We've Been Here Before

Ronald Dworkin in the New York Times Review of Books.

Worrying About the Wrong Thing

One hopes that the perpetrators of current economic policy will be be called to answer for their idiocy. Did no one pay attention in Econ 101? Mark Thoma comments.

Happy Fourth of July--the USA Is not a Simple Concept

Today no one seems to want to wrestle with the complex organism that is the United States of America. On the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War some people want to believe the fiction that secession was not about slavery, when a simple reading of the articles of secession published by every southern state say that it was almost entirely about slavery. Likewise some of the simple-minded politicians want to pretend that the Constitution was the highest statement of what the USA is (even while they want to pass amendments regarding things as mundane as a balanced budget because our politicians can't do their jobs).

It's often hilarious to listen to uneducated politicians, some of whom seek the highest office in the land, fracture American history. From Paul Revere's ride to the most recent offering on the Constitution and slavery. Every school child should know that the Constitution defined Negro slaves as property--property equal to three fifths of a white citizen for the purposes of measuring population for elections. Slaves as property were a sort of quasi-human in a way that other property was not. It took another eighty-nine years for the USA to live up to the Declaration of Independence and make the slave population people equal (in theory) to the white population.

Here's Mark Byrnes take on the latest historical faux pas by a ignorant presidential candidate. This would be funny if Michelle Bachmann wasn't actually considered a viable candidate for president.

New Music on the Left

A Canadian group I'd never heard before.