I’ve been reading a bit of this panel discussion thing about conservatism’s future. It’s mostly an epic wankfest and it’s remarkable how much Larison stands out. I liked this especially:

Conservatism rebels against the concentration of power and wealth, temperamental conservatism teaches that power corrupts, while the movement concentrates in acquiring political gain particularly on national security.

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Moby Dick:

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

I’m sure there are also all kinds of paradoxes in liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is that people like me are supposed to have as a philosophy. And this is why I think it’s a mistake to think that pondering Burke and Hume or their liberal equivalents, whoever that would be, will lead to any kind of clarity.

In the future, the FTC can rest assured I will burn every free book from the Heritage Foundation and Regnery. Considering I felt like going on a three day bender after I read the Party of Death by Ramesh Ponneru, burning the damned things is probably healthier in the long run. If I get a copy of Going Rogue, I might just be driven to shoot smack.

As a side note, it is really hard to argue for good government when you have jackasses like Cleveland running around.

(via)

BTW- Frontline returns tonight, and the subject is Afghanistan:

Should be a good one.

Vote Bitsy:

We have been slacking and really need to push hard this week. Big write-up about her in a local NC newspaper.

Go vote.

I was actually thinking of reading that Matt Latimer book until I found him writing this:

In fact, even the odd coupling of Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan agreed that excerpts from my book made Bush look smarter and funnier. Christopher Buckley and Maureen Dowd said Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney came across as characters more textured than is commonly known. (Dowd, as is her wont, said I let them off too easy.) And nearly everyone who read the book said it was funny and accurate in its depiction of the silliness of our nation’s capital.

I mention this to underscore that Republican elites in Washington have gotten so overly serious, so defensive and so insular that they have lost the ability to be self-aware and laugh at themselves, much less learn from their mistakes.

What the hell is wrong with people these days? Don’t they know better than to (a) fluff their own books and (b) pretend they’re fluffing their own books just to prove some larger lofty point?

The moment I heard Snowe was going to vote for the bill, I began furiously refreshing Red State for the reaction. Finally, they deliver:

That is right, folks. To show unhappy they are, they are going to ask you to buy rock salt through their amazon store and mail it to Olympia Snowe. They don’t call them the Red State Strike Farce for nothing.

Seriously, how do I make a joke about this?

Has anyone offered an amendment requiring employers to, somewhere on every pay stub, list how much the employer and employee contribution to their respective health care plan was for that pay period, the cumulative for the year, and how much that is up from the same time last year, over the past five years, and over the past ten years?

That seems like it could be very valuable information that could really inform people just how much money is going to the insurance boys and girls and how it is really impacting their wages.

I’m really sick of this infatuation with Liz Cheney. The only reason the media is paying any attention to her is because she will launch wild attacks on the current administration. She’s basically a less-attractive Sarah Palin with a more prominent lineage.

Who cares what she thinks? Aren’t there people who actually know things who you could talk to, or are you just eager to help Dick’s daughter rehab the family image?

I’ve mostly grown weary of birtherism, but there are some real gems in some of the recent court filings.

On page 27, explaining why it’s good that Congress, not the courts, are in charge of removing presidents from office:

“Or perhaps an eccentric citizen has become convinced that the President is an alien from Mars, and the courts should order DNA testing to enforce the Constitution [7] ...”

“[7] The Court does not make this observation simply as a rhetorical device for emphasis; the Court has actually received correspondence assailing its previous order in which the sender, who, incidentally, challenged the undersigned to a “round of fisticuffs on the Courthouse Square,” asserted that the President is not human.”

The corresponder sounds an awful lot like Zell Miller to me.

Depressing.

I kind of hope the Roberts gang overturns this, just so I can read about what kinds of alternative rough justice (here; here; here) the pundits will suggest:

The Supreme Court will consider throwing out the convictions of former Enron Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling for his role in the collapse of the one-time energy giant.

The court said Tuesday it will hear Skilling’s appeal of lower court rulings that upheld all 19 of his 2006 convictions of conspiracy, securities fraud, insider trading and lying to auditors involving the 2001 collapse of Enron.

Update. Obviously, I think Skilling belongs in jail. But I really would enjoy reading all the crazy shit the media would come up with if he walks. And, also, to be honest, I think there’s too much of an attitude of “the Enron guys got nailed, so it means our system is fine now” out there.

Michael Steele’s Official RNC Blog is titled “WHAT UP?”

Tammy Bruce announces the next Nobel Prize winner, and it is a racoon. Because the word coon has never had another meaning in the past.

I’m kind of pissed off I am feeling a little better, because after fifteen minutes of reading blogs, I want to go back to bed.

Anyone surprised by this needs their head examined:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) is risking a shot at becoming the top Republican on an influential Senate committee by backing Democratic healthcare legislation, according to senators on the panel.

A Senate Democrat on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee said Republicans on the panel are threatening to vote against Snowe, who is in line for the senior GOP post that is about to come open.

“Wake up,” the Democrat told a reporter last week when questioned if the Republicans would retaliate against Snowe for crossing party lines.

As much as I bitch about the sheer chaos of the Democratic party from all the noisy voices (and it truly is maddening, as some days I hate Democrats more as a Democrat than I did as a Republican), it is far better than the alternative.

I simply can not believe this is not a bigger story:

Orwell once wrote, “[He] who controls the past, controls the future.” Texas Governor Rick Perry has apparently taken the lesson to heart. He’s now removed a fourth member of the Texas commission responsible for investigating whether Texas (and Perry) executed an innocent man. It’s whitewashing at its worst.

As it is, this story already reads like a Grisham novel- allegations of murder and arson, the execution of an innocent man, corrupt politicos What exactly does the media need before they cover this?

Seriously, there is a Pulitzer in this story.

It took a WaPo editorial, but Sullivan is finally on board:

The WaPo is right about this: the president is not responsible for not legislating something; and everything the gay rights movement wants is a legislative act right now. So aim the pressure at the appropriate people. Why does Nancy Pelosi believe the US should still be firing soldiers solely because they’re gay? Has anyone put her on the spot about that lately?

The last few days have been crazy. I was talking to a friend via email, and he said, essentially, that the squeaky wheel gets the grease- look at the NRA. To which I can only respond, I never recall Wayne LaPierre going on television, or writing a story, or screaming from a blog, that Bush was “just words” and “worse than Clinton.” He would never do that, because he recognized that Bush was on the NRA’s side on these issues. Instead, he and his establishment would lobby congress and spend money trying shape public opinion. A crazy idea, I know. There is a lesson here.

Meanwhile, it turns out that outside the chorus of the professionally angry, people who are actually in the know understood that the administration was working to end DADT and wasn’t just words:

Shortly after President Barack Obama pledged Saturday to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Administration’s highest-ranking LGBT official said the White House is speaking with certain senators about strategies for repealing the policy—specifically Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“On ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ this administration is talking directly to the Hill—we are in direct discussions with Senator Lieberman,” John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, told The Advocate.

***

Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the repeal lobby group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said during a symposium two weeks ago that he believed a bill was only weeks from introduction.

Though Sarvis said he preferred a bipartisan track, he added, “A number of other Democrats are ready for bill introduction and I suspect we may soon have a Senate bill introduced.”

Now I’m sure the usual suspects will claim that the little shit fit from the last 48 hours is the driving force behind this (I’m imagining fifty self-congratulatory and misguided “SEE, THEY LISTENED” posts), but as you can see, the head of the SLDN has known for quite some time that work was underway for a repeal of DADT.

I suppose it is probably pointless to note that the people who have been most obnoxious the last 48 hours probably were also berating Obama for not knee-capping Lieberman a while back.