Brandon has a good post on the now-common argument that the disaster in New Orleans has somehow discredited libertarianism. I’ve actually read people who say that this shows the bankruptcy of the concept of “limited government.” Should we assume such people are for unlimited government? The problem with the handling of this situation, in my…

Andrew Bacevich* reviews Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, which Bacevich says is a paean to American soliders who, in Kaplan’s view, are the elite vanguard of a new American empire which is the only hope for pulling the rest of the world out of chaos: Reactionary populists idealize the past because they loathe the present. Kaplan…

Okay, not really (made ya look though, didn’t I?), but Jonathan Rauch has a column comparing the philosophy behind Sen. Santorum’s It Takes a Family and “classic” Goldwater-Reagan conservatism. In Rauch’s view, Santorum represents a principled turn away from the individualist/limited government paradigm (allegedly) represented by Reagan. In Santorum’s view, freedom is not the same…

O.C. premier tonight! Yeah! Forget all your highbrow HBO dramas and PBS documentaries. For sheer entertainment value you just can’t beat beautiful and rich (yet angsty!) teenagers and their equally beautiful and rich parents all set to the background of today’s hippest rock ‘n’ roll tunes! (Incidentally, the O.C. is often called this generation’s 90210.…

Matthew Yglesias makes the important and often-overlooked distinction between intervening militarily to stop ongoing crimes like genocide and intervening for the sake of regime-change toward democracy: Operations of that sort are clearly different from operations aimed at halting an ongoing genocide or preventing an imminent one. There is a huge amount of space, both practical…

Here’s a very interesting article from British Christian writer (and self-described “post-Anglican”) Theo Hobson on what he calls the “ecclesiological fundamentalism” of contemporary theology, specifically among “postliberals” and members of the “radical orthodoxy” school. I am suggesting that a form of ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ presently dominates academic theology; it underlies theological postmodernism. I will demonstrate this…

Clark Stooksbury has a great take-down of spurious appeals to federalism by some of the President’s defenders: Are [Hugh] Hewitt and [Christopher] Ruddy so deluded that they believe that the president and his advisors carefully read through the Constitution and the opinions of Learned Hand before deciding if they have the power to act? Bush…

Will Pennsylvanians ever be free from the despotism of our commonwealth’s ridiculous blue laws? Here’s a step in the right direction anyway.

Russ Feingold (D-Wis) could be the antiwar candidate in 2008. He was one of only three senators to vote against the authorization of force in Iraq, so he has the kind of credibility that someone like Kerry lacked. He was also the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT (sic!) Act that was rammed through…

Pro-war bloggers and pundits have made much hay of George Orwell’s dictum that pacifists are “objectively pro-fascist” because their aim is to obstruct the war effort and, thus, aid the enemy. This bit of rhetoric got particularly nasty during the run-up to the Iraq war when war opponents (pacifist or not) were routinely characterized as…