Here's the REALLY short version of the above:

Conservatives are happy with the way things are. Liberals are not happy with the way things are and desire change.

I'm shocked.

That study was funded by....

The National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency.

I doubt it has been politicized. Don't you?

W.T. deserves a rest and relation time. I'd say we take up a collection plate. Yesterday I found a heads-up penny in the parking lot of IHOP diner.

W.T. needs to visit Australia. Oz can show him the red lights.

W.T. needs a escort with beautiful rouge cheeks and lipstick.

W.T. can have OZ show him tricks of the trade and the ropes.

W.T. is fun to read.

W.T. is AZ. `de Oscar.

W.T. is Mr. Cranky? no.

W.T. is acting 16? I hope.

W.T. is sowing the oats.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYCOyaIUCSo&feature=related

http://cato-at-liberty.org/2008/04/18/mccain-on-judges

CATO@LIBERTY
The blog of the Cato Institute.

McCain on Judges

Cato scholars have increasingly been evaluating the respective policies of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. The trade shop understandably prefers McCain (see my colleague Sallie James’s new paper), as does, cautiously, our director of health and welfare studies, Michael Tanner. The foreign policy shop, meanwhile, doesn’t like McCain because he is ”wedded to perpetual war” and generally given to neoconservative tendencies.

On judges, I’ll go with the trade and health care folks: While John McCain’s views on the First Amendment are unacceptable to freedom-lovers of any stripe, he has at least promised to nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of John Roberts and Sam Alito [...]

- - posted by Ilya Shapiro on 04.18.08
- - http://cato-at-liberty.org/2008/04/18/mccain-on-judges

http://cato.org/people/ilya-shapiro/

Ilya Shapiro
Senior Fellow, Center for Constitutional Studies and Editor-in-Chief, Cato Supreme Court Review

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato he was Special Assistant/Advisor to the Multi-National Force-Iraq on rule of law issues and practiced international, political, commercial, and antitrust litigation at Patton Boggs LLP and Cleary Gottlieb LLP. Mr. Shapiro writes the "Dispatches from Purple America" column for TCS Daily.com and has written for the L.A. Times, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, Roll Call, and National Review Online, among other publications. [...]

- - http://cato.org/people/ilya-shapiro/

This is not true. One can get people together to form a program to feed the hungry and homeless and there will be no outcry about individual rights. It is when you leave the area of voluntary cooperation and force people to do your will that you will hear an outcry.

You've found an interesting exception, perhaps (I suppose you have never heard of NIMBYism being applied to homeless shelters), and I will confess to a bit of rhetorical exaggeration. But it is exactly that response of "you are forcing tyranny upon me by asking me to step to the side on a public escalator, let alone to register my howitzer" that I was portraying as a typical American reflexive response to any kind of socially-oriented action. In short, thank you for stepping up and providing an example.

To be precise, it's not a matter of approving of the use of force, it's more a matter of defining "force" so broadly that everything except getting the hell out of the way fits into it.

And of course feeding the hungry is fine in America if it's faith-based and therefore "voluntary." I wonder what would happen if one proposed using taxes (gasp!) to do so. It's exactly that withering of the public space that allows faith and corporate welfare to creep in.

Even if you think an action is "for everyone's own good", others may well disagree with you.

That's what democratic debate is for. It's funny---I almost responded jokingly to Glenn's reasonable request by calling it "Socialism!" It's exactly what I'm talking about. Acting with restraint in public on one's own initiative shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't require either maternal or paternal nannyism, nor lead to anarchy.

It may seem odd to some people here, but the human being does not enjoy being forced to do things that he otherwise would not do.

It's all about consenting to being governed. Force should not and does not normally enter into it. I wonder if this is where libertarians stopped showing up for class?

On a larger scale, I have to wonder whether Americans have a weaker sense of social capital because we are all uprooted immigrants. Non-Americans grow up knowing certain things about how to behave---they learn to do/not do certain things, and therefore don't need to be "forced."

Here in the US, people wear underwear in public but believe nudity to be a crime. Damned activist judges again!

N/T

"Fierce individualism," a brief description of Rand philosophy, is pure authoritarianism, as pure individualism always must be. If any one individual can make a decision that affects others, and do so without consultation, then those affected must obey. The combination of "freedom" and "individualism" masks this truism.

- Frederick Thayer, Professor, Public Policy, Southern University

Note here that if I'm counting accurately, the "Blue Dog" coalition is in serious jeopardy of vanishing as an excuse for or threat to the Democratic majority next year. With 48 members, and given the current margin of the Democratic majority in the House, a net swing of only 7 seats from Republican to Democrat obliterates that 48-member bloc's ability to join with Republicans to defeat the Democratic caucus.

The fly in the ointment here is that the above seems to assume that all new Dem seats will not be bluedogs--that the bluedogs will not gain any seats themselves.

I think this is not likely. Take a look at the seat just picked up in LA.--almost certainly a bluedog. The gains to be (theoretically) made by Dems may well be in fairly conservative districts, ones that previously elected GOP. It is thus equally likely--perhaps even more likely--that the Bluedog caucus will grow larger in relationship to the Dem caucus as a whole, and hence even more powerful/influential.