Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
This afternoon my wife and I finally visited the Amish Market in Burtonsville, MD. (Obviously, they have no web page to link to, although they do have credit card readers these days.) We witnessed a community that prefers to live apart, retains its original language, adheres to a very strict religion, and […]

By Thoreau
I’m sure everybody here has heard that two car bombs were found on Friday in a place where new British PM Gordon Brown was to be, and that today a burning car was crashed into an airport in Scotland. Muslim extremists are apparently the culprits (although one should avoid making hasty assumptions on […]

Given that
there is no evidence that [Jonah Goldberg] has actually written anything other than the subtitle — again and again and again, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. And now he is even rewriting that. The original subtitle, “The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton,” had to be changed, probably because the publisher worried […]

By Mona
Well, so claims Stalinist/Maoist, Reagan DoJ member Bruce Fein (bio) at Slate, who has previously babbled this Communist drivel.
(Via several commenters at Greenwald’s.)

Ah, moving quickly and quietly down the corridor of American politics:
“We’re in the formative stages of creating a new group that will give voice and hope to conservatives everywhere who believe in peace through strength and limited government,” Blakeman said. “We expect to have more to announce sometime down the road.”
I believe in weight loss […]

The other day in comments I advanced several reasons why the US didn’t need to stay in Iraq to prevent a regional war, one of the rote justifications for maintaining the famous “residual force.” They boiled down to, “What? You think the local rulers want to shove their hands in the disposal just as we […]

By Mona
Jonah Goldberg writes a book titled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods; this would be the cover:

Tom Palmer says:

The original subtitle was “The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.” That one was unhinged enough, but the new title is simply deranged.

Palmer is especially convinced that Whole […]

Just in case there’s any doubt out there, I thought I’d mention that I’m totally willing to blog full-time for a magazine in exchange for a middle-class wage. Yes, even in the daytime if I was making day-job money. I ust don’t blog from work today as a matter of policy - it’s not what […]

Thoreau, I think Pope Ben should let Blair convert to Catholicism after Tony passes an exam on Catholic Just War Theory.

By Thoreau
You get the drill. The Senate has subpoenaed records relating to the illegal wiretaps that that Stasi NSA conducted. If they hand the records over, we’ll probably have incontrovertible proof of violations of FISA and grounds for impeachment. If they don’t hand it over, the matter will go to court. […]

Surely we can do better!
The Totalitarian Temptation from Heraclitus to Hudson Trail Outfitters
The Totalitarian Temptation from Plato to Piggly Wiggly
The Totalitarian Temptation from Aristotle to Anthropologie
The Totalitarian Temptation from Lucretius to Lane Bryant
The Totalitarian Temptation from the Venerable Bede to Bailey Banks and Biddle
The Totalitarian Temptation from Epictetus to Eddie Bauer
The Totalitarian Temptation from Marcus […]

The Stiftung writes about “the incomprehensible scale of wasteful, stupid, possibly illegal if not illegitimate contracting that has gone on” within the intelligence community in general and the Department of Homeland Security in particular.
IOZ writes about “the CEO president.” (Remember him?)

By Thoreau
This week’s science news involves those adorable creatures known as penguins: It appears that 36 million years ago the tropical areas of Peru were populated by giant penguins, standing taller than today’s Emperor Penguins (subjects of “March of the Penguins”). Penguins do exist far north of Antarctica today, but they’re smaller, and this […]

By Mona
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Americablog has video and sums up NBC’s David Gregory, who tsk-tsks that one simply needs to learn to understand that Ann makes oh-so-very serious points, and it is short-sighted for Elizabeth Edwards or anyone else to focus on Ann’s hateful rhetoric:

Because, you know, if you strip away the fact that […]

By Mona
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HTML Mencken reports on a very special football game, in which my personal fave of all the depraved neocons, Michael Ledeen, throws a penalty flag, and Andy McCarthy rends his garment jersey whilst declaring the End is Near.

BTW, the hot rumor is that Sheik Rishawi has vamoosed, Chalabi style, with $75 million in American funds intended for the Anbar Salvation Council. I haven’t seen this reported from multiple sources, though, so I’m not sure I believe it yet. I never believed that Baby Sadr fled to Iran over the winter either, but […]

More on the Higazy case, the storm-petrel of everything since.
Joanne Mariner on Findlaw. The article dates from August 2002. At that point the judge told the FBI to stop dragging out its internal investigation and report results by Halloween of that year. Your nut graph:
Higazy claimed that the FBI agent conducting the interrogation threatened him. […]

It’s a sin of pride, but rereading that 2002 item I have to ask:
WHY DIDN’T YOU PEOPLE LISTEN TO ME?????????????

LizardBreath finds an officer willing to call bullshit before he’s safely out of the service. Way back in January 2002, I wrote
The right question is not, Are terrorists ordinary criminals? They question is, Are terrorist suspects terrorists? Clearly, the answer will be Yes sometimes and No some other times. Note that this is exactly congruent […]

Sullivan: “But what marks conservatism is extreme prudence in initiating conflict, a principle I foolishly rushed past in the wake of 9/11.”
I’ve said many times I wasn’t going to make a fetish of mea culpas. This one is entirely sufficient for my purposes. If I were a real liberal I’d probably still be personally cheesed […]

By Thoreau
In my continuing series on what the scientific community and its processes are like from the inside, I present an account of a task that I just completed:  I was asked to review a paper for an optics journal.  The paper was a series of theoretical calculations (based on well-established equations for the propagation […]

By Thoreau
The movers came last week to examine my belongings and work up price quotes.  The best quotes are from Atlas Van Lines and Allied (well, the emails say Ace Worldwide but the price quote says Atlas, and it seems that the companies are affiliated).  Does anybody have experiences with either company?  I don’t want […]

Jason Kuznicki asks the most important question facing us, “What Now?”
The rule of law has been fundamentally compromised in the United States. What do we do now, particularly if we personally still care about the rule of law and don’t want it to be any further violated by whatever steps we might take in response? […]

By Thoreau
I just heard Colbert say that Tony Blair is thinking of converting to Catholicism.  Um, Tony, here’s the thing:  I know that churches are hospitals for sinners and not museums for saints, and Jesus was all about forgiving even really messed up stuff.  So I know we’re obligated to accept even an architect of […]

It’s Al Gore’s world and we’re just living in it:
At 59, he’s an Academy Award winner, a bestselling author, a front-runner for the Nobel Prize, and a concert promoter who turned out to be a bigger rock star at this year’s Grammys than the rock stars themselves.
What no one is talking about is that he […]

Matthew Yglesias makes a good case that, contrary to what I wrote the other day, “according to Jim Mann’s account in Rise of the Vulcans Cheney very much didn’t want Powell as a colleague (they’d worked closely together in the Bush I administration, and Cheney knew he didn’t like him), but his appointment was ordained […]

By Thoreau
I just finished reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. The basic premise is that a group can (under the right circumstances) be smarter than its smartest member. Say that everybody has a little bit of information, and not everybody has the same information, but everybody also has some mistaken ideas. […]

By Mona
From Think Progress:

Yesterday on ABC’s Good Morning America, Coulter said, “[I]f I’m gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.” She has previously called Edwards a “faggot.” In 2003, she wrote a column claiming that John Edwards […]

By Mona
The CIA has declassified a trove of documents regarding their activities through 1973, some unobjectionable and others, well…… According to USA Today:

The documents are divided into two groups: The Family Jewels [Mona could not successfully reproduce this link; go to story to click], the agency’s skeletons-in-the-closet, and an analysis of Soviet […]

By Thoreau
Mona already blogged some of the remarks by former FISA judge Royce Lamberth, but this morning’s Washington Post has an interesting look at how his job actually worked.  In a nutshell, he was able to act very quickly when needed, but he could also hold a federal agent accountable and question him pretty closely.  […]

Iraq’s lost generation.
Via Yglesias.
At some point I’ll get up the energy to dig up the links, but I clearly remember that four years ago at this time, serious commentators wrote columns arguing that Iraq proved we could free countries pretty cheaply and easily with military force, so we probably had a duty to do so. […]