Powerful endorsement

IowaHawk offers the most compelling statement from an Obamacon I've yet read. (Via Instapundit.)

Meanwhile in orbit

The Hubble Space Telescope has been partially restored after a glitch, and got a nice shot of galactic pair Arp 147.

Threats and overreactions

Brink Lindsey finds Obama the "clearly superior alternative" in foreign policy. Why?

Iraq today is a complicated mess, and how best to extricate ourselves is a tough problem. I don't know how well Barack Obama would handle that problem, but at least he sees it clearly: His goal is to get us out of there. John McCain's goal, on the other hand, is to keep us there as long as possible. That fundamental difference is reason enough in my mind to root for Obama.

Me: First of all, McCain's spoken about getting most troops out by 2013, which is not "as long as possible." Secondly, how clearly did Obama see Iraq when he opposed the surge, which he much later acknowledged worked much better than anyone (meaning he) had dreamed? Did he see clearly the genocide that may well have occurred there following a fast U.S. pullout?

More from Lindsey:

The Iraq fiasco was just one consequence of a deeper misjudgment: a panicky overreaction to 9/11 that inflated the real and serious threat of terrorism into an apocalyptic fantasy of World War IV. Delusions of "existential" danger lay behind the Bush administration's resort to torture and its mad claims of absolute executive power as well as its blundering botch job in Iraq. I myself suffered from such delusions in the first years after 9/11, but the accumulation of countervailing evidence eventually freed me from them. Bush, of course, has proved incurable. And McCain's case of 1938-itis is, if possible, even worse.

Me: There's some truth to that. The Iraq War likely would not have happened if there had been no 9/11, and rhetoric along the lines of "World War IV" does seem overblown. But isn't there a danger now of overreacting to the Iraq War, by downplaying threats from hostile nations and terrorist groups, and wouldn't such insularity set a tone of weakness that would make future wars more likely? And if McCain is such a warmonger ("1938-itis"), please explain that part where he led the renormalization of relations with the nation where he was tortured.

Distant landscape

This is not a picture of McCain trying to drum up some last-minute votes.

Government banking

Barry Goldwater, in his famous 1964 convention speech, said it is "the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public." (Note the inclusion of "private," which suggests that Goldwater was not as far removed from the Theodore Roosevelt/John McCain tradition as some believe.)

Fast forward to the present: a tremendous concentration of power has emerged in the banking sector, now that government is a shareholder in the biggest banks. This concentration of power is both public and private; it's a nexus of the two, and it offers untold opportunities for corruption, abuse, and politically directed financing decisions. Creating it may have been a needed measure in the midst of crisis (though it should have been done in a more market-oriented way) but, as David Frum rightly notes, a major reason to vote for McCain is that he, unlike Barack Obama, wants to get government out of the banking business as soon as possible.

Libertarians and the GOP

In Reason magazine, Ryan Sager asks: Have libertarians been driven out of the GOP? His answer: Yes.

Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff—not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it's difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the battle for the soul of the Republican Party has been lost.

I think it's more complicated than that. The soul of libertarianism has been deeply damaged in 2008. That's the result of the Ron Paul phenomenon -- socially conservative and conspiracy-minded -- which was touted, far more than not, by Reason magazine (and deplored by Sager). Now, Ryan falls back on the definition of libertarianism as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal." But that's a dwindling segment of what passes for libertarianism these days. Ron Paul and Bob Barr, whatever their fallings out, are libertarianism's most prominent figures now.

So, I'm not an admirer of the Rovian politics and social conservatism that Sager decries. But if libertarians are no longer at home in the GOP, then I (who have long called myself a libertarian and still wear the label, however uncomfortably, now) say that has a lot to do with where libertarianism has been going, and not just where the GOP has gone.

Science pork swaps

There was a time, over a decade ago, when opposition to science earmarks -- research spending dictated by individual legislators and not subject to scientific peer review -- was a cause celebre among scientists and defenders of science. But apparently, for some people, such as Christopher Hitchens, if Sarah Palin is opposed to earmarks, then earmarks must be science at its best. Yuval Levin points out this absurdity. Another recent example of misguided pro-earmark sentiment is here.

UPDATE 11AM: Via Instapundit, the DC Examiner has more on the trouble with earmarks.

Hollywood brokers and investment classics

My Research magazine article on how Hollywood has portrayed financial advisors over the decades,"Brokers and Other Monsters," is now available online. Also, my recent radio interview on the Gabe Wisdom Show about the investment classics of Graham, Dodd and Fisher is now available here.

Post-election at Lolita Bar

Here's something to attend one day into the dawning one-party left-liberal ascendancy (or, alternatively, after a wildly overblown premature political bubble has burst just in time):

Wednesday, Nov. 5, 8pm: “Yesterday Was the Election: What Now?”

Featuring (1) Abe Greenwald, blogger at Commentary, (2) Ben Geyerhahn, advisor to the 2004 Kerry campaign, and finally (3) funnyman Marty Beckerman, author of the fantastic Dumbocracy (and the earlier Generation S.L.U.T.), to say a pox on both your houses.

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar. The debates, usually pitting two opponents against each other (in a civil and often humorous fashion), take place on the basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

Defending Teddy Roosevelt

Max Boot rightly dismisses the insipid Edmund Morris op-ed in today's Times that conjures an imaginary and bogus interview with Theodore Roosevelt based on out-of-context quotes. Boot also points to a valuable article he wrote that affirms T.R. as a reformist conservative, and not the big-government hack that many knee-jerk antistatists nowadays perceive him to be.

Shades of rightness

Ross Douthat has some thoughts on being a right-of-center Republican who disagrees with Rush Limbaugh about lots of things but still has zero interest in jumping ship to the Barack Obama cause. I can attest, it's not all that hard.

Obama's constitutional flaw

The last time a noted figure said the Constitution was profoundly flawed, without making clear what the flaw is, it was Kurt Godel. Somebody should ask Barack Obama what he was talking about in a 2001 interview here. In particular, what "fundamental flaw" is it that (unlike, say the three-fifths doctrine) "continues to this day"? Does he still hold this view, and if so, how would he seek to rectify said flaw?

Mea culpa on Biden

I was definitely wrong about one thing: my previously relatively high opinion of Joe Biden. I welcomed his veep nomination, and considered him the Democrat I would've preferred among those running in the primaries this year. But he can't open his mouth without causing an international embarrassment, and now has shown he's flustered and incompetent in handling tough questions. If Obama wins, it will be despite his running mate, and a Vice President Biden will probably be spending a lot of time attending funerals in obscure parts of the world.

Libertarians vs energy independence

The standard libertarian position on energy independence is that it's undesirable, infeasible, a form of autarky that makes no more sense than wanting "coffee independence." If "energy independence" is literally taken to mean no imports of any kind of energy from anybody, then yes, it is an ill-conceived goal. But what its advocates really want, I think, is energy security, which would mean a diversified set of energy sources and a diminution of revenues to the anti-American dictators that control a large share of the oil supply. I have yet to hear a compelling argument, libertarian or otherwise, against such energy security.

Axis of illness

First Kim Jong Il and now Ahmadinejad are ill or "exhausted." It looks like President Obama's no-preconditions world tour may be lacking for interlocutors for a while. At least, Hugo Chavez seems to be well, if not entirely happy with oil prices right now.

Palin unreserved

Gov. Palin has reportedly gone "off the reservation," rejecting the advice of handlers and setting her own tone. This seems like a good idea, especially since "the reservation," i.e. the campaign, has been so poorly run. A small consolation of what's happened is that the "not-about-the-issues" campaign strategy is being discredited.

Poll

I've placed a poll to the right. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to accept votes unless you're signed in to Blogger or something, which will depress turnout considerably. The one negative [actually positive now] vote already cast is my own.

UPDATE: Actually, the thing seems to be completely screwy. I'm not sure if it will correctly count votes at all. But I'll leave it there for now, as a cautionary tale about the limits of democracy.

UPDATE2: It might be working now.

UPDATE 11/5/08: The poll is now closed. Results:

Keep it going. It's a much-needed intellectual compass in these turbulent times: 62%.

Shut it down. It's a pathetic puerile profusion of pointless pixelated procrastination: 0%.

Change it completely. Take the opposite of your positions because you're wrong about everything: 12%.

Whatever, dude: 25%.

Unfortunately, the poll didn't work consistently, such that a significant segment of the electorate may have been disenfranchised. The recorded vote total was 8 million, minus 6 orders of magnitude.

Free Joe Biden!

This oppression must not stand.

Dating on Mars

It's gotten easier, according to Happynews.com.

An endorsement

Charles Krauthammer is right.