That’s right. That’s Mark Warner, junior Democratic Senator from Virginia, who won an astonishing 65% of the vote in 2008 (besting Obama by 12 percent), after a highly acclaimed term of Governor from 2002-2006. That’s the same Mark Warner who was rumored to be considering a Presidential run in 2008, a favorite among the establishment elite for his mixture of ... Read More
Following Kramer’s comments the other day, an interesting conversation has arisen that compares Kramer’s proposal to end pre-natal subsidies with China’s one child policy. The reason for this debate originates in the UN’s definition of genocide, as found in Article 2 of the Convention on the Preventment and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “In the present Convention, genocide means any ... Read More
On February 3, Martin Kramer, visiting scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, gave a six-minute speech at the annual Herzliya Conference in Herzliya, Israel (discussed by Jeremy below). In that short amount he time, he provided a clear call for the West to curb Gaza’s exploding population by ending pro-natal subsidies for Gazans: “Aging populations reject radical agendas, and the Middle East ... Read More
I spent this past week complaining about government dysfunction — so I’d be remiss not to mention the Citizens United ruling. Of the many bad things that happened last week Citizens United is probably the most significant. The ruling will make our government worse. How much worse? It’s not clear — some argue that risk-averse corporations won’t be inclined to ... Read More
James Fallows makes a lot of good points in his long Atlantic article, “How American Can Rise Again.” I’ll highlight just one. Let’s call it “the pathos of helplessness”: The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case. Take ... 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 understand the relationship between liberty ... 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 and don’t have. But, in ... 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 studies major. I think the ... 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 he realizes that the government ... Read More
