Today, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Instapundit comment on the Brad DeLong post I disuss here.
Check out the discussion thread on Hayden’s site, where Buckaroo Banzai references fly unchecked.
More important; it remains a two-dimensional tug-of-war in which one small team gains and another loses. I’ll restate that the rest of us are watching from the cheap seats as the game itself becomes increasingly irrelevant to us and our lives.
Except for the taxes, laws, and wars. Stuff like that which leads me to want to take the game back.

Mike Hendrix, of Cold Fury, weighs in on hard times (forgive the extended quote, link over and give him some traffic, but this is too good):

ABC’s presentation was just as lame. I don’t remember the specifics like names and places and whatnot completely, but I do remember quite well that they spent a good bit of time on some guy whose stocks had dropped in value by a third (!) due to the recent fluctuations. Yep, that’s right – this poor poor man had lost around 370,000 dollars. That of course means that he originally had over a million bucks worth before the market nosedived, and how much do you want to bet that he made most of that nut back during the ’90’s bubble? And I’ll guarantee you he has way more than a million tucked away elsewhere, like real estate and 401k’s and such. But the still-rich-by-my-standards little snot still had the audacity, the sheer tacky gall, to complain about possibly having to keep on working past age 55 just like Mr. Chest-butt above did.
Let me tell you a little story about my mom and stepdad. My stepdad is almost 65. He has no thought of retiring – he still works in the cotton mill he’s worked in for 40 years and will most likely keep right on until they wheel him out, and he ain’t doing it because he loves the work either. My mom has been unable to work for years due to the gradual worsening of a neck injury she suffered in a car accident 35 years ago. They’re on something like their 4th or 5th mortgage and have no hope of ever paying off the house, until they die and the insurance does it for ’em. They provide constant care and a living space for my mom’s sister, who has emphysema and requires the assistance of an oxygen tank to breathe. They do the usual sort of complaining about money that we all do, but nothing like the sort of whining these dickless yuppies are doing now. They have absolutely no expectation whatsoever that the Almighty Federal Government is going to step in and save their asses either and would be somewhat amused by the thought, which is probably why ABC News won’t be putting them on TV anytime soon. My mom gets a very small amount from Social Security and my aunt is on Medicare, and that’s the limit of federal assistance they figure on getting.
Let me tell you a little story about myself now. I don’t own stocks, I don’t have a retirement plan, and I barely scrape by month to month. I work my ass off and have never taken a vacation in my entire working life – not once. I’ve ducked out on the occasional Friday for a long weekend, sure, but a full-fledged week-long pleasure trip, never. I don’t expect the government to bail me out of any financial woes I may have anymore than my mom does. I’ve made my own choices over the years and it’s my responsibility to find a way to deal with the potential adverse consequences of them.

Now remind me again who federal policies are supposed to assist?
See, I am a liberal. I do believe that government should help folks who need help.
But seeing us look to help those whose portfolios dropped from $1 million to $100,000 really doesn’t make me feel all soft and warm. You were a grownup when you asked for the cards and put your money on the table. Ther’s nothing in the Constitution about a vacation house in Aspen. Get over it.
But if there were a group of Democrats who were looking at Mike and his parents…trying to figure out how he could retire without working as a greeter at Wal-Mart, and how they could get health care and still pay the mortgage…well, I’d bet there is a consituency out these who would vote for them.
I know I would.

…well, not really…
Ann Salisbury points to the S.J. Mercury-News article about the noxious Intuit bill restricting free state e-filing dying.
I’m off to paint a picture of a lobbyist on the side of my motorcycle…

Brad DeLong, who is smarter (and probably better-looking) than I am, launches on the ‘rhino neoliberals’ who, he says, are bridging over to the neoconservative side.

Kaus has thus passed through the third of the four stages of becoming a Rhinoceros… excuse me, a neoconservative.
The first stage is to hold that the flaws–the mighty flaws–of the center-left in American politics are important enough to more-or-less balance the flaws of the right. The second stage is to start making desperate and implausible excuses for Republican politicians and functionaries. The third stage is to lose contact with the substance of public policy issues, and focus instead on intellectual and rhetorical “errors” made by those left of center. And the fourth stage is to start acclaiming right-wing political hacks as noble thinkers, and right-wing office holders as bold and far-sighted leaders with a plan to guide us to utopia.

It was a little frightening to me to read this…kind of like one of the “you may be an alcoholic if…” articles where you start recognizing some of your own behavior.
Then I thought about it a bit.
Here’s the deal: I think Brad is conflating two different sets of issues, which are rooted in our political ecology.
One set are substantive, and have to do with policy, governance, and what exactly we want the government to do…in my case, offer great day care, have a moderately progressive tax code, etc. etc. … the other set are procedural, and have to do with how the government makes decisions and constitutes itself.
Substantively, I stand with the liberal side of the house (with a few wrinkles on guns and foreign policy).
But procedurally, I think that the mainstream liberal and conservative actors are indistinguishable, and I have a huge problem with them and with the process that maintains them.
Let’s take California for an example. I’ll take a wild-ass guess and say there are 3,000 jobs that will change hands over a two-year period if Republican Simon is elected over Democrat Davis. Officially, I’ll bet there are something like 500 – 1,000 exempt jobs…jobs that are exempt from civil service and are truly ‘political appointees’. But an additional few thousand jobs will shift as the new bosses hire and promote folks who they are more comfortable with, have more experience with, and who look at the world in the same way they do.
Brian Linse focuses on the importance of these jobs:

…But I still maintain that having the State in the hands of the Dems is more important for the ’04 nationals than having a better man in the job up in Sacramento. Riordan would be a better man, but it now seems certain that Simon would not, so the BadDude endorsement stays with Davis.

So what we have is a revolving pool of five or six thousand political operatives, variously liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican, who do a large dosi-do when elections change the party in power.
The ones out of power become lobbyists, columnists, professors, political campaign advisors, go into private practice of law or other professions, and bide their time.
But they remain a part of an insular political class, and as that class gets more and more reified, elections become essentially contests between two branches of the same bureaucratic organism.
The first problem this presents is that it has been almost impossible for a true outsider (Riordan) to come in and play on a big level. Simon was wealthy, the ranks of attractive Republicans in California is thin, and from the talks I’ve had with the Republicans I know, no one thought Davis was beatable.
(Jesse Ventura will come up later in the argument).
The second problem is that the views of the ‘operative class’ become more and more insular and parochial as they increasingly interact with and talk to themselves. They are upper-middle class, educated, and articulate. They are my kind of people, they are fun to hang around with and chat about political gossip. But they live in the better bobo suburbs and have the option of sending their kids to private schools, because they can afford it.
The third, and to me biggest, problem is that the rest of us…the folks outside the political process…begin to get increasingly alienated from both the process and the people in it. See my discussion on legitimacy below, and the two books on legitimacy in the ‘must read’ section below. The average voter (or more realistically, the average non-voter) really doesn’t give a damn about the politicians, the laws they pass, or, increasingly, about the polity that we are all part of.
Why? Because instead of any effort to engage the broader population in discussion or debate, politics has become entirely tactical. What matters is how I can get positive coverage for my team, and negative coverage for theirs. And the metaphor of teams holds up, as we start talking about whether the Democrats will draft Gore as their QB in ’04, or if the plucky understudy Lieberman, will get the nod.
The people aren’t stupid, they get it, they see that it’s MLB and that the best they can do is but a ticket in the cheap seats (the SkyBoxes are already filled with the patrons of the game). And when presented with an attractive option, the non-voters (who Ventura singled out as his base) come out.
For me, I have to say that the broader issue of the isolation and alienation absolutely trumps the narrower issues which divide the electable left and right. Because I believe that if we don’t begin to deal with those, it really won’t matter who we elect.

Race-based voting, in which voters are defined by race and then can only vote for a candidate of that race is proposed for a British NGO. Electoral apartheid comes to Britain
(from Junius)

CNN.com – New Orleans aquarium platform falls, dumps 10 into shark tank – August 8, 2002
Not quite “Headless body in topless bar”, but sound, very sound.
I’ve always imagined that my retirement job would be writing the headlines for the Post or another tabloid…

Charles Johnson is hosting a discussion on the peaceful youth of islam.
It appears that a Muslim-hate-kidz site has been discovered: Clearguidance.com. It’s full of fun posts and video clips if you have a stronger stomach than I do.
Yeah, yeah, there are Christian Identity sites almost as bad – but, and it’s a big one – there are mainstream Christians actively denouncing and working against those folks.
As I’ve said before, where are the ‘moderate’ Muslims? Personally, I’ll bet that they have been oppressed into silence by the nutjob thugs who are currently running many of the Arab countries, and who are promulgating the messianic, destructive culture that we have to break somehow.
How becomes the question.

I’m working on the migration to www.armedliberal.com, and having a small problem…the archives don’t appear. I’ve both left them in the blog directory and put them in their own directory and made the code changes suggested on the help page on Blogger.
Can someone smarter than me make some suggestions??

Unqualified Offerings sets out arguments for waiting on Iraq:

Deterrence requires two components:
1) A sure penalty for noncompliance.
2) A clear benefit to compliance.
US policy toward Iraq has lacked factor 2 for a decade. Current, stated policy is
1) If Saddam uses, acquires or conceals weapons of mass destruction, he dies.
2) If Saddam foreswears use, acquisition and concealment of weapons of mass destruction, he dies.

Um, guys, while that’s a nice trope, this isn’t how 4th Generation warfare works. Saddam gets the maximum benefit from lying about his activities. It’s more like this:
“Wow!! Bummer about Tel Aviv!! Who would be crazy enough to smuggle a nuke in there? Wasn’t us, promise!! No, really!!”
While the tame game theory model suggests that he and others can be managed successfully through boundary and consequence-setting, the only thing that might work would be something Godfather-like:
If anything bad happens to me; if I catch a cold and go to the hospital; if I get hit by a car while rollerblading drunk; you will die. You are now the guarantor of my wellbeing.
And of course, if something bad did happen, there would be many people who would say: “With no apparent thought given to the thousands of casualties on both sides, de-stabilization of the entire Middle East, loss of just about every ally we have except maybe Britain – well, the whole thing is quite mad. Adventurism at it’s worst, cynically done, at least in part, as a desperate ploy to aid Bush & Co. in the midterm elections.” (from Bob Morris)
Personally, I lean toward doing something, and doing it now. It will destabilize the Middle East, but the reality is that the Middle East is going to get destabilized soon by demographics, resources, poverty, and most of all by a virulent and murderous culture that is growing there unchecked.
I have three reasons for wanting to get it over with; they are eighteen, fifteen, and five years old. I want to buy some time for them, and some space to try and come to any humanly sustainable resolution, and we simply can’t do it in the face of an increasingly belligerent (the proof is just inland from Battery Park) culture that will only be richer, better trained, and better armed tomorrow.
I’m still looking for an alternative path. But I don’t see one.

(From Joe Katzman).
A Fire Captain’s Eulogy

When a friend dies we miss them, we regret words unspoken, we remember the love. When a brother dies we grieve for the future without him. His endless possibilities. If your brother doesn’t die of old age you might never accept the parting. When a comrade dies we miss them, we regret words unspoken, we remember the love, we grieve the future without them. We are also proud. Proud to have known a good man, a better man than ourselves. We respect the need for him to leave, to rest.
Some people equate camaraderie with being jovial. It is anything but. Camaraderie is sharing hardship. It is shouts and commands, bruises and cuts. It’s a sore back and lungs that burn from exertion. It’s heat on your neck and a pit in your stomach. It’s a grimy handshake and a hug on wet shoulders when we’re safe. It’s not being asleep when it’s your turn on watch. It is trust, it is respect, it is acting honorably.

Nothing I can say compares. Why aren’t you reading the original?