. But paleoconservatives should probably be wary of pronouncing confidently on the political effects of a controversy among ordinary people, [...]

The great Spencer Ackerman, one of our country’s gutsiest reporters and most humane thinkers, will hereafter be blogging at Attackerman, in addition to contributing to the Washington Independent.