Mickey Kaus has a great idea.

Better yet, we could have two rounds of primaries. Start with a full roster of non-delegate-selecting ‘beauty contests” in 2007, including in the big states. This would winnow the field. Then, just about the time buyer’s remorse sets in and we wonder if there’s not a better candidate, we could have the second round of real, official, delegate-binding primaries. …The candidates are already campaigning and debating as if its February, so this schedule couldn’t mean that much more work for them. Reporters would love it–they’d get to write about twice as many elections. And the campaigns would probably run out of money, reducing the impact of expensive TV ads! … Win-win-win.

Read it. More inconvenient truth. Who knew that AlGore’s dream of a future is our nightmare of a past?

Read it. You can almost hear the sneer. Gee, an insurance company is spending some money to protect their investment. What a shock.

Neal Boortz gives the other side of the Fair Tax debate. And apparently he has a book on the subject. How convenient. Unfortunately he indulges in some of the same things he criticizes Bartlett for:

t’s so very simple: When you see a lamp on the shelf marked $100, you will pay $100 for that lamp when you get to the checkout. You will receive a receipt which shows that $23 of the $100 you have paid represents the FairTax. You do the math for yourself, but every time I work it out it comes to 23%

Well, no.  If shops did it that way, then he would be correct, but they won’t — you know and I know that they’ll put the price at $77 and tack on the $23 at the checkout, the exact same way that they do now. And Neal knows it too, which is why I find this sort of argumentation rather irritating.

But he does have some good arguments, if you can separate the wheat from the chaff (and when don’t you have to do that?), and some good references, so Read The Whole Thing.

Thomas Sowell discusses sqeamishness.

Read it. I guess enforcing the law actually works, huh. Whoda thunkit.

Arizona passed employer sanctions with a particular bite. Rather than set up an escalating series of fines, which has been the federal approach, the state opted to put employers out of business. A first offense gets a ten-day suspension of the firm’s business license, which would close the doors during that period. A subsequent offense revokes the business license permanently. Needless to say, that has provided an incentive to business owners to start checking identities through the federal database and terminating anyone who doesn’t clear the system.

Well — there it is. Pick the right fulcrum and you can move the world.

Proponents of federalism often refer to states as laboratories for political experiments. Arizona’s efforts on employer sanctions will prove an interesting test case for employer-based immigration sanctions.

The system works, given a chance.

Read it. My kind of place.

Read it. As granny used to say, God never closes a door without opening a window.

Read it. Well, it makes a lot of sense. Why pay double for the same service?

Read it. This is pretty funny, and alas all too true. The publishing business started out dysfunctional and has only gotten worse.

Read it. The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it. All of my illusions, shattered.

Read it. Tyler Cowan is apparently an economist even when walking down the street. Not the sort of life I would choose, but it’s no doubt good to have at least one wandering around.

The only time I’ve ever bought a book solely because of its cover, it was Fellowship of the Ring, which I bought because the cover art made me think it was one of Andre Norton’s Witch World series. That worked out rather well.

Read it. Funny how nobody asks whether National Socialism is relevant to the Democrat party, although I (for one) see a lot of resemblance.

Read it. Irony comes to the immigration situation.

Read it. As George Carlin says in his comedy routine, if you nail together two thing that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck out there will buy it.

Read it. Many’s the time I wish I had a laptop in a meeting….

Read it. Reminds me of an old filk — “You can make a mainframe from the things you find at home.”

Read it. Dealing with Muslims is like dealing with circus animals — they smile for the cameras but you can’t ever turn your back on them.

Read it. Life imitates great art.

Read it. An argument worth having. There are a lot of consumption tax fans out there; Bruce Bartlett takes ’em on.

The only good point I can see to a consumption tax is that it puts what you’re paying right in your face.

The bad points all cluster around the fact that it, too, will be a political football like the current tax code, with legislators carving out special favors for their favorite sob-story minority, untill (like the current system) the Crust and the Yobs pay nothing, while the productive middle class shoulders the entire burden.

Read it. The New York Times is so clueless it’s almost a parody of itself.

It would have been nicer if Mr. McConnell had really wanted to enlighten the public.

Well, that’s not really his job, is it? In fact, I suggest that his job is precisely the opposite.

This was supposed to make us feel better. It did not.

Well, anything that refrains from making the socialist morons at the Times feel better certainly has my support.  It’s still not clear to my why these clowns aren’t under indictment for all of the secret programs they’ve exposed, contrary to law.

Read it. And about time, too.

Read it. I have a question.

As president, he said, he would streamline the bureaucracy, strengthen law enforcement to curb a rise in crime and immediately close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in order to restore wetlands to protect against storms.

When was the last time a Democrat succeeded in “streamlining the bureaucracy” or “strengthen law enforcement”? Although it certainly doesn’t surprise me that he would ruin the Port of New Orleans’ commercial traffic to “restore wetlands”.

Read it. I’m still trying to figure out how this is a legitimate use of tax money.

Read it. Not really surprising, but it’s good to know they’re starting to nail down the details.

Read it. Our culture keeps getting worse and worse.

Read it. Don’t these silly critics understand that the job of government workers is to hire and pay more government workers? What are they thinking?

Read it. This is an extremely interesting and useful idea.

Read it. The viewspapers are only courageous in denouncing censorship by people who do not, in fact, have the power to censor them. When faced with people who have demonstrated that they can and will kill them, they not only shut up themselves, but willingly shut up other people.

UR does it again.

A European or American intellectual of 1907 would be shocked and appalled by the society of 2007 in many ways, but I think his general impression would be one of great mental conformity. It’s much easier to find popular opinions of 1907 that have no living parallel in 2007, than the reverse. (Gay rights is the only major innovation I can think of.) The process of memetic extinction is quite advanced.

Read it. I haven’t linked a pure libertarian piece in a while, so this is it.

Read it. If you squint just right you might even believe he’s serious.

This is the sort of thing Scott Adams would write, if Scott Adams could write as well as he can draw.

Read this for the moral.

Just as chemistry is a special case of physics and biology is a special case of chemistry, a government is a special case of a corporation.

Truest thing you know.

Safire on language.

David Brooks reviews a book that purports to explain Democrat failure with the novel theory that Democrats are just too rational.

I must admit that the notion of Democrats, the party of deconstruction, postmodernism, and “gender studies”, being just too rational to win elections made me laugh so hard that my stomach hurt.

Read it. And try to think of another country’s army in which this could possibly take place.

LanguageLog. If you don’t have any enemies, can you be said to exist? And could you possibly get a book contract?

Read it. The impact of science upon identity. How much can we change before we turn into somebody else? If we do turn into somebody else, is this necessarily a bad thing?

Read it. Consider the impact of religion on food, and vice versa.

Read it. And the hits just keep on comin’….

Cringely has some interesting news.

Read it. I like Arnold Kling’s wife’s policy suggestion: “Just take the oil.” The only reason the plutocrat royalty of the Arab world have two euros to rub together is because of Western tender-heartedness.

Read it. Not a surprise either. Don’t forget: What happens in Britain today may happen in America tomorrow.

Read it. And yet again the free market steps forward to supply the deficiencies in the “public sector”.

Read it.

Read it. Paging Dr McCoy….

Read it. This would seem like a sensible precaution. Don’t see what they’re bitching about. You’d think that there wasn’t a war on.

Read it. Can’t say that I blame her, really.

Read it. And keep in mind that Communism is just as repressive as Islam, just not as irrational.

Read it. And yet, if these kids were black, or Muslim, nobody would be bitching about it.