On my mind today.

“The ability of people to convince themselves that they can win the presidency (Fred Thompson? Chris Dodd? Seriously?) is the stuff of legend.”
– Kevin Drum

The classic Johnny Rivers tune.

This is the track through which my lovely wife introduced me to the greatness of the Jayhawks. As a bonus, this is the band playing on the old Jon Stewart show. You know, the one he had on MTV? Back in the 90s? Was I the only one who watched that?

From Michael Giacchino’s excellent score for J.J. Abrams Star Trek remake.

“In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
– James Madison

* Peak oil is coming sooner than you think.

* Baby Einstein is bad for babies.

* Rod Dreher has a good article on the death penalty in light of the Willingham case.

* AIPAC v. J Street.

* A bunch of high schoolers stood and watched as one of their classmates was beaten and raped. Nobody called 911.

* Glenn Beck falls for Hugh Hewitt’s joke.

Last week, Congress approved the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, with costs totalling to a whopping $680 billion. And as Christopher Preble points out, that’s not all:

The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

And don’t forget that national security spending also contributes to our growing budget deficits. In Fiscal Year 2009, the United States spent approximately $383 billion on interest payments to service the debt (by way of comparison, that’s about 7.5 times NASA’s budget). As we continue to allow national security spending to go unchecked, those numbers are only going to get worse.

The amount of money being poured into national security spending is completely irresponsible and unsustainable. We can’t afford it. As we (hopefully) wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to take a real hard look at our foreign policy–particularly why we feel the need to spend more on defense than the rest of the world does combined. There’s no reason why we can’t adopt a more restrained policy and still keep the United States secure. I mean, let’s put this in perspective. We could cut DOD appropriations in half, today, and we’d be spending more on defense than all of the EU nations combined.

We need to move to a more responsible course.

(cross-posted to Outside the Beltway)

In my opinion, the best track on Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffitti.

“Good news for investors who like to lose all their money, ‘John Meriwether, the hedge fund manager and arbitrageur behind Long-Term Capital Management, is in the process of setting up a new hedge fund – his third.’ What’s that, you ask, didn’t his first fund lose all its money? Why, yes. And didn’t the second fund fold because it lost a ton of money? Yes, quite so. So how will this new one be different? It won’t!”
– Matthew Yglesias