Beloved

4-hour work week? Sarkozy won't like it.

John Hood

In reviewing an op-ed by Mark Moyar, John Hood makes this unbelievable argument:

Basically, anti-war Democrats think that their statements and policy proposals are a response to an impossible situation in Iraq. They have it backward. Their statements and policy proposals are a main reason why the situation in Iraq is so dire. Like it or not, the enemy is counting on them — it is trying to manipulate American public opinion, because it can't win on the battlefield. Their goal is an ignominious American retreat. It cannot be in our interest to comply.

If you want to make an argument that attitudes on the homefront are detrimental to the war effort, you can do so while perhaps retaining an ounce of credibility, but to argue that statements by Democrats are the main reason that Iraq is in such a bad state is just plain idiotic, ahistorical and dishonest.

Nick Cohen

I think that this Nick Cohen piece should go in a museum vault so that everyone remembers the curious specimen that is the leftist who loves nothing more than to sound the death knell of the left.

Rock

I'm not sure if this Nineties rock playlist makes me lose more respect for Matthew or for the Nineties.

Moleskine Hacks

This should be interesting for some of the GTD (Getting Things Done) crowd. I'm not a big fan of Moleskine myself, as the paper in the ruled notebooks seems cheap for how much you're paying, but I'm always interested in such life hacks anyway.

Second Acts

Sometimes I'll be surfing from blog to blog and read something without fully realizing the context in which I'm reading it. Take this post:

Who must be the president's choice to replace Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank? John Bolton.

Funny, right? But I suddenly realized that I was reading Kathryn Lopez at the Corner, not an ironic post by somebody like Yglesias. She actually believes that would be a good thing. And on the same thread, check this out:

So who? Well, the best solution would be to simply dismantle the Bank and convert its capacious main building into a hotel, convenient to the White House and other Washington attractions. But since that’s unlikely to happen, here’s another thought ... There’s a whole roster of patriotic Americans who would have a similar effect, and as we have just seen, they don’t have to actually do anything wrong. The Bank will arrange that for them. In that spirit, if they are willing to sacrifice for the good of our country, and indeed, the good of the world, how about we send John Bolton, followed by Don Rumsfeld, followed by …. well, you get the idea.

What these folks would really prefer is that we just completely dismantle multinational institutions such as the UN and World Bank, but in lieu of that we'll just send them our most incompetent, belligerent bastards and do as much damage as we can that way. Well, if nothing else you can say they're honest about it.

Ron Paul

Andrew Sullivan's latest Ron Paul post, a YouTube clip from The View, shows that Sullivan continues to be taken with the old-school Republican candidate, and illustrates Jonathan Raban's point that Sullivan has a schoolboy tendency to hero-worship, often based on scant evidence. I'm glad Ron Paul is in the debate crowd, don't get me wrong, and he certainly stands for a kind of conservatism which is alien to the rest of the GOP field, but the guy is also a bit loopy.

New Commander-in-Chief

That about says it.

What I'm Waiting For

Gore. I'm still convinced that he's just brilliantly letting the others take the heat of the campaign for months on end while he goes about his other business and that he'll throw his hat in sometime this summer. Derbyshire seems convinced not only of Gore's candidacy but of Gore's inevitable ascension to the White House.

Kamchatka

Some very cool photos by Sebastiao Salgado from his continuing voyage around the world.

The Centre Doesn't Hold

I think that this post by Tony Karon and an agreeing response from Yglesias are the best retorts to Alex Massie. Massie thinks that any peace process that ends up with extremists in power is very flawed and not necessarily worth cheering for. Here's Karon:

The original Good Friday agreement ten years ago was brokered by very different parties to the ones who have now joined a unity government. On the Catholic side, it was the SDLP of John Hume who was the dominant voice at the table, while the Ulster Unionists of David Trimble represented Protestant loyalists. But the electorate eventually rejected those parties, and each community chose more uncompromising parties — the Sinn Fein on the nationalist side and the Democratic Unionists on the loyalist side — to represent them at the table.

The government of Tony Blair did not flinch or give up hope, it pressed on, pushing the chosen representatives of both communities into a process that led to agreement. And the agreement may be far stronger than its predecessor, in that it was brokered by hard men on both sides and that has left no significant rejectionist constituency on either side.

And Yglesias:

This is what makes the search for "moderate Arabs" generally and moderate Palestianians in particular so inane. If, by "moderate," we mean something like "eschews violence" or "accepts the basic legitimacy of Israel" or both, then, obviously, those aren't the people you need to strike a deal with. As Yitzhak Rabin put it, "one does not make peace with one's friends, one makes peace with one's enemies." This was also what made Ariel Sharon's term in office and the breaks -- minor as some of them were -- he made with the Israeli far-right so significant. Peace doesn't need to be made by the very most extreme elements on both sides, but you can't exclude any faction that has a non-trivial following simply on the grounds that that faction's leadership isn't moderate. It's easy, after all, to broker a deal between moderates. The trick is to moderate the views of influential non-moderates.

Exactly. Paisley and Adams are the ones who needed to form the backbone of the agreement in order to make it relevant.

At a Clip

As a Fast Walker myself, I found this interesting. And it doesn't surprise me that Edinburgh has some of the fastest walkers in the UK; I've definitely noticed that walking around town. I can attest for Dublin too. Only one US city on the list? I guess that's not so surprising.

Starbucks

More people who can't handle being exposed to ideas with which they disagree.

The Insular Right

First there was Conservapedia, now QubeTV, a right-wing knock-off of YouTube. Apparently the founders believed YouTube was too liberally biased (the piano-playing cat did look a little pink) and began this venture as a refuge for the oppressed American right. Someone could make a killing with a conservative search engine. The American right clearly doesn't want to engage with unfiltered reality.

Debatable

Through Yglesias, I discovered this blog by Alex Massie, a Scottish journalist contributing to the Scotsman, New Republic, Scotland on Sunday and others, and living in Washington DC. Looks like good stuff.

Election

More results here.

Ballots

Who will step up to be Katherine MacHarris? Sweet memories of 7 years ago.

More here.

A Better Nation

On Scotland and Canada.

Election Day

Here's a place for Scottish election news.

Salad Days

Most hilarious headline ever. Man, the German press is tough.