The proper responses to silly length requirements are two:

1. Using an attractive typeface instead of ugly Times: Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, and Georgia, for example, all chew up a good couple pages more than Times New Roman in an essay of a few thousand words. And they make it look nicer.

2. Footnotes. Lots and lots of glorious footnotes, ferreting out every corner of every digression along the way that doesn’t belong in the main flow of the essay.

I’ve never had much of a problem on this end: I’m naturally long-winded, and like to fill out my essays with silly flourishes, so my essays usually clock in well over the length requirements. But having to learn how to shorten essays, from time to time, has helped me discover a few of these tricks in reverse.

Unfortunately, the way it works here, as in too many other cases around the globe, is that innocent Iraqis will be getting what some of us deserve. It’s not like the comfortable suburban voters who put in by 2-1 margins for Bush will be the ones facing mortar fire or aerial strafing or roadside bombs. As usual, the State’s essential feature is irresponsibility, and war is the health of the State.

“A friend of mine and I are thinking about starting up a community blog for southern Democrats, possibly called “Yellow Dawg.” It would be focused on trying to get the Solid South back — revisiting historical political trends, the FDR administration, etc. and trying to see how to reconnect Democratic party principles with the values of southerners.”

I’ll be interested to see it. But watch out about the “solid South,” rebuilding, etc. rhetoric. Until 1968 or so there was a solid Democratic South, but of course the reason it was solid was that the Southern Democratic party was unabashedly the party of militant white supremacy, and it was not until 1968ish that the combined effects of LBJ’s realignment and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party broke the back of the Klan primary vote. I’m all about the social justice tradition in the South, but the Democratic “solid South” isn’t it (not even vis-a-vis FDR and the New Deal–white Southern Democrats’ support for the New Deal was thoroughly intertwined with white supremacy, in the same way that their later support for “populists” such as Orval Faubus, Bull Connor, or George Wallace was.)

If we are going to build our presence in the South so that it’s worth anything, we won’t be rebuilding, at least as far as the Democratic Party goes. We will be making something substantively new.

Beito: “In response to evidence of this type, some conservatives, most notably David Horowitz, have called for universities to expand the existing use of race and sex (biological diversity) as factors in hiring to include ideological diversity.

“While I think that Horowitz makes a stronger case than many of his critics are willing to concede, I have never been sympathetic to the approach he recommends.”

I have to differ here. There are many reasons to worry about hiring practices that are intended to skew towards race and gender “diversity” within the academy. But whatever you might decide in those deliberations, Horowitz’s proposals are a very different beast. His case isn’t compelling, either within the entrenched logic of skewed hiring or from without. It amounts to nothing less than a sustained assault on the idea of the University, in a way that hiring skewed by race or gender does not.

Here’s why: one of the typical arguments given for policies that encourage demographic diversity is that in a society coping with a history of oppression (and a great deal of ideology coming out of academic institution to support various forms of that oppression), it’s worthwhile to cultivate an academic community with people who come from historically excluded groups, because those people bring a systematically different set of life experiences to the discussion and therefore may be aware of arguments and evidence that may never be seriously aired in more insular academic settings.

Maybe that’s true and maybe that’s false, but it’s important to see that it is importantly different from Horowitz’s notion, which is that it is worthwhile to skew hiring practices based on the political conclusions that researchers come to. (This is connected, of course, to a whole raft of what is, effectively, ideological identity politics from the Right.) But there is absolutely no value whatsoever to diversity of conclusions. The point of the University is to build a community in a conclusion is taken to be worthwhile only insofar as (and only because) the argument for it is worthwhile. Horowitz’s notion is to skew hiring in favor of certain conclusions whether the research and the argument supporting those conclusions measures up under standards of academic rigor or not; that is, to turn the idea of the University entirely on its head.

Think of it this way: demographic diversity arguments are intended to skew hiring based on non-academic factors. A bad idea? Perhaps. But Horowitz’s plan is intended to skew hiring based on anti-academic factors. Of the two cases, I think Horowitz has very clearly got the less compelling and more dangerous one.

“Riiiiiight… gotta watch out for all those free-market conservatives, they might just tear down what remains of the socialist regulations we put in place!”

Red State Republicans have had control over the Presidency and at least one house of the legislature for the past four years; and they’ve had control over both the Presidency and the entire legislature for the past two. In the meantime they have erected the largest expansion of government programs and spending since LBJ’s Great Society.

I am wondering just when these “free-market conservatives” are going to start tearing down some socialist regulations. Whether the Beast is starving or not, it seems to be bigger than ever.

Sabotta: “Private armed guards would have acted the same”

Private guards would have turned around and opened fire with live ammunition into a crowd of demonstrators after some rocks had been thrown? Gunning down four people at over 250 feet away who didn’t have anything to do with it?

If they did, they’d rightly be locked away for second-degree murder.

Are you this glib about the murder of Vicki Weaver? At least at Ruby Ridge there was shooting before she was gunned down.

Do you think that in a free society paramilitary forces would be deployed to tear-gas “illegal demonstrations” in the first place?

Haven’t the hobbits’ finders responded to claims of microcephaly already by pointing out that they have found more than one hobbit-sized jawbone at the site? A freak find of microcephalic remains would be one thing; several would be quite another…

I’ve never seen any actual evidence that “Americans” hate Hillary Rodham Clinton (or, mutatis mutandis, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who got a lighter but still pretty sharp version of the same treatment). It’s obvious that Right-wing blowhards hate her with a passion, and it’s also clear enough that the personal loathing of Right-wing blowhards gets a disproportionate airing on Sunday morning news commentary and in other outposts of the cultural elite. But does that actually translate into anything outside of the commentary echo chamber and the dittohead legions? Is my experience atypical for never having noticed it?

I should say that none of this is to quibble with the idea of having John Kerry as Senate Minority Leader; I think that would have been a far better idea than the idiot notion that ended up being pushed through. I just don’t think that preparing the ground for the Kerry 2008 campaign is any reason for supporting the plan; if it increases the likelihood of a Kerry 2008 run, I think that’s more of a reason to worry about it than a reason to support it.

“Despite the conventional wisdom that a loser can’t run again and win, we have proof to the contrary as recently as Nixon and, at a local level, we see it all the time (think Thune, Giuliani). Kerry ran a good race and could win in 2008 when he’s not facing an incumbent.”

But I don’t want Kerry to win in 2008, and neither does a lot of the Democratic base. Kerry’s big draw as a candidate in 2004 was that he (1) wasn’t Bush, and (2) he was a liberal-enough candidate that lefty Democrats thought was “electable” where the candidate they actually wanted (say, Howard Dean) wasn’t. And, well, we saw how well that panned out. We’ve got a full four years to work on this stuff for the next election; can’t we at least spend a few years working for what we want to happen before we have buckle down to what we think we’ll have to settle for?