Because it seems obligatory to have an opinion on President Barack Obamais winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, I will tell you mine: I agree with Malia Obama that the news is slightly less significant than her three-day, school-free weekend. That said, here's my rather idiosyncratic round-up of the (a) most honest; (b) most Orwellian; (c) most ironically accurate; and (d) most humorously ironically accurate responses to this award from both Delaware and the world. The first items are comment rescues from Delawareliberal where pretty much everybody has either pointedly ignored Donviti's acid assessment, or--in the case of Delawaredem--engaged in exactly the kind of Orwellian rebranding of President Obama's increasingly militarist foreign policy into an enlightened approach to world peace that explains why very few Democrats have any moral authority of foreign affairs these days. First, Donviti : Indefinite detentions. Wants to extend sunsetting patriot act provisions Guantano...

It's embarrassing to have just written a post (which Tyler, damn him, immediately upstaged) ruminating among other things on the changing definition of privacy, only to discover that Great Britain has already made my own paranoid musings obsolete by putting thousands of families on government surveillance inside their own homes : THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far. But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two ye...

First, a semi-random sampling of a local blogger doing her bit to sell the narrative that anyone who is not a liberal Democrat should have to spend all his/her time running around condemning violent extremists because they are to be portrayed as responsible for everything from Glenn Beck to the guy who killed cops in Pittsburgh: This kind of violent rhetoric is exactly the refuge of the worst of the current wingnuts and exactly why they got their outrage on over the DHS report. You can’t protect your own bullying and violent speech without having to cover for the terrorists in your midst too. This comes from the same little merry band that lined up to label Resistnet.com a potentially violent rightwing extremist group that should be on a DHS watch list somewhere. When I examined all their material and failed to find the slightest inkling of violent intent (in fact, quite the opposite), the rejoinder was--I kid you not: What do they mean by keep the powder dry ? Bath powder? So much...

From ClassicallyLiberal : Australia announced that they were going to have nation-wide Internet censorship to help control child porn. That’s a smart move. Use the child porn fear to scare people and then move on with the true agenda. Now it appears that the blacklist of banned websites has been leaked prior to the ban going into effect. And guess what? Most of the banned sites have nothing to do with child porn. Anyone surprised? A document that was recently leaked showed that various sites are being banned including poker sites, some YouTube links, regular erotica sites, sites about euthanasia, fringe religious groups, some Christian sites, a tour operator and, for some reason, a Queensland dentist. The Australian government, anxious to catch up with the police state mentality of Mother England, intends to make Internet filtering mandatory for the entire country and has said they intend to ban access to 10,000 different websites. In fact, Wikileaks was added to the banned list beca...

From the UK Telegraph [with h/t to The Libertarian Alliance }: Local authorities have ordered employees to stop using the words and phrases on documents and when communicating with members of the public and to rely on wordier alternatives instead.... Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use. This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via. Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo. In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly diffic...

Hate speech as a crime is an oxymoron in a society that values freedom of expression sufficiently to enshrine it in the Bill of Rights. But there are plenty of morons out there who support the idea. Hate crimes rest on the rather dubiously assumption that it is somehow more wrong to commit first degree murder against my neighbor because he belongs to an ethnicity that I dislike than it is to kill him because he kicked my dog. Intent, with relation to criminal guilt, is primarily useful to establishing the difference between willful acts and acts committed through culpable negligence, or to be offered in extenuation or exculpation. Other than that, your intent cannot make you any more or any less guilty of a crime. If you had trouble with that paragraph, you probably think hate crimes are a good idea.

Long post warning: in order to preserve the text I'm quoting (because, as you will see, they are changing even as we speak), I'm going to go whole hog and chunk in the whole things rather than just link to them. ********************* The furor over Dubya's comments about appeasement and Obama's response are the context in which I am writing, but they aren't the story. If you hadn't already figured out that politics would eventually end up in the gutter this season, you haven't been paying attention. What interests me is the strange case of Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times and his editorial on the use of Hitler and the term "appeasement." Ramsey apparently (you'll see why I use the qualifier in a moment) wanted to set what he considered to be the historical record straight about the continual references to Hitler and Munich in 1938. Which, of course, the right jumped all over like . . . well, I'm spare you the gratuitous simile. Here...

Yesterday, P ennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell opportunistically used the tragic death of Police Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski to call for a return to the so-called assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. (Never mind that the Chinese weapon that actually killed Stephen Liczbinski was imported before the ban and therefore would have been legal.) There's no reason to be surprised at Fast Eddie being opportunistic, but it does give me the opportunity to point out that neither Republicans nor Democrats have any scruples whatsoever about coining misleading phrases to con voters into accepting (and even supporting) a point of view that has no basis in fact or reality . This weapons ban, for example, as accurately reported by USA Today , was a ban on "the manufacture and sale of 19 semiautomatic assault weapons." These weapons are most commonly referred to as assault-style weapons . But what the American public misses is that the key word is not assault , it's semi-automat...

I think the main point about torture and water boarding and all their lesser kin like sensory deprivation are being missed by most people in the current debate. Recently New Scientist ran an interview with torture expert Darius Rejali (whose father was tortured by order of the Shah of Iran); it's online and here's the URL , but you won't be able to access it for free for about another 2-3 weeks. So I'll summarize my major takeaways from the article: 1) There is no science of torture. To have any valid argument about torture working or not working you would actually have to collect data over time and analyze it. This is not done, even by the governments or organizations that employ torture on a regular basis (although I'm tempted to wonder if somewhere in Moscow or Bejing there's not such an archive), so there is absolutely no scientific evidence in existence to support the notion that torture or enhanced interrogation techniques will ever get you the inform...

I did something tonight I've never had the inclination to do before: I visited Hillary Clinton's website . There I found out that not only isn't she loosing, but that it is only ethical to give her all the Michigan and Florida delegates. Here's the plan to win the nomination: FACT: There is a clear path to an overall delegate majority (pledged + automatic) for Hillary Clinton after all states have voted -- with or without Florida and Michigan. Contrary to the Obama campaign's claims that the race is over, all voters should have their say before a candidate declares victory and tries to circumvent the democratic process. The race is currently a virtual tie, with the campaigns now separated by a small handful of delegates, barely 2% of all the delegates to the Democratic Convention. Hillary Clinton has won states from New York to California and everywhere in between. She has won in states north, south, east and west, red and blue. She has won states she was not expec...

As a kid I saved up all my allowance and chore money for weeks to buy the Johnny Seven One-Man Army, a plastic multi-machine gun that fired plastic bullets, grenades, and rockets, and even came with a detachable cap pistol for use when you'd expended the better part of your ammo in backyard war. I also played with pots and pans in a kitchen set, but that was something I don't think my parents told the neighbors about. Today, I do all the cooking, and I won't tell you whether or not I own a firearm to protect my castle. The only reason you could possibly need to know is that you want to break in. And then you'll find out. Do we become what we play with as children? Maybe at least in part. Now, thanks to Third Party Watch , I know that we have new toys available to socialize our children to the brave new world of what Simon at From the Barrel of a Gun likes to call Submission Arches : I hate to get Godwinian here, but OperationCheckpoint.com has just come out with a p...

I'm not an Ayn Rand Libertarian Objectivist or anything, but I do think she was onto something about the virtues of selfishness--although not in quite the way she would have meant it. This comes to me after several weeks in the Delaware blogosphere in which (a) people who don't want opt-out or mandatory organ donation have been castigated as selfish for not wanting to share their organs after death, even if they have profound religious or philosophical doubts about the process.... (b) people who oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds have been accused of not giving a rat's ass essentially about living, breathing children.... (c) people who object to the tax increases (and potential loss of choices for them) involved in various schemes for universal health care have been portrayed as unfeeling toward the millions of uninsured.... Orwellian Progressive guru George Lakoff repeatedly makes the case for progressive taxation in terms of the idea that wealthier America...

... and those of us in Delaware can again hang our heads in shame at Tom Carper's craven vote. Becky, that Girl in Short Shorts , lays out the best simple (but not simple-minded) analysis not only of what telecom amnesty means, but just how much of a travesty it is to portray the Democratically-controlled Congress as opposing the Bush administration on anything significant. Junior has also unequivocally stated he will veto any version which does not give amnesty to the telecommunications companies, who participated in his illegal spying program. He won't even accept a 21 day stop gap extension of the current law, to keep us safe until the House can act on this.. Its all or nothing, and its all about priorities. It seems protecting the pocketbooks of giant telecommunication companies is more important than dead Americans. So yesterday the Senate gave our president the greatest gift all. They retroactively rendered crimes committed by Bush’s illegal spying program totally cool an...

About two weeks ago I got into it with Jason on Delawareliberal over (of all things) opera . What's interesting is the comment Jason made in critiquing one of my argument: The logical fallacy that Libertarians like most, above all logical fallacies is that slippery slope argument. I pointed out in rebuttal: Not all slippery slope arguments are invalid–you guys use them all the time about Republicans when it suits your purposes, so get real. And Dana Garrett agreed with me: “Not all slippery slope arguments are invalid” Now there is a truth few know. Any chance you could teach it to Al Mascitti? If you tell him the predictable consequence of some action (that he likes, of course), his knee twitches and out comes the “You are committing the slippery slope fallacy.” Here’s the scoop on it folks: “If A happens, then by a gradual series of small steps through B, C,…, X, Y, eventually Z will happen, too. Z should not happen. Therefore, A should not happen, either.” The whole bit disappea...

One of the problems with Libertarians is that, frankly, the theoretical and strategic writing of self-styled Progressives is so difficult to read that we don't do much of it. This is something we have to get over, especially as the Progressives seemed to be in full swing of pulling off the same trick that Ronald Reagan did for conservatives in the 1980s: reframing the public political discourse in their favor. Reagan, followed by talk radio, actually managed to make the term "liberal" one that even politicians who were avowedly liberal needed to avoid if they wanted to get elected or re-elected. Liberal as a "brand" still has not been successfully rehabilitated. On the other hand, Dubya--with a lot of help from his neo-con friends and his opponents--has managed to self-destruct the brand value of "Conservatism" that Reagan created, so much so that today Rush Limbaugh announced , "I can see possibly not supporting the Republican nominee this elec...