Living in the Love of the Common People

by Scott H. Payne February 12, 2010

You might have noticed that I’m on a bit of a hiatus right now. Maybe not, either way is fine. I’ve left the League in the capable hands of my fellow contributors to focus more of my time and attention on various other projects, links for which will be forthcoming as early as Monday. Today; however, is a bit slow, so I thought I’d drop a quick note in response to Erik’s post of yesterday on the pettiness of current ...

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A modest proposal for childhood obesity

by Erik Kain February 12, 2010

Every First Lady is obliged to tackle some trendy and media-inflated crisis.  For Hillary Clinton it was healthcare.  Laurah Bush focused on literacy.  Michelle Obama wants to end the dread childhood obesity “epidemic”.  Perhaps because the federal government has shown such skill in combating similar issues – such as our nation’s failing public schools – Mrs. Obama believes that it is the best institution to tackle our expanding waistlines.  That the federal government cannot tighten its own belt is beside ...

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The politics of pettiness

by Erik Kain February 11, 2010

I’ve been trying to get at the heart of what bothers me so much about contemporary conservative politics & discourse these days. The closest I can come to an answer is that conservatives have fallen into the trap of modern politics – which is to say, they’ve become petty.  Extraordinarily petty. The endless lament over the liberal menace; the incessant ballyhoo over anything and everything the president does or says; the irksome victimhood – it all boils down to a ...

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Should We Preserve Modernist Buildings?

by David Schaengold February 10, 2010

Urbanophile has posted some thoughts on preserving buildings from the mid-20th century: “Mid-century modern architecture is now in the same danger zone chronologically that late 19th-century buildings were in during the urban renewal period. These buildings are old enough to be considered dated, but not old enough to be considered ‘historic.’ The exact same was true of all those buildings that got torn down in the 60’s and are now are so lamented.” Modernist buildings are not in the same ...

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Homer “The Iliad” (2 of 2)

by Rufus F. February 9, 2010

Long before they were recorded, the Homeric legends were the material of traveling oral bards who composed as they chanted, making use of certain stock formulas: the battle, the speech, the ritual, proper descriptions for the goods, etc, and reciting stories that lasted hours, or even days. In a time of regional decline and stagnation, the epics recalled the greatness of the Mycenaean culture, while creating a common literature for the coming Archaic Greek revival; they stood, in a sense, ...

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Economic Finger Trap

by Chris Dierkes February 9, 2010

Dani Rodrik on the Chinese trade imbalance vice grip: So we are left, it seems, with two equally unappetizing options. China can maintain its currency practices, but at the risk of large global macroeconomic imbalances and a major political backlash in the US and elsewhere. Or it can let its currency appreciate, at the risk of inducing a growth slowdown and political and social unrest at home. It is not clear that advocates of this option have fully comprehended its ...

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Should we be capturing more terrorists?

by Will February 9, 2010

On a practical level, Mark Thiessen’s case for capturing and torturing suspected terrorists in place of bombing them is pretty unpersuasive, mainly because he doesn’t have any proof that we lose a chance to interrogate Al Qaeda operatives every time they’re assassinated. Maybe Thiessen has some evidence to the contrary and the military really is sitting on a terrorist-capturing contingency plan, but absent an explanation of how we’d go about detaining terrorists in rural Yemen or Pakistan’s tribal provinces, I ...

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Separation of Powers and the Filibuster

by Mark Thompson February 9, 2010

I go back and forth on what I think about the propriety of the filibuster for legislative purposes, although I’m inclined towards the view that the filibuster is on the whole a good thing under those circumstances. The announcement by Sen. Ben Nelson that he would not only oppose but filibuster Obama’s nominee for the National Labor Relations Board, however, provides an opportunity to discuss an area where I think the filibuster is not only inappropriate but also undermines the ...

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Andy McCarthy is right….

by Erik Kain February 8, 2010

…the Saints did play like champions.  And it was a pretty damn good game right up until the end. After that interception, though, you could tell the Colts were rattled.  Peyton Manning especially.  That was the nail in the coffin right there, except it was the Colts and they’ve pulled back from worse brinks before. I enjoyed the game.  I don’t watch much in the way of sports, but I do love a good football game.  On that note – ...

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Bach BWV 82 (for Sunday)

by Rufus F. February 7, 2010

I’m always amazed to read essays on classical music from the 18th and 19th centuries. The writers, often with no more musical training than I have (i.e. none), also would have necessarily had to listen to the pieces performed live, maybe only once. And yet, their attention was such that they picked up on nuances that elude me after hearing these works dozens of times. There are many works I have never heard unmediated by some form of recording and ...

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The Architecture of Modernity & the Joy of Science

by David Schaengold February 5, 2010

Ages, places, and nations sometimes have characteristic architectural forms. Sometimes these forms, like vinyl-clad McMansions, or the decrepit and vaguely totalitarian National Mall, tell you things about a culture that its members would rather not know, and surely most places and times have an architecture of that kind. Other forms are characteristic not only of some virtue or vice in a society, however, but its self-understanding. The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late ...

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Keep It Simple Stupid

by Mark Thompson February 5, 2010

Daniel Larison makes a point that should be blindingly obvious were it not for the need for our talking heads to turn every single election into a referendum on the talking heads’ own framing of the President’s agenda: “What we have been seeing in all of the elections over the last year is a readiness on the part of the electorate to oust the parties that have traditionally held sway in the district or state in question….The candidates that could ...

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Excellent Video on Yemen

by Chris Dierkes February 5, 2010

Not much to add to this one, except to say that it gives us an amazing window into the paradoxes of a country facing the pressures of globalization and traditional culture (what used to be called The Lexus and The Olive Tree). Or in this case, The Cell Phone and the Camel. Politically, the video shows that the country cannot be viewed solely through the lens of its small (but potentially quite dangerous) al-Qaeda presence. The rebellion in the north ...

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High speed rail U.S.A.

by Erik Kain February 5, 2010

Opponents of high speed rail make several points about its viability: rail is a “19th century” mode of transportation; rail would be under-used and therefore would need massive subsidies to function; infrastructure in the cities connected by high speed rail is not sufficient to make this form of transportation efficient or cost-effective; even if rail is eventually necessary, right now it is impractical due to the ready supply of cheap oil.  Others point to the fact that the contracts for ...

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Should Democrats pass the healthcare reform bill?

by Erik Kain February 5, 2010

Via Andrew, Jonathan Bernstein thinks the Democrats should pass the bill regardless of the public’s distaste for the process: Reconciliation is thirty years old, and there’s nothing at all wrong with using it to pass legislation.  What’s more, pass and patch (or pass-then-patch) involves passing health care reform through perfectly normal, regular, procedures — and then fixing the original bill through reconciliation.  Now, granted, Republicans are apt to complain about procedure, and it’s true that Americans don’t like partisan squabbles ...

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Now Thanks to the Internets, You Can Make Fun of Politicians, Too

by Scott H. Payne February 4, 2010

I’m just not feeling the serious blogging today. So following on Will’s post noting the stoopid spat between Obama and various Nevada politicians I give you further variations on what I term, “I am duly offended, Mr. President…” Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t head on down to Boca Raton to shuffle board your worries away when you’re worried about your 401K. McCain: I heard that… Crist: I am not gay… unless that sort of ...

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An unsettled dogma

by Erik Kain February 4, 2010

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes: My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who ...

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Homer “The Iliad” (1 of 2)

by Rufus F. February 3, 2010

Western literature begins with The Iliad and, until recently, it was assumed that no educated person in the west could have skipped it. Set during a few days in the tenth year of the Greek assault on the Trojan city of Ilion, the epic perhaps refers to an actual war, but remembered dimly and filtered through a storyline of gods interacting with men, and men being undone by pride, anger, arrogance, and lust. Kierkegaard wrote that the Iliad was the ...

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This post is brought to you by….

by Erik Kain February 3, 2010

Matt Yglesias likens transparency in Congressional negotiations with transparency in family negotiations: Think about a family negotiation over whose house you spend the holidays at, or who goes to watch Billy’s soccer game on Saturday. At the end of the day, wouldn’t everyone be worse off if the whole extended clan had the right to watch the negotiation on C-SPAN? More to the point, wouldn’t knowledge that the proceedings were going to be seen by others bias the negotiation. If ...

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Refuting Might Equals Right

by Scott H. Payne February 3, 2010

Big news from the ICC today, Appeals judges at the International Criminal Court have ordered the chamber to reconsider its decision to omit genocide from an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president. The ruling in The Hague on Wednesday follows an appeal by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to charge al-Bashir with genocide. Moreno-Ocampo, who has implicated al-Bashir in the deaths of 35,000 people, said a genocide charge would ensure “the world knows ...

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The National Popular Vote and the Electoral College Anachronism

by Mark Thompson February 3, 2010

A hot topic the last few months here at the League has been the issue of government accountability reform, and how best to loosen the grip of narrow interest groups over the federal government.  In connection with that discussion, I had the good fortune to get in touch with regular League reader Paul Fidalgo, who is currently the communications director for FairVote, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to electoral reforms whose Board of Directors includes personalities ranging from former GOP Congressman ...

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