Washington Post: The Church Doctrines of Pope Ron Paul
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011101859_pf.html
What's wrong with libertarianism?
By Michael Kinsley Saturday, January 12, 2008; 12:00 AM
Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order. But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let's pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person's money to someone else?
OpenDemocracy: Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited
http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/35559/print
Michel Thieren
The question of how many Iraqis have died since 2003 has been reopened. In answering it, it is vital to clarify the criteria in making a scientific assessment, says Michel Thieren.
11 - 01 - 2008
The final analysis and computation compensated for a series of possible biases - such as the under-reporting of deaths because people have moved away from households and relocated across them, the impossibility of visiting some households for security reason, and the effects of migration of Iraqis to neighbouring countries. Although adequately controlled, these biases are still present, and this makes the final estimate of "151,000" the one that is, for that survey, the closest to the true toll. The survey released by the New England Journal of Medicine, therefore, concludes that between 104,000 and 220,000 people died in Iraq during the three years after the coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, with the highest probability that the true number is 151,000.
Charlie Wilson's Warlords
Charlie Wilson's Warlords
by Ivan Eland
http://antiwar.com/eland/
It is ironic that during the Cold War, liberals like Charlie Wilson and neoconservatives like Ronald Reagan agreed on pursuing this costly and interventionist containment strategy. The venues in which they preferred to challenge the Soviets may have differed – the neoconservatives preferred the futile effort to support the Contras in Nicaragua, while the liberals preferred backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan – but they had the same foreign policy. The interventionist consensus continued after the Cold War and ultimately led to the blowback of 9/11. It shouldn't be any surprise that liberals and neoconservatives alike have opted for an interventionist foreign policy, since both support government activism at home (again, with differing preferences as to the areas of mischief). But unfortunately, 9/11 demonstrated that the cost of overseas meddling by Charlie Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and their liberal and neoconservative brethren in the state apparatus might be even higher than the cost which accrues from government intervention domestically.
Why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz
Norman's Conquest
Why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Podhoretz was born in 1930 into a lapsed Orthodox Jewish family, the son of a sixty-dollar-a-week milkman. He grew up in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that profoundly shaped his character. In his book Ex-Friends, Podhoretz describes Norman Mailer, who grew up near him and attended the same high school, as a similar product of the local street culture: "Like me, and practically every Brooklyn boy I had known, he was direct and pugnacious and immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage." Podhoretz was a member of a gang called Club Cherokee and hung out with gamblers and other riffraff as a child. It was an environment in which, he recalled in a 1999 television interview, "the main desideratum was to be tough and not to back down from a fight. And to be a sissy, as people used to say, or a coward was probably the worst possible condition into which you could fall." It was the credo Podhoretz would follow all his life.