If you’re dying to hear me hold forth on FISA and surveillance while I’m on hiatus, I’m going to be on a Center for American Progress panel tomorrow morning with Spencer Ackerman, Caroline Fredrickson from the ACLU, and Nita Chaudhary from MoveOn. Update: Those of you not physically located in Washington, D.C., can watch the […]

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This animal rights discussion is reminding me how little worth saying can be said in blog posts. I think I’m done with this medium for a while.

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Ah, Internet, you are a boundless cornucopia. Hear your IP address read out in orgasmic moans. (HT: YitC)

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Via roomie Dave, a group called Freedom Watch has produced a series of ads urging the importance of staying in Iraq. Their nominal argument (for some appropriately loose sense of that term) is something along the lines of: 9/11! Iraq! 9/11! Iraq! We’re going to keep mentioning these things in close proximity! Even at this […]

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James Joyner writes: While there are many theories and many stripes of libertarianism … it seems to me that at the core of all of them is the Harm Principle…. It would seem, therefore, that any libertarian case for preventing cruelty to animals — or, more correctly, as Sanchez notes, the particular classes of animals […]

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Kerry links to Will Wilkinson’s unflattering review of the most recent anti-consumerist jeremiad from Ben “Jihad vs. McWorld” Barber: Barber claims that not only is modern capitalism no longer satisfying real needs, but is in some sense making us worse off. The modern consumer, Barber writes, “is less the happy sensualist than the compulsive masturbator, […]

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From Marketplace today: Daniel Mitchell: A capitalist system without losses or bankruptcy is like religion without hell. Yes, I mean, who ever heard of such a thing?

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There’s an awful lot of cruelty toward animals in the news lately, and Jim Henley wants to know whether there’s a “libertarian case for animal cruelty laws.” But I actually don’t think the question can really be answered as framed. Libertarianism is a family of doctrines defined by a set of views about the rights […]

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I think it’s because I’m reading a novel in which art figures pretty heavily, but my first thought upon reading the headline ““Olmert bans mobiles in meetings” was: “What has he got against Calder?”

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Perhaps you’ve noticed the near-unanimous condemnation of the Protect America Act by people not currently, formerly, or in their fevered daydreams employed by a Republican administration? Fear not! As Andy McCarthy explains, the urgency and consensus with which people are objecting just shows how little weight the objections should be given, as it’s proof that […]

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