This post first appeared on Balloon Juice.
Via Atrios, an excellent post about the recession:
[Recession is] often taken as a big deal in the simple sense that the experience of recession sucks. But, people say, there are lots of bad experiences and this is just one of them. Sometimes we have to suck it up.
My argument is no, this isn’t just another bad experience. Its a failure of our most basic institutions and is leading to pure loss.
This post first appeared on Balloon Juice.
A Lexington columnist (via) notes that Rand Paul doesn’t know fuck all about Kentucky:
A person who has “lived” in Kentucky for 17 years might know how “Bloody Harlan” got its name and that The Dukes of Hazzard was set in the fictional Hazzard (two Z’s) County, Georgia, not the Kentucky city of Hazard (one Z).
[.....]
Not only is Eastern Kentucky’s drug problem “a real pressing issue,” it is arguably the region’s and the state’s most pressing issue. For Paul to think otherwise, he must have spent his 17 years in this state in a cocoon — perhaps paying 24/7 homage to Aqua Buddha.
What I find interesting are the similarities with the original Tea Party candidate, Doug Hoffman:
Douglas L. Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate for the 23rd Congressional District, showed no grasp of the bread-and-butter issues pertinent to district residents in a Thursday morning meeting with the Watertown Daily Times editorial board.
[.....]
Coming to Mr. Hoffman’s defense, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who accompanied the candidate on a campaign swing, dismissed regional concerns as “parochial” issues that would not determine the outcome of the election. On the contrary, it is just such parochial issues that we expect our representative to understand and be knowledgeable about, if he wants to be our voice in Washington.
This shouldn’t be surprising: conservatism, at least in its Tea Party incarnation, is ideological and abstract, not pragmatic and concrete. Air-fairy ideas about “freedom” are considered much more important than a working knowledge of local issues.
This post originally appeared on Balloon Juice.
Some interesting political and demographic facts about the Arizona law….
Polls in Arizona:
This post first appeared on Balloon Juice.
Racial supremacy is a fairly taboo topic in the media. That’s why William Saletan thought it was exciting to tell liberals that they were no better than creationists if they failed to accept the “studies” done by white supremacist J. Philippe Rushton. It’s also why Andrew Sullivan and George Will thought it was exciting to promote The Bell Curve. It doesn’t matter that there is little-to-no scientific evidence for any of it. What matters is that taking on an edgy topic like this proves you are a brave media maverick.
But I’d argue that Saletan’s and Sullivan’s flirtations with white supremacy are mostly symptomatic of the general Slate/TNR fetish for contrarianism. Sure, you think that white supremacist notions are just for bigots, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords blah blah blah. In particular, Saletan’s white supremacist piece could just as easily have been a multi-part treatise on why Creed is underrated.
The popularity of Steve Sailer among principled, intellectually honest conservatives is much more troubling. Sailer writes for site called VDARE.com; the name is taken from the name of the first white English child born in North America. After Hurricane Katrina, Sailer wrote
