Comments Elsewhere

“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?

Come on Max, everyone knows that what strapped government schools in low-income areas need is standardized tests. Piles and piles of standardized tests, day in and day out. Nothing inspires a love of learning like endless scantron paperwork.

In all seriousness, I think this is a great idea, both for high schools and for colleges. High school students get systematically exposed to a much richer set of options and experience a certain amount of the freedom and responsibility that comes with a college setting. Colleges, hopefully, get the joy of fewer students showing up at the age of 18, allegedly for full-time college work, while still needing a couple semesters’ worth of remedial training in basic English composition skills. (Of course, they would have to deal with 14-16 year olds showing up while still needing a couple of semesters’ worth of basic English composition skills, but that means less time wasted on the stupid stuff when they’re actually settling in to make college their full-time gig.)

“It could be used to restrict the state’s ability to keep abortion safe. … Malpractice law and regulatory law (requiring that abortions be performed by licensed MDs) could be construed as restricting abortion.”

Laws such as these are very bad ideas and if an amendment were to ban them from going on the books, so much the better for the amendment. Abortion is not a particularly dangerous procedure; prior to legalization it was safely performed by Women’s Liberation activists in the Jane network after they had been trained by a paramedic. And of course there is nothing to prevent women who want an abortion only from a licensed MD from getting it.

Doctor-only and hospital-only laws are a staple of anti-abortion efforts to limit access to abortion; that’s because they dramatically restrict the availability of abortion and drive up the cost. Women who will be able to obtain abortions regardless of the cost or distance that they have to travel to get one will be fine, but the effects are insidious and oppressive for poor women who don’t have the same options.

Lucinda Cisler of New York Radical Women took up the point in Abortion Law Repeal (Sort Of): A Warning to Women back in 1969 (particularly in the closing sections). And the sad thing is that nearly everything she predicted three years before Roe has since come to pass.

“Bush, he’s trying to get rid of every program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s” … Well, that’s probably [i]true[/i]. The problem with Bushists is that they wants to throw out all the old idiot programs and replace them with [i]new[/i] idiot programs: TANF, vouchers, faith-based welfare, NCLB, social security accounts, national sales taxes, etc.

And so it is that they can gleefully hop on Leviathan’s back and march through the burning town, all the while hoisting blood-red banners proclaiming “IT’S YOUR MONEY” at the front of the column.

Micha: “Barganier is clearly implying that Max is an advocate of torture, not an advocate of relative ethics.” No, he isn’t. Barganier has many standing problems with Max’s policy positions, not the least of them that Max is pro-war, whereas Barganier writes for AntiWar.com. The “boiling alive” bit is part of a longer argument about why total war against the wogs is permissible. I see no reason to uncharitably read Barganier as calling Max a boiling-advocate here rather than, say, an advocate of a morally indefensible war.

Micha: “After all, relativism is much less controversial than torture …”

N.B.: since Max’s account of rights [i]entails[/i] the monstrous consequence that you aren’t doing anything wrong to a foreigner by torturing her for no good reason at all (up to and including boiling her alive just for the sadistic pleasure of it), the position ought to be just as controversial as torture. If it’s not, then that’s merely a matter of not thinking through the ideas that you claim to be discussing.