Julian posts the key Time interview grafs. I’m down, of course, but universal preschool AIN’T CULTURALLY CONSERVATIVE, dood! State-supervised socialization for toddlers? Not for my future aloof, elite offspring. I can unironically tell you one little bit of irony: a universal preschool regime will produce Barack Obamas even less frequently than our current crude regime.

Ross has an unnerving post up that I’ve been brooding over for a while. It finishes on this note:
in 2001, when Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for … 3.3 percent of GDP. In the years between, it rose as high as 3.6 percent [...]

Be sure to read this from the NYT:
in a nation that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, the government has transformed from a reliable guarantor into effectively the only lender for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives.
Before, its more modest mission was to make more loans available [...]

If good grammar builds confidence, be considering I worriedsomely:
Our regulator has emphasized that we have continued to maintain the highest capital rating, and we are in the market everyday. We’ll continue to do so. — Sharon McHale, vice president for public relations, Freddie Mac
And for that matter:
Those institutions, Fannie and Freddie, have been responsible for [...]

Check out Robert Sibley’s piece in the Ottawa Citizen:
Obama has defined himself as the “man of destiny,” the candidate who can overcome racial divisions, bring home the troops and persuade terrorists to the ways of peace. This makes Obama’s story one of redemption and salvation. He speaks to a deep-seated desire on the part of [...]

That’s liberal/progressive blogger Brian Beutler, apparently, who had his spleen vented for him in the unsatisfying sense by some contemptible little bastard on the wrong side of Adams Morgan. I don’t know Brian, but many people do, and along with them I send a prayer and a burst of healing cosmic energy. Also, since Brian [...]

A lot of spluttering is taking place over the possibility certainty that Barack Obama is a ‘Christianist’ of some kind or another: see Rod (II), Daniel, Ross, Andrew (II), Ambinder. Sure enough, Andrew walked right into this one and has smartly admitted it very swiftly. Daniel seems for a minute to have the last word:
The [...]

Daniel thinks small-country regionalism is no laughing matter, whereas large-country republicanism may still be impossible to take seriously:
In the end, the federal republic was consolidated because it came to pass that an extended republic that was not consolidated would break up along regional or sectional lines according to the political differences between blocs of states.  [...]

My main worry about the Bush years is not that the President created problems so terrible that no one can undo them. My main worry is that the President has broken so many hearts and scrambled so many brains that people looking for commonsense fixes will be led by a trauma-stricken elite to do stupid [...]

In his American Conservative review of Matt Yglesias’ new book, Heads in the Sand, Austin Bramwell contends that, “[i]n the end,”
it is unclear whether Yglesias seeks anything more than an internationalist fig leaf for the policies he happens to prefer.
So what if he does? As my long trail of blog crumbs reveals, I have deep [...]

I should respond to some of these Vito-related comments, I think, because they sound reasonable enough at first blush and provide thereby a good means of sharpening my argument. First consider commenter Tel:
He wasn’t married at the time, but Thomas Jefferson did father several children with one of his slaves, starting in 1795. Should his [...]

Another doomed Republican, another sexual surplus and moral deficit:
Rep. Vito Fossella of New York acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week.
“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly [...]

With Will Wilkinson safely on the other side of the Earth, I am free to agree with him about something:
It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. Liberals who worry about religious home schooling are not wrong to [...]

Stands for, y’know, We Await Radical-life Extension’s Zarathustra. I see Sonny’s on board, praying for the Great Noontide. Then there’s this guy:
As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor [...]

It’s Grand Theft Auto IV (that’s “Four”, not a heroin reference). Nick Gillespie reports:
As sales mount for the game, now set in New York-like “Liberty City” and (hopefully featuring a whore-banging, money-laundering, hypocritical pol a la Eliott Spitzer), expect the protests to mount against the game, which has somehow helped add to generally lower crime [...]

Freddy Gray posts an @TAC on the way at least one glaring example of foreign policy hackery is sure to transcend the mere Bush era:
Very interesting and revealing post from Gideon Rachman about a lunch with Georgia’s President “Misha” Saakashvili [...]:
John McCain is also a personal friend – “the guy brought me a bulletproof vest [...]

From the point of [view of] the federal government’s balance sheet[,] there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between a dollar spent on health care, on a fighter plan[e], or on a tax cut. — Ezra Klein
Easy laughs aside, I wish someone would vociferously attack both this position and the one that says tax cuts [...]