Welcome to Freedom Democrats

CA has banned the sale of Salvia divinorum to minors. Several states have banned the plant outright. I wouldn't be surprized if the DEA steps in sometime soon and use its emergency powers to place the drug on Schedule I, just as it did with Ecstasy. That would be a shame because the drug is quite interesting from a pharmacological standpoint (I think it's the most potent natural psychoactive compound known, and a previously unknown class of drugs), and rapid progress is being made in studying its activity. A DEA ban would place a burden on researchers, and probably inhibit research progress.

BTW, CA is the home of the Salvia divinorum Research and Information Center.

The Next Right counters Open Left.

Each are rather wieldy posts, resorting to plethora of statistics and charts to buttress their points, but we can summarize each argument thusly:

Open Left:

The country is currently at a peak of liberal policy preferences, not a centrist node. The country is becoming less Republican, and has not experienced a decline in Democratic self-identification since at least 1994 (and possibly since 1984). What these three trends point to, if anything, is the country becoming more progressive, liberal, leftist, or whatever you want to call it.

The Next Right:

This country has generally had a center-right governing majority for most of the past century, interrupted by some “hiccups” to the left, notably from 1932-1937 and from 1964-66. Power has moved back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats with some regularity, but in terms of “real change” in the governing philosophy of America, the swings have been overstated.

In other words, Obama is unlikely to manufacture a new progressive majority. Reagan didn’t, and even FDR didn’t. What those Presidents did was recognize an extant majority coalition for them, and give it life.

Personally, I find the Next Right argument more compelling. Progressive sites like Open Left are a bit too optimistic in their rush to conflate the decline of the Republican brand under Bush with the emergence of a new progressive majority.

One of the obvious errors Chris Bowers makes is not filtering out independent leaning voters from Party identification. If you filter out the "leaners," Democratic Party Identification is relatively unchanged from the time Bush took office. What has changed significantly is decline in partisan GOP identification, and the percentage of independent voters who now lean democratic.

Let's look at the raw numbers recently compiled by Pew Research.

Dem: 36%
GOP: 27%
IND: 37%

If we split the leaners from the Independent Group, with 15% going to the Dems, and 10% going to the GOP we end up with:

Dem: 51%
GOP: 37%
IND: 12%

The inclusion of "leaners" suddenly makes the Democratic majority seem impressive, but this can be a fleeting coalition. Back in 2004, this was the breakdown including leaners:

Dem: 44%
GOP: 41%
IND: 15%

Therefore, it's fairly easy to make the case that the current Democratic Majorities simply reflect a democratic leaning shift in an increasing Independent voting block, entirely at the expense of the GOP. However, this shift should be tempered by the extraordinary low opinion polling for the Democratic majority Congress and the fact that the Democratic Party itself has not seen any significant increase in it's positive opinion ratings. The likely scientific conclusion to draw is that this shift represents a "lesser of two evils" change in perception with respect to the 2 parties as opposed to a mandate for hardcore progressive government. In fact, the very type of progressive overreach advocated by Open Left, in taking advantage of the decline in GOP branding, is likely the very thing that would reverse democratic trends and revitalize the GOP brand. If the Democratic Party wants to retain it's majority, it also needs appeal to the libertarian vote, and would do well to avoid this addle-headed nonsense.

In a recent Meet the Press appearance, Chuck Todd credits the libertarian vote for swinging Democratic gains in the West.

Letter from Ron

This was predictable.

Tarran over at The Liberty Papers nicely deconstructs McCain's latest National Defense policy drivel. In any event, it's fairly evident from reading that proposal that the McCain team is taking their policy cues straight from the Heritage Foundation playbook that views missile defense and substantial modernization of the US nuclear arsenal as essential strategy to counter the nuclear proliferation "threat" posed by China and Russia. Essentially it is a continuation of the Bush policy, but McCain threatens to put that policy on steroids.

Conn Hallinan, echoing the sentiments of George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, proposes that nuclear abolition offers a saner strategy, at the very least in terms of economics, than the costly strategy implied by a n-player nuclear proliferation game. As Hallinan points out, smaller countries have defected from the NPT because the larger powers defected from their disarmament obligations.

A long-term cooperation game depends upon the ability of the players to detect uncooperative behavior and to retaliate promptly. And while the US could play the lead role in a new NPT treaty resulting in substantial decrease in nuclear disarmaments among the major powers, total abolition is likely an elusive goal. The increasing marginal value of a dwindling nuclear arsenal A and the costs of enforcement of monitoring compliance as A --> 0 make total abolition unlikely. For example, eliminating 20,000 weapons from a stockpile of 40,000 is one thing, but the marginal value associated with, say, the last remaining 5 in the stockpile is quite another. And while monitoring resumption of a full-scale military nuclear weapons program is certainly possible, it would be quite difficult to monitor whether or not the US, China, or the Russians are sneaking in production of a new weapon here or there.

So a new NPT treaty, while laudable, isn't going to solve the "nuclear proliferation" problem, especially if the major powers beef up their conventional forces as means of compensation.

This all underscores an essential fact that it's quite difficult to "uninvent" something that already exists. It's likely that the Nation-State model won't survive a n-player nuclear proliferation game. As Tarron pointed out, McCain's proposal, which is essentially the Heritage Foundation proposal, is not economically feasible and consumes way too much wealth in achieving a goal of "stability."

So, how do you therefore efficiently solve this n-player nuclear proliferation game? If n is a subset of N, where N=set of all nations, you efficiently reduce n by reducing the cardinality of N. That is to say, you move toward World Government. "Country First," indeed....

Apparently the big health news today (according to Google News) is that radio hate-monger Michael Savage acted like a pompous prick and said something mean and belittling of families suffering from autism.

 In New York City, Autism United, a coalition of organizations that advocate on behalf of children with autism and provide services to them, staged a protest Monday outside the studios of WOR (710 AM), which carries Mr. Savage’s program...

 I don't know if these people really are shocked, or if they are just using this as an excuse to attack Savage, whose radio program transmits insulting drivel to the minds of millions of Americans. I haven't listened to Savage in several months (he keeps me awake on long drives), but there is nothing exceptional in him saying that nearly every child with autism is just “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out.” This guy makes Limbaugh look like a hippie. Really, he's kinda scary. What is shocking is that his audience is the third largest among talk-radio (behind Limbaugh and Hannity).

If you aren't familiar with his screeds, here's some of his best stuff from Media Matters:

•  Savage praises comments by controversial McCain supporter Rev. Parsley advocating destruction of "false religion" Islam
• Savage on Obama: "He's an Afro-Leninist, and I know he's dangerous" 
• Savage: "Bring in 10 million more from Africa. ... They can't reason, but bring them in with a machete in their head"
• Savage: Rep. Ellison, atheists share "hatred of Christianity and hatred of Jews"

Brad from The Crossed Pond has responded to one of my posts at The Art of the Possible on Brad's idea of a single term promise from John McCain, among other suggestions for the struggling Republican Presidential candidate. Brad, tag, you're it now.

Now as Brad says, you have to be "preternaturally preoccupied with evangelical issues (either by being an evangelical, or by being particularly concerned with them) to view them as being central to the general election either by presence or by absence." As a libertarian Democrat, and therefore someone who has affiliated with the Democratic Party largely out of my opposition to the Religious Right and its affiliation with the Republican Party, I think I fit the bill of being "preternaturally preoccupied."

My argument is taht while evangelicals failed to mount a significant challenge to John McCain, they did manage to mount a significant challenge (against the will of the leaders of the movement) to Mitt Romney as the presumptive frontrunner and propelled Mike Huckabee into the top tier of the nomination fight. The nomination fight has already been dominated by stories of unhappy evangelicals and conservatives. Now, in the general election, there seems to be a weekly schedule of new stories about how evangelicals are not excited about John McCain.

Perception, in politics, is more important than fact. So I disagree with Brad's own perception that:

Even as far as the media is concerned “evangelical mobilization” is “out” as an election year theme. Though “Obama wins evangelical support” will likely be a back-page story that pops up here and there.

I think that the tug of war between Obama and McCain over evangelicals has already played a major role in media coverage of the race. But could John McCain win if only he could rally the Republican base and connect with evangelicals?

No.

The Republican brand itself is in such disarray, and the county is demographically more Democratic than it was four years ago, that the same base strategy of Karl Rove will not operate successfully for John McCain. Ultimately, George W. Bush went down a pathway in his first term that undermined his own reelection (he underperformed based on historical expectations based on the economy). Now, four years later, are we surprised that we are heading towards a Democratic landslide?

There are plenty of ways that the Republican Party could turn itself around, although a number also depend on the Democrats imploding once in power. I'm not entirely sure about which direction the GOP will take, but I don't think we can rule out that the failure to energize evangelicals and social conservatives as a possible scapegoat.

Public Policy Polling, a NC-based polling firm, summarizes the surprising polling numbers of a number of Libertarian candidates in NC.

Now, Elizabeth Dole's own internal polling shows that Libertarian Senate Candidate Chris Cole is pulling in 6%.

That someone like Chris Cole is registering at 6% in a state wide poll, when he really has no business breaking 1%, is fairly demonstrative that Barr and Munger are raising the tide for all Libertarian candidate boats in NC. Outside of Barr, Munger--who chairs the political science department at Duke--may be the most credible libertarian candidate in the country. It also worth mentioning, of course, that BJ Lawson, the GOP candidate in NC's 4th district, is probably the most credible candidate to emerge out of the r3VOLution.

As a NC resident, I can flatly say that the state LP has been hampered by oppressive ballot access laws through the years that the system and the 2-party duopoly are in no hurry to remedy. If either Barr or Munger can get 2% in November, the NC LP will be spared from having to repeat the arduous exercise of re-qualifying for ballot access(in 2010 and 2012), which is just a a drain on time and resources. Instead the NC LP could concentrate on recruiting a stable of capable candidates, a process made much easier when you already have guaranteed ballot access and Party ID registration.

From a libertarian political perspective, North Carolina is going to be an interesting laboratory of sorts to keep an eye on come this fall.

Interesting book review. The book, Nudge, is written by two people with connections to Obama.

The reviewer for Mises is economist Gary Galles. I don't know much about him but I would assume he's more of anarcho-capitalist style libertarian who doesn't like the "libertarian paternalism" argument put forth by the authors.

Says Galles:

In Nudge (Yale University Press, 2008), authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein try to combine libertarianism and paternalism by arguing that a nudge — "any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives" — can benefit those nudged, while staying consistent with liberty because it does not force anyone to do anything. Nudge's argument is far from airtight. But even more devastating is its reliance on a false premise. The "market failure" examples it promises to improve are actually government failures.

The argument he puts forth goes to the heart of how different people perceive our realities. Quite frankly, I find that we do not debate this paradigm enough in our national discourse. It may seem like we do but we really don't. To Galles, the authors start from a "false premise"...that false premise being that the problems they seek to correct with a "nudge" are not grounded in market failure. The authors show a variety of economic shortcomings and Galles seeks to demonstrate how their focus on the root of the problem is misplaced.

Is he right?

Read on and share your thoughts.

Concerning that Barr Global Warming Strategy I posted about a couple of months ago, well forget that.

I give strategic credit to Barr, the guy can flip-flop with the best of them. And it's not too difficult to discern the motivation behind the change of strategy. The last month, there has been quite a bit of flip-flopping occurring on both sides of the isle in terms of domestic drilling, driven by record gas prices. Mccain has since flipped on both domestic drilling and cap-and trade. The political calculus has since changed on this issue.

With Al Gore publicly stating that voices such as Barr should be included in the public debate vis a vis Climate Change public policy, and Barr then immediately calling for himself to be included in a serious debate with the other 2 major candidates on the serious issue of "climate change," it's pretty clear now what the Barr strategy is. Get in a debate, any debate, whatever the means, with Obama and Mccain. There is even scuttlebutt that the Barr Campaign is actively going to try to leverage Barr's FISA position with the progressive community to somehow create a blogosphere buzz for Barr's inclusion in the debates.

I give credit to the Barr Campaign, they are at least trying...

UPDATE:

Barr crashes Netroots Nation

Robert Novak is reporting that GOP strategists are now privately conceding that Barr could cost McCain Georgia