Williamsburg Is Coming (So Here’s a Huge Pile of Politics)

All right, my post-Groundhog Day extra six weeks of online political musings has clearly run its course.  

Spring has come, and it’s time to get off Blogger and Facebook until ready to present my revamped, Williamsburg-ready face to the world (you’ll see this site and my Facebook pages changing in bits and pieces over the next few weeks, probably even producing a short-term technical glitch or two, but don’t panic). 

One last big political entry before that (though I may tweet a little during the transition – and I’m sure you’ll get ahold of me one way or another eventually if you really need to):

•Romney now looks like the inevitable GOP nominee (regardless of whether he gets there via a brokered convention – and in spite of the fact that the Tea Party’s acquiescence to him has been exaggerated, a colleague notes).  Senator Sanatorium reminds us all that there are crazier things out there, and he may continue to do so as Romney’s v.p. running mate (gotta keep those socially-conservative states that are skeptical of Romney onboard somehow, I fear).  The man explicitly denounces Goldwater and the limited-government wing of the GOP – you can watch him doing it right here.

(Admittedly, there’s some waffling praise of decentralization...or something...at the end, and I’m sure the resulting muddle pleases William Kristol and David Brooks.  I’ll vote for Ron Paul in the New York primary next month and, barring the highly unexpected, for Gary Johnson in November.)

Depressingly, Romney has to be asking himself who’s more easily alienated (as opposed to inspired) by his v.p. pick: social conservatives or libertarians?  I suspect we libertarians are more easily lost this time, though we were looking important for a month or so there (but here’s Sean Trende with some counter-intuitive insights on the real voting blocs).

•At least Santorum understands Goldwater means liberty and smaller government, even though he opposes them.  By contrast, the left probably can’t tell any of these people apart – nor can some on the right.  I’m reminded of an absurd piece – in National Review, I think it was – making Goldwater out to be a full-blown religious conservative.  Luckily, Drew Rushford has this Goldwater passage at the ready:

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”

For me, the fundamental question for testing people’s political allegiances is something earthly-yet-moral like this: Do you want money and resources to flow away from stupid people/decisions and toward wise ones – or vice versa?

•“Punk rock Republican” Andrew Breitbart fighting from beyond the grave with Obama-from-twenty-one-years-ago over Derrick Bell at Harvard has to be one of the most Gen X moments in politics so far this year.  Ah, nostalgia. 

•But as for the kids these days: I am all for Occupants

Left-Libertarians Have and Eat Cake Once Again, in a Feminist Way

This post at the deeply confused left-leaning site BleedingHeartLibertarians caused me to become deeply confused about how the hell one posts a comment on the site without interacting in some unexplained way with a social media service or setting up an account with a service called Disqus.  Most likely, this comments format appealed to the BHL crowd because liberalism works best when insulated from external criticism.  Nonetheless, I'll post my intended comment as an entry here: 

No, no, no, no.  Look, it is not out of lack of nuance or ignorance of other areas of cultural analysis that libertarians define coercion narrowly by physical and fraudulent attacks on body and possessions.  

They do so because of their awareness, from surveying the real world, that you can creep up slowly, over the course of several paragraphs -- or even whole academic careers -- to the suggestion that sexist orders from an employer (for example) are somehow also coercive (maybe sorta kinda) -- and their accompanying awareness that no matter how cautiously you do it, you have then blown libertarianism to smithereens and opened the floodgates to the idea that outcomes that are voluntary by the old standard libertarian litmus test but that you really, really dislike are now suspect.  

And despite the pretense of having some other morality-or-autonomy-respecting criterion in the BHL entry above, it does not come down to anything other than saying, "The boss is just way freaking me out with that suggestion [assuming, obviously, the boss is committing no fraud or contract violation with the new suggestion]."  

Acting as if some voluntary arrangements are, as it were, just too icky and unpleasant to be voluntary arrangements (coal mining, anyone?) is such a short road to modern liberalism -- and the condoning of legal responses to (what were under traditional libertarian criteria) non-coercive but annoying outcomes -- that it barely warrants being called a road.  

It would be more accurate to describe it as libertarianism evaporating in an instant before our eyes, so quickly does this collapse into an intellectuals-led social-democratic guessing game about which deals are permitted and which (likely unbeknownst to some of the poor bastards attempting to enter into them) are just too, too autonomy-violating.   

Failing to say loudly and clearly that no legal remedy can be justified in these hypothetical non-violent non-fraudulent yet somehow coercive situations only makes the enterprise more troubling (especially given that, as you may've noticed, we already live in a world in which everyone except libertarians is bursting with reasons to adopt legal remedies and needs no help from us) -- as does the abject failure in the entry linked above to even note as an aside that employers (who are individuals, too, after all) might tend (like the CEO of American Apparel, reportedly) to prefer a workplace in which it is understood that superiors will grope and ogle underlings. 

Since the BHL crowd leans left, to get some idea how vague, troubling, and dangerous all this is, I can only suggest that you imagine me bringing over to the BHL blog an army of hypothetical HHLs (right-leaning "hard-hearted libertarians" who, hypothetically, regard certain arrangements as too tradition-violating to be truly "voluntary") and having them (ever so thoughtfully and articulately) let their imaginations run wild about how important the concept of "coercion" is but how we would do well to broaden it to include sexually demeaning things like porn and prostitution and divorce, not to mention atheism.  

To avoid that clash, abandon the BHL project and return to libertarianism proper before you unwittingly destroy your own parent-philosophy.

Or if you really need a simpler explanation: imagine a "bleeding-heart free-speech amendment," which was steeped in all the finest classical liberal rhetoric about the evil of censorship…and sneaked in at the end a reminder that social pressure can also be censorship, so we'd better not allow, y'know, the hurtful words.  If you think that'd be moronic -- take another hard look at bleeding-heart libertarianism.  Please.  Now.  (Don't "force" me to "force" you through social pressure.) 

John Carter (Princess of Mars), Stan Lee, Edward Gorey, the Lurch/JFK tie, T. Rex, and other art

Obviously, I will have to see John Carter (in IMAX 3D at the Broadway/68th theatre or bust).  It’s based on the century-old sci-fi works by Edgar Rice Burroughs that gave us not only otherworldly arena combat but also offhand faux-alien jargon like “nerf” that would echo in later sci-fi works (they should have a nerf-herder character in the movie just to mess with George Lucas).

To celebrate the release, here are five geek/fantasy notes from acquaintances:

•Austin Petersen, fellow Fox veteran, notes these encouraging words from Cracked.com:

[I]n a documentary on the DVD for the first film, Iron Man co-creator Stan Lee flat out says that he created a capitalist, commie-fighting, industrialist, weapon-manufacturing superhero as a way to deliberately antagonize hippie-leaning comic book fans. Anti-military sentiment was high back in the 60s, and Lee wanted to challenge himself by creating a character he could force them to like.

•It was Julia Strohmeyer who suggested the excursion I made Wednesday to see the new Edward Gorey exhibit at Columbia – and I only hope I don’t sound like an ingrate when I say that ironically, I’m getting a little tired of all affected forms of traditionalism, from the neo-Victorian to the steampunk. 

I realized recently that within seconds of seeing a blog making prominent use of phrases such as “Zounds, madame!” I know it will also contain nineteenth-century illustrations with ironic captions and that the odds are good it will deploy Latin, Catholicism, or links to conservative friends of mine such as Tim Carney or James Poulos, possibly all of these things (not that I’m entirely objecting).  This may be too narrow and predictable to sustain, like America’s interest in manga. 

And any costume party involving corsets must get expensive.  (I’m too tired to even make a diagram showing how all these things are related.)

•Dimitri Cavalli e-mails with this important information about an actor associated with the comparably goth cartoonist Charles Addams:

Before gaining fame as Lurch on The Addams Family, and then as the narrator of the opening credits of The Incredible Hulk, Ted Cassidy worked as announcer for WFAA Radio in Dallas.  Here he is helping the station’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination.  (About one minute in.)

•Anastasia Uglova notes the amusingly simple and sad-sack adventures of T. Rex Trying. 

•And pehaps best of all, Dan Greenberg notes this panorama of art history re-envisioned through a sci-fi lens.  Now that’s art. 

We May Need to Resume That Progressive-Conservative Dialogue

It’s International Women’s Day, and I’ll celebrate by not arguing with feminists – or, better still, I will recall a long-lost era when people on different parts of the political spectrum could break bread and talk civilly with one another.  I mean, of course: 2007.

Or at least, I can’t help thinking something useful was happening around then in the form of a “wonk dialogue” among progressives and free-market conservatives who were beginning to talk about the fact that government is neither as egalitarian as the former would like nor as small as the latter would like (nor as socialist as the latter usually fear but instead about as corporatist as the left had long said). 

Acquaintances of mine who were not all of the same political stripe were starting to take what one might almost call a Clintonian interest in the problem of real government being unlike the ideals of any philosophical faction: Dan Gerstein, Robert A. George, David Bernstein (one of the David Bernsteins, anyway), Julia Kamin, and Koli Mitra all organized or attended events here in NYC around then that somehow fit into this trans-partisan conversation (sometimes featuring guest speakers such as the moderate John McWhorter).

Though that feels like it was only yesterday, it was a different (and arguably less partisan) era in several ways: pre-financial crisis, pre-Obama presidency, pre-Tea, pre-Occupy, and prior to the libertarian shift in emphasis toward cultivating “Ron Paul Republicans” (and seemingly pretty decisively against cultivating “liberal-tarians”).  But when all those far noisier phenomena have quieted, it might be worth rekindling that progressive/conservative dialogue. 

And it was a slightly different conversation than either the “liberaltarian” or fusionist (whether neo or paleo) conversations between libertarians and other strains, in that it was less about finding already-existing areas of overlap or easy agreement and more about wrestling with the colossal real-world problem of our ideologies being almost irrelevant to government as it actually is. 

That problem looks more relevant than ever, though, with the Tea Party railing against the major political party that supposedly represents it for not tackling the debt, and the Occupants (can I call them Occupants?) rightly denouncing corporatism and bailouts (when not wrongly denouncing markets, accounting, and sometimes math itself).  I may not be the only one who feels oddly hung over when trying to recollect what ever became of that thread of conversation. 

Intellectuals were actually ahead of events at that point – and perhaps should have talked with greater urgency.  But divisive Obamaphilia and Obamaphobia put those talks on hold – until now, perhaps, with people on both sides (all three if you count frustrated libertarians) willing to talk more thoughtfully again about how, as political ideologues, we’ve all screwed up royally for the past several decades and overlooked some huge problems.

Perhaps this is one of many vexing and complicating conversations we can have soon at those new bar events I’ll host in Williamsburg.

P.S. In the meantime, absent some Ron Paul-boosting miracle, I will take some small consolation (and it really is very small) in things like Romney’s Michigan victory speech last week repeatedly emphasizing the Constitution and “smaller government” – a formulation we should hold him to if he gets elected.  He consciously wants those libertarian votes, I think.  Santorum seemingly does not.  Obama plainly does not.  It’s a start.  But I predict I’ll be voting for Gary Johnson in November. 

Madison Rising live, David Friedman (and me) and Obama on video

The conservative rock band I wrote about for New York Post (and for Newsmax, in a piece likely appearing next month) is performing Friday at 6:30 at Sullivan Hall. 

Madison Rising put a video homage to the late Andrew Breitbart online – and their manager notes that Breitbart’s (pop-culture-informed) mission was described as a search for “punk rock Republicans.” 

Indeed, at an informal memorial toast to Breitbart on Monday night, a few of us took Breitbart’s reported musical tastes as sufficient justification to request Smiths songs and the like on the jukebox – but I soon had to exit to host the talk by David Friedman seen in this video, shot by a very helpful Danny Panzella.

For a quick lesson in the difference between good moderates and bad moderates, see this nice Mickey Kaus defense of Breitbart against the now chronically-dissatisfied and fun-ruining David Frum.  When I saw Donna Brazile talking with obvious warmth about how Breitbart would eagerly give lengthy and useful Web-using advice even to his worst political foes, I figured a wave of surprisingly nice things was about to be said about him from counter-intuitive parts of the political spectrum.

I have no idea what Obama footage Breitbart was planning to release at the time of his death, but here’s a quite charming clip of Obama in 1991 at Harvard Law School sounding exactly like himself.

Even Obama once described himself as hanging around with punks back in those days, so I certainly don’t pretend rock n’ roll alone can prevent statism.  Madison Rising does more of an Alice in Chains grunge sort of thing than punk, though, so we’ll see if that brings down big government.  See you Friday.  

Super Tuesday and a Meta Tomorrow

I see comics artist Dean Haspiel -- who among other things drew a skeptical account of the Cuban Revolution -- is one of the competing writers at the Literary Death Match at the Back Room tonight at 8pm.  And Cuba is a reminder that no matter how heated the GOP primary has gotten, in the grand historical/geopolitical scheme of things, the candidates aren't that far apart.  

Of course, my favorite remains Ron Paul -- and the best thing for the libertarian movement right now might actually be if he and Gary Johnson ran as the Libertarian Party ticket -- but I'm pragmatic enough to see the long-term advantages of Paul seeing his GOP run through to the convention and retaining enough good will to boost his son Rand Paul's future prospects.  

Romney's new emphasis on his "more jobs, less debt, smaller government" mantra (and wife's Kid Rock shout-out during the same Michigan victory appearance) is at least a feint in the right direction.  I don't expect him to be much better than Bill Clinton, but he's hardly a communist.  

And if it's useful to step back from the combat once in a while and remember our similarities, sometimes the first step to seeing family resemblances is admitting shared history. 

After all, we all inherit the history of anarchism, anti-imperialism, Cold Warrior bravery, environmental concerns, industrial revolution, abolitionism, traditionalism, avant-gardism, moderation, democracy, monarchy, globalism, localism, federalism, mass movements, reform, conservatism, feminism, manliness, secularism, science, and religion -- and we can make all these things fit together if we honestly prefer that to fighting. 

I mentioned at last night's (excellent) David Friedman talk that the upcoming Williamsburg bar events I'll host will be more eclectic, and that includes a willingness to see what unexpected and unorthodox political notions arise in the new arena.  The world as a whole does not pick one ideological strain and ignore all others.  The world remains fusionist, in the broadest sense, even when the Republicans can't quite pull off the art of the seamless blend.  

Over the long haul, the world mixes and matches traditions shamelessly -- sometimes in blenders such as Super Tuesday but also via ambiguous works of art or party-switching politicians -- and posterity may not even recognize the once-discordant elements underlying the strange new hybrids.  We may need to create some in Williamsburg.

Anarchy Tonight! (an optimistic glimpse of speaker David Friedman’s future)

It’s Monday.  Tonight (after spanning the political spectrum with a tour of the New York Times and a 7pm stop at Sanctuary Bar, where some folks will toast the late Andrew Breitbart), I will head down to old LOLITA BAR (266 Broome St.) to host the previously-noted talk there by anarcho-capitalist economist DAVID FRIEDMAN at 9pm.  Join me!  Together we will rule...nothing.  No one should rule.

Friedman may be the writer with views closest to my own, so of course I will take it as a terrible personal slight if you do not attend.  Besides, his talk on “Global Warming and Other Good Things in Our Future” will give you reason to welcome tomorrow – and will defy the usual right-vs.-left analysis.

A dozen more thoughts about politics, the past, and the future:

1. I recently scoffed at the decades-ago warning that robots would end up producing all our music – yet (as Jake Harrison points out), tiny computer-guided quadrotor flying-drones have now been programmed to perform the James Bond theme song.  The lab that built them, called GRASP, is looking more like SPECTRE with each passing day, and plainly we are all going to die in some way resembling this video clip (you think I’m joking).

2. If the future brings a moon colony, I only hope it looks more like the one Gingrich imagines than like the one in next month’s eagerly-anticipated film Iron Sky, about a Palin-like president fending off lunar fascists.  Perhaps Friedman can address this issue – or give us hope that the moon will end up having revolutionary anarcho-capitalists on it, as in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. 

3. To learn how law works on Mars, by contrast, you may need to join me in seeing John Carter this weekend, in theatres a full 100 years after the original novella – and somewhere out there, I hope a 105-year-old fan who read it when it came out in 1912 is complaining that they’ve gotten something wrong in the film.  (Had things gone as once planned, by the way, it would not have been Disney who first released a theatrical John Carter but Warner Brothers animators back in the 1930s – before Snow White.  We can only imagine how that might have altered the history of animation.)

4. Santorum does not seem much concerned with forward-looking things like robots or off-world colonies.  On the other hand, economist Don Boudreaux wrote this criticism of those who, among other things, want the government to mandate payments for contraception: “Here again is another instance of ‘I want what you earn’ lauded as being enlightened, while ‘I want what I earn’ [is] criticized as being backward.”

(By the way, do many leftists feel shame living off rich parents’ trust funds – much like that felt by welfare recipients – all of it sublimated as anger?  That would explain a great deal.  Being a parasite is a fast track to self-hatred, after all, and one obvious response is to seek some way of claiming the moral/political high ground.)

5. Since I started out complaining about Santorum, though, I should post a better link to that hula hoop chick I linked on Facebook as a small anti-Santorum pro-sexytime protest.  I deleted it on Facebook not because Santorum pulled off a belated quasi-tie in Michigan but simply because that other link was wonky (in a non-political sense of the word). 

6. Here she is hooping to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs of Williamsburg, future site of Seavey-hosted bar events.

7. Speaking of protests against right-wingers, I find myself in the odd position, years after Brown, of noting that a Brown Daily Herald columnist

"WilliamsbURGH! A Music War," if you will

I’m hosting a talk at Lolita Bar this coming Monday, as noted yesterday, but since the plan is to host events in Williamsburg very soon, here’s a Williamsburg sampler of sorts to tide you over. 

Famously, at the very end of the twentieth century, members of four impoverished rock bands all lived crammed together in the same apartment in Williamsburg.  Those four batches of total going-nowhere losers are now known to one and all as:

•Metric (and more Metric):

•Yeah Yeah Yeahs

•TV on the Radio

•Liars

The girl bands are far cooler, I think we all agree.  But congratulations to them all, and it's interesting to see the similarities (and I don’t just mean the wolves).

P.S. And since the other half of the bands from the 00s seem to live in Montreal, here’s the wonderful (albeit suburbs-bashing) Arcade Fire song “Sprawl II” while we're at it (with cameo by Black Widow from the Avengers – if I think the singer’s cuter than her, is there something wrong with me?).

Lolita Bar (with David Friedman), W’burg (with Eddie Vedder), and talking pictures

•It’s OK to wax nostalgic about silent films (and give The Artist Oscars), but Dan Greenberg notes that musicians, frightened (like typical little sissy labor union members) by the advent of talkies eight decades ago, tried to kill movies with sound in the crib – out of fear that theatres would no longer need live musicians.  Behold the Smithsonian’s look back at the (ironically sci-fi-like) propaganda deployed against the robotic menace of recorded music!

They feared the day would come when there were no musicians at all and music was made by machines.  In short – they knew the score!  (Ha!  Get it?)

•And if all that seems like irrelevant, ancient history, Kevin Walsh points out that Golden Earring was founded (in the Hague) fifty-one years ago.  That’s right, the band that did “Radar Love” and “Twilight Zone” not so terribly long ago has existed for over half a century (one year longer than the notoriously-old Rolling Stones).

•But exactly one week from now, we look to the future – with DAVID FRIEDMAN! 

Yes, the famed anarcho-capitalist economist (son of Milton, father of Patri) will give a talk (hosted by me) on the subject “Global Warming and Other Good Things in Our Future.”  Join us and a bevvy of libertarian and anarchist wisdom-seekers – not to mention ordinary folk in search of hope: LOLITA BAR (basement level, 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St., one block south of Delancey St. on the Lower East Side), Monday, March 5 (9pm).  One week!

•Of course, the plan is to start a whole new (unrelated) series of bar talks/events in Williamsburg shortly – and as a reminder that spending time there is liable to make me feel old, I recently had the blissful yet disconcerting experience of discovering that DuMont Burger on Bedford Ave. serves a (real!) bacon and bourbon milkshake (you read that right). 

That’s the bliss part – but what was disconcerting was asking the hip young bartender the name of the singer we could hear playing, to which she responded, clearly unfamiliar with the name: “Eddie Vee-der??”

Despite aging a decade or two on the spot, I survived to track down the song online.  Turns out Vedder’s memories of songs like Indio’s catchy “Hard Sun” from two decades ago must be as positive as my own, since he recently did this cover version.  Makes sense: not only are the two acts from the same era, the song has a Vedder-like plodding quality – but I love it. 

•There was a brief period – during which I was lucky enough to be in the vicinity of the radio station WBRU near Brown – when “cutting edge” was the tentative term for all the grungey, postpunk, etc. stuff percolating just outside the mainstream in between New Wave and the later grunge explosion.  Lots of wonderful stuff vanished down that less-easily-branded memory hole, if I do say so myself. 

The aforementioned 1988 Indio song is forever batched in my mind, for instance, close to House of Freaks’ catchy “Sun Gone Down” (1989).  Sadly, the singing half of the band, Bryan Harvey, was murdered along with his wife and two daughters in 2006, with the killers later caught, one executed and one sentenced to life in prison.

Far goofier but batched with them in my mind nonetheless is That Petrol Emotion’s “Hey Venus” (1990).  And there are thousands more where those came from.  But maybe tomorrow some Williamsburg songs are in order.

•A fine musician in her own right, Jessica Eisenberg informs me of this other Williamsburg establishment, which might also be a suitable venue for bacon and bourbon shakes, at least given the name.  Maybe going there would be a good way to compensate for my failure to get tickets to Kraftwerk, ja?  No, that would be sick and wrong. 

And as a lecture I heard at NYU about a decade ago noted, Germany’s New Wave music probably dealt more maturely and thoughtfully with the threat of the police state than any other nation’s New Wave music.  For what that’s worth.  

Imagining Post-Ron Paul Coalition-(Re)Building (and bar events!)

Ah, the 23rd.  And that number reminds me of a few odd, prophetic minutes from long-ago early January.

GOP Divisions

For a short, bizarre time on the night of the Iowa caucus, you may recall that it was an even split – 23% each – for moderate Romney, Catholic cultural-conservative Santorum, and libertarian Ron Paul, which says a great deal about the composition of the Republican Party and the right in general.  Someone who was truly able to appeal to all three of those constituencies at the same time would have had the vote sewn up with Reaganesque coalition-building finesse.  Instead, each seems to alienate the other factions.

And so, perhaps, we will continue to economically stagnate under an immense, corrupt government.  And the electorate will continue to choose, reluctantly, between embracing welfare or warfare, probably based largely on their own least-rational psychological proclivities (unthinking compassion and unthinking belligerence).  We almost have a route out of the madness, in the form of Ron Paul – but then, he has no one but himself to blame for striking some people as even weirder than the status quo.  If he’d avoided the more insulting anti-imperialist rhetoric and had not tolerated even a bit of race rhetoric decades ago, well...things might look very different right now (not that I’m giving up, given the current campaign chaos).

But let’s assume for a moment that it’ll still end up being Romney and try looking for a silver lining.

Sympathy for Satan (by which I mean Romney)

It’s a bit unfortunate to have the headlines “Seinfeld Actor Fires Back at Romney” and “Seinfeld Actor Shoots Himself in the Head, Calls 911” in the news on the same day.  At least the headline wasn’t “Romney Shoots Self in the Head with Seinfeld Remark.” 

On the contrary, I think every time he does something slightly goofy, it’s a reminder he’s not as robotic as people say.  Would a truly calculating man – with an odd religion – have told the world that L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth is one of his favorite novels?  (Unless, as one friend of mine said, he wanted to remind us that there are religions weirder than Mormonism.)

I would think even more highly of him if he picked Ron Paul as his v.p. (as Santorum fears) – though that might increase the risk of him getting shot, much as I hate to speak ill of my nutty and lovable fellow Ron Paul fans.  It might be a wiser move for him to pick the younger and somewhat less controversial Rand Paul.  I can promise that would please the libertarians immensely. 

Even if my vote in the NY primary two months from now proves to be a futile protest vote, not to be confused with the futile protest vote for Romney that I cast (against McCain) in the NY primary of ’08, and then I cast what may well be a futile protest vote for Gary Johnson in November (still living in NY, after all), I do think that Romney, for all his mushy-liberal tendencies, is a useful nudge in a more econ-focused direction for the party and away from the Southern-religious-social-conservative stuff, which we now know can happen in Pennsylvania, too.

A restoration of something resembling the northeastern Rockefeller Republican establishment that existed just before I was born could do wonders to raise the level of right-wing discourse, if I do say so my stuck-up New England Ivy League-educated self.  But you know what I mean.  Romney may be stiff, but he’s not dumb.

Romney Still Lame

Of course, he is sort of hollow – but then, so is Obama. 

In fact, Obama is the sort of hollow corporatist the Occupiers decry, and Romney is the sort of hollow statist the Tea Partiers decry, but each side will probably still fall into line and devote most of its energy to attacking the other side’s leader.  And Obama will attempt to (quietly) rally the Occupiers to his side, without alienating moderates.  And Romney will attempt to (quietly) rally the Tea Partiers to his side, without alienating moderates.

Both are the kinds of hollow men to whose banners no idealists should rally.  Intellectuals of both sides might want to start talking – more diplomatically – about how they let this happen.  I recall being part of some fairly highbrow, civil, wonkish conversations back around 2007 about how libertarians and progressives might work together to address the inefficiency of the welfare state – and then all that died in the subsequent polarizing passions regarding Obama, and now crazy rabble in the streets have a (much more hostile) version of that important conversation.  I guess we should have started it sooner. 

As a practical matter, the most productive thing that

Commentary Assured Us Paul'd Go Nowhere -- and Neither Would Santorum

A reminder to pundits to stay humble, prior to tonight's 8pm CNN GOP debate (of which I shall tweet).

Here's Jonathan Tobin on the Commentary blog in August, cheering the press for ignoring Ron Paul -- but revealing the limits of his own prognosticatory powers in the process:

"…Unfortunately for the extremist candidate and his vocal fans the press is, at least in this one case, completely right. Though Paul has a devoted following, a lot of cash and will undoubtedly win some protest votes wherever his name appears on the ballot, his chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination are as minimal as those of Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Thaddeus McCotter, Newt Gingrich [sic] and Jon Huntsman and maybe even less than some of them. If the press prefers to devote far more of their resources to covering the Republicans who have a reasonable shot at the nomination that is simply a case of giving their audiences what they want: more information about someone who might actually become president.

If that seems unfair to the libertarian crowd that follows Paul around cheering his every irresponsible statement, they’re just going to have to learn to live with it. If anything, Paul gets more than his fair share of attention at times simply because at every debate his outrageous statements can tend to be the focus of comment even though few outside of his immediate circle take him seriously. And that is as it should be…"

The tautological, bullying “He has no chance” mantra can be quite effective, I fear – but it’s not foolproof, much as people who have no other arguments might wish otherwise.

Skepticism Wednesday

As many of you walk around with ash on your foreheads (and perhaps Santorum on your minds) today, I remind you that belief without evidence is a dangerous habit, as my hero, James Randi, has reminded people throughout his career – a career recounted in this in-progress documentary, An Honest Liar, if you care to help.

If our own culture’s flights of fancy seem harmless to you, perhaps you’ll be more troubled by this recent report of Saudi Arabia beheading a woman for witchcraft.

P.S. And by the way, if astrology actually worked, dimwits, why would you ever need to ask someone’s sign?  I’ve twice now had people guess when they asked and watched them go through almost the entire (meaningless) zodiac without picking the right one.  Insanity.

Ten Musical Notes for Mardi Gras

10. Until Whitney Houston’s death, I must confess I was unaware of this number from 1974: the original “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton (h/t Nicholas Campbell).

9. While we’re outside my usual musical zone: I sometimes forget my prog side, perhaps because it’s less socially acceptable than the punk and the indie sides.  But I contend this, for instance, is beautiful: “Lady Nina” by Marillion.  Especially if you never, never see what the band looks like.  And don’t think too much about the fact that their name was picked as a variant on a Tolkien title. 

8. But then, I think Genesis by Genesis was one of the best albums of all time, and I don’t care if they ban me from Williamsburg for saying so.  Recall “Mama,” for instance.

7. The name of my own prog album someday (especially since I worked in a sewage treatment plant one summer) will plainly have to be: Scum Pot Valve Explosion.

6. Yet I could never call a band the Misplaced Modifiers.  Too grotesque a thing for my editor’s sensibilities.

5. And here a young woman says what we’re all thinking in response to “Scum Pot Valve Explosion” because it’s not a thought nowadays until a young woman on the Internet says it.

4. Speaking of young women, here’s a fake Jewel song from a decade ago about the X-Men from the geniuses at the now-defunct ModernHumorist (who also did this swell Vague News Report, worthy of Firesign Theatre).

3. And here’s my friend Tricia Summers, a Williamsburger, singing jazzy serious stuff beautifully on her new album. 

2. Hard as this may be to believe, in 1978, immediately after the breakup of the Sex Pistols, Richard Branson flew Johnny Rotten to Jamaica to meet with Devo, where Branson tried in vain to talk the band into making Rotten the new Devo lead singer.  (I wouldn’t mind at least visiting the alternate timeline where that worked out.)

1. Of course, it might well have just ended up sounding like “Rise” by Rotten’s actual next band, P.I.L.

A Rushmore Round-Up for President’s Day

GEORGE WASHINGTON

It’s President’s Day.  Liberals ask themselves if their favorite politicians are as great as FDR (despite the tyrannical, racist FDR doing things like putting a young George Takei in a prison camp along with over 100,000 innocents – a move that makes the 171 remaining Gitmo prisoners seized on the battlefield seem like a minor issue in comparison, so spare me your Bush-is-evil, FDR-was-great hypocrisy).  Conservatives ask themselves if their favorite politicians are as great as Reagan (though even Reagan, for all his good points, did not actually succeed in making government smaller). 

But if we want to aim a bit higher – if we want our next president to be someone like Washington who is plainly more freedom-loving than power-seeking – we have to vote for Ron Paul.  Or you have to tell me, whether you style yourself a Democrat or a Republican, how you first became a socialist. 

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Want to see Thomas Jefferson and his Founder pals using flying machines that never existed – and weapons based on real eighteenth-century semi-science – to battle such menaces as Hessian werewolves (and New Orleans zombies, just in time for Mardi Gras)?  Check out Paul Taylor’s “teapunk” e-novella The Burr Conspiracies for next to nothing on Amazon.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

One of many benefits to attending a Phillips Foundation Fellows event on Friday was that I got a copy of a swell Regnery Books volume about TR called Bully! – a title I consider fitting in more ways than one, since TR was a profoundly evil man bent on violence and racist conquest, not to mention co-founder, really (along with Woodrow Wilson), of the centralizing, authoritarian, corporatist impulse called Progressivism that remains the primary source of

A List of Fictional Flying Aircraft Carriers

Perhaps the coolest list of fictional artifacts on Wikipedia:

Airborne aircraft carriers

• Helicarrier - Nick Fury/S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Cloudbase - Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
• Skybase - Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet
• Iron Vulture - Airship captained by the Air Pirate leader Don Karnage in Disney's TaleSpin
• Valiant - Doctor Who
• Royal Navy flying aircraft carriers – Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• XB-0 Hresvelgr of the Ace Combat series.
• P-1112 Aigaion Heavy Command Cruiser of the Ace Combat series.
• UI-4053 Sphryna Mobile command and control airbone aircraft carrier in the Ace Combat series.
• Air Carrier Justice of the Ring Raiders.
• Protoss Carrier of StarCraft universe.
• Scrin Planetary Assault Carrier of Command & Conquer 3.
• Holy Britannian Empire's HMS Avalon, Caerleon Class, Logres Class, and Black Knights' Ikaruga of Code Geass Series.
• Goliath Rocket powered carrier - Aero Fighters Assault
• Saints Row: The Third- Flying STAG Aircraft Carrier, the Daedalus.