The American Conservative

Watching the above parody, I thought about about an NPR story from about a month ago about “retro-acculturation,” in which musician Marco Polo Santiago went back to Oaxaca, Mexico, where his parents were born to learn “cumbia,” an Afro-Columbian hybrid music they once listened to:

Santiago, 36, was born in Los Angeles and is also a native English speaker. He grew up playing hip-hop and heavy metal. But now, he leads a band in Oakland that plays an Afro-Colombian style called “cumbia.” Santiago’s journey from hip-hop to cumbia began a couple of years ago, when he took a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, where his parents were born. He came across a woman playing a quijada — that’s the skeleton of a donkey jaw.

“It was my first time witnessing that,” Santiago said. “You’ve got a piece of carcass on stage that you are using as a musical instrument, and I was just fascinated by that, you know?”

… Santiago is a textbook example of what Jackie Hernandez calls “retro-acculturation.” Puerto Rican and raised in Manhattan, Hernandez is the chief operating officer of the Spanish-language Telemundo television network, which has made it a point to reach retro-acculturated Latinos.

It turns out the term has been in use for some time now, but my only encounter with some variation of it before hearing it on the radio had been this 2007 essay from TAC, by Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind:

One of conservatism’s most fundamental impulses, and one of its most valuable in a time when history is neglected or forgotten, is to recover good things from the past. Traditional cities and towns, passenger trains and streetcars, are examples of this tendency, which we label retroculture. The next conservatism should incorporate retroculture as one of its guiding themes, a basis for its actions beyond politics. Want to fix the public schools? How about Schools 1950? We already have retro cars such as Volkswagen’s New Beetle and the Mini. Why not retro manners and retro dress? It would be nice to see men’s and ladies’ hats again instead of kids’ underwear. By making old things new, retroculture might offer a counterweight to the endless spiral downward that pop culture decrees in everything. If fire is needed to fight fire, perhaps fashion should be used to fight fashion.

So what does this have to do with Mumford and Sons? Well, for starters it seems obvious that they tap into some sort of retrocultural impulse, but they also illustrate its limits in an important way. Just as investments in trains and streetcars Lind and Weyrich cite as the embodiment of retrocultural transportation often end up as public sector boondoggles or payoffs to monopolistic companies, much modern retro-sounding music ends up as upper-middle brow emotional validation in service of big entertainment. Besides, it’s not exactly clear what they’re recovering.

That wasn’t always the case, but we’ve (arguably) lost the participatory musical culture on which particular genres–such as cumbia, or American folk music–depend. I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done about that, and that dissolution itself has given rise to interesting new forms, as I wrote in a recent essay for the Umlaut, but it ensures the permanent retro-ness of the retrocultural project.

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What everyone agreed on during Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Tuesday was that it wasn’t actually about Apple’s tax dodging. It could have been dozens of other companies.

Apple did nothing illegal, and they’re the largest corporate taxpayer in America. The subcommittee’s report presents Apple as a “case study” in how multinational companies game the tax code, not accusing them of anything, per se. And though Senator Rand Paul took issue with  ”the spectacle of dragging in” Cook, representing one of “America’s success stories”—an oddly combative tone to take, which seems to have everything to do with his upcoming trip to Silicon Valley—Cook voluntarily appeared, and the subcommittee report even refers to Apple as a success story too.

Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) reassured Paul that it wasn’t about Apple, but about “investigating a tax code that is not working for the American people, is not working for businesses in this country, which some business decide how many taxes they’re going to pay, how many they won’t, what they’re going to leave offshore in terms of profit, cooking up all kinds of arrangements to avoid paying taxes.”

So why did Cook choose to appear? The Guardian’s Heidi Moore suspects this is because the subtext of Cook’s appearance was to build support for a tax holiday for repatriating overseas profits.

The reason why a lot of these multinational companies are so multinational is America’s corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world, at 35 percent, which means companies park approximately 1.7 trillion in profits offshore (often figuratively) and don’t pay taxes on it. Everyone wants to lower it, but it’s the low-hanging fruit of tax reform—Paul called it a “sweetener” in his statement—so Congress holds out for a chimerical comprehensive tax reform package.

Two proposals have been released recently to do repatriate foreign earnings. Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) has proposed tax exemptions proportionate to the company investing in infrastructure bonds.

Slightly better is Senator Paul’s repatriation bill, titled the Emergency Transportation Safety Fund Act, after the much less consequential infrastructure fund it also creates. Unlike the 2004 holiday which was largely used to repurchase stock and is widely seen as a failure, Paul’s bill doesn’t expire. (Why people see it as a failure is important—it’s clear that the expiration date led to short-term decision-making, that savings from the tax holiday went mostly toward repurchasing stock is a feature, not a criticism.)

These are both short-term fixes that do nothing to solve the underlying problem of high corporate tax rates, and mostly function as another tax loophole for large corporations.

It was easy to portray the hearing as just another lesson in harassment via the tax code, just like Tea Party groups, and that’s basically what Paul did. But it’s politically daft to suggest the hearing was in any way adversarial. Cook met with President Obama this November and was a donor to his campaign in 2008. Given the cozy relationship, he probably didn’t have to be “dragged” very hard to appear before a committee controlled by Democrats.

Some sort of tax holiday would be a massive boon for Apple. Why should Congress apologize to Cook for letting him make his case for why one is necessary?

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Today the IRS official in charge of the exemptions unit where the targeting of conservative groups occurred went before the House Oversight committee, and refused to answer any questions.

The ranking member on the committee Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has called for Lois Lerner’s resignation already, and said during the hearing today that he was ”disappointed” that she pled the fifth.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) referred to the IRS’s behavior to this point as “stonewalling” that “can’t continue,” and suggested a special prosecutor might be necessary. “There will be hell to pay if that’s the route we choose to go down,” he said.

“I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws,” said Lerner in a brief opening statement. “I have not violated any IRS rules and regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”

She then declined to answer any questions. When pressed by Chairman Darrell Issa, (R-CA) as to whether there were any more specific areas she would be willing to talk about, the former director repeated, “I will not answer any questions.”

The IRS maintains that the targeting that went on was not political, and claims that interpretation is borne out by the Inspector General’s report. The IRS commissioner at the time, Douglas Schulman, said in his opening statement that the questions for tea party groups “created the appearance” of political targeting, which he said was nonetheless “inappropriate and damaging.”

The two Democratic Reps on the oversight committee aren’t the only ones who have questioned the IRS’s handling of the scandal thus far. On Tuesday, Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Baucus asked “Why wasn’t more definitive action taken?” after the IRS found out the targeting was going on. No one was fired at the time, when commissioner Schulman found out about it in May 2012.

One was reassigned, but today Schulman said, “To the best of my knowledge I was not involved in the reassignments.”

Though conservatives are working hard to tie the scandal to the upper levels of the administration, that link need not exist for the targeting to have been politically motivated. The IRS’s behavior takes place within the context of the president’s criticisms of tax exemptions for right-wing groups, with many Democratic legislators going further calling for them to be investigated.

The first lawsuit by Tea Party groups has now been filed, and today the RNC issued a Freedom of Information Act request for more information.

The White House has had to walk back several claims about who knew what, when. Howard Fineman has more on that.

The hearing is still going on, updates to follow.

Update: Reps Markey and Holmes-Norton pile on. Markey focuses on the IRS asking about the content of the prayers of Christian conservative groups, to which Schulman responded that “sounds inappropriate to me.” Holmes-Norton says it would be “far worse if there were outside influence, outside the IRS.” The IG responds that there is no evidence of that yet.

Update:

RT @darrellissa: E-mail show @ustreasury IG knew internal #IRS investigation found wrongdoing back in July 2012 1.usa.gov/16OiSr9

— GOP Oversight (@GOPoversight) May 22, 2013

Rep Jordan: Schulman visited WH 118 times

— Jordan (@j_arthur_bloom) May 22, 2013

Jordan brings up that 132 different members of Congress contacted Shulman about 501(c)4 status in the time period they’re focused on.

— Jedediah Bila (@JedediahBila) May 22, 2013

IRS IG says they’ve had trouble getting an answer on how and why the agency started targeting tea party groups

— Jon Ward (@jonward11) May 22, 2013

Update: Inspector General J. Russell George says, “We have had some difficulty in terms of getting clarity from some of the IRS employees we’ve interviewed.”

Shulman: “I dont take personal responsibility for there being a list with criteria on it.” @amspec #IRS

— Kaylin Bugos (@KaylinBugos) May 22, 2013

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The Nation looks into the Center for American Progress’s “dark money” and ties to First Solar:

Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner—
a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for 
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.

Read the whole thing, it’s a great illustration of why the Democratic party’s version of liberalism isn’t remotely opposed to big business. First Solar is an almost perfect case study in how it’s usually not thriving upstart companies that benefit from government favors, it’s flailing, politically-connected ones seeking to preserve their place in the market.

In the fall of 2011, First Solar finalized nearly $4 billion in loan guarantees fromt he Department of Energy, as part of a program enthusiastically endorsed by ThinkProgress and CAP’s other affiliates. They also received a $455.7 million loan guarantee from the Export-Import Bank to build plants in Canada.

As all this was happening, First Solar was beset by a number of threats to its business, mainly the introduction of more efficient Chinese and Canadian solar panels and diminished demand in Europe. In 2010 they had a net income of $664 million, and in 2011, a net loss of $39 million, in part because of a $215 million “manufacturing excursion” involving solar panels that failed at high temperatures. In 2012 it was one of the worst performing members of the S&P 500, despite a major cash infusion from the Walton family—heralded friends of labor and the environment, them—on New Year’s Eve 2011.

First Solar quickly sold three of the largest solar farms for which they received loan guarantees; Antelope Valley, Desert Sunlight, and Topaz Solar. In fact, the day after a $1.46 billion loan guarantee was approved in late September 2011 for Desert Sunlight, it was sold to NextEra Energy. It was dubbed 2011′s North American Solar Deal of the Year.

A GAO audit found that the DOE’s loan guarantee program had significant oversight problems.

The DOE estimates the project CAP’s Richard Caperton praised will create 20 permanent jobs.

Bill McMorris has more on CAP’s “Business Alliance.”

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This is why a convention was a bad idea.

The Chesapeake bishop who clinched the Virginia GOP’s nomination for lieutenant governor this weekend has a history of crazy, unhinged statements that everyone from Buzzfeed to Bill Bolling have already criticized. Many of them are pretty standard charismatic fare, but there’s some genuinely offensive stuff in there too, like saying liberals “have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did.”

Ordinarily there’s a certain logic to putting someone who can please the party faithful on a ticket’s second slot—the Paul Ryan to Mitt Romney. But Cuccinelli is anything but a squish, and E.W. Jackson’s nomination does nothing but ensure a very conservative nominee is associated with his very conservative running mate’s crazy, unhinged statements.

More importantly, the LG is the tiebreaking vote in the state senate right now. The current Republican LG hasn’t reliably voted with his party (on transportation, voter ID and redistricting). But Jackson will not win. That means the state GOP didn’t just give up the lieutenant governorship, but control of the state legislature too.

Dave Weigel has more:

Democrats win in Virginia, in off-years, when they convince suburbanites that the GOP has lost its mind. They will point out that the lieutenant governor, rather unusually, has real clout in Virginia at the moment. The state Senate is evenly split between the parties, and the state’s second-highest ranking official gets to break the ties. Bolling provided key votes on a tax-hiking transportation plan and a voter ID bill. Jackson repeatedly told Republican activists why Bolling was wrong; if you’d have put him in the chair, he’d have sided with hardcore conservatives.

A month ago, before the party took him seriously, Jackson gave a long interview to an Internet radio host named Anna Yeisley, and told her that the lieutenant governor’s office would offer him even more than the vote. He’d approach it as a “platform to move this commonwealth into a conservative, constitutional direction when the legislature is not in session.”

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The Washington Post reported yesterday that in 2010 the Justice Department surveilled Fox News reporter James Rosen and obtained a search warrant for his private emails:

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails. …

At a time when President Obama’s administration is under renewed scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, the Kim case provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one such probe.

Glenn Greenwald explains what sets this apart from the Obama administration’s other prosecutions over leaks:

It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests – something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist – something done every day in Washington – and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”. …

This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

To obtain that search warrant (read the full thing here), the Obama administration had to argue Rosen had committed a criminal act. A second high-profile incident in as many weeks of the DOJ surveilling journalists raises the question of just how widespread this kind of behavior is, a question Julian Sanchez took up last Friday in Mother Jones. Not surprisingly, we don’t really know:

It wouldn’t be surprising if there were more cases like this we’ve never heard about. Here’s why: The Justice Department’s rules only say the media must be informed about “subpoenas” for “telephone toll records.” The FBI’s operations guidelines interprets those rules quite literally, making clear the requirement “concerns only grand jury subpoenas.” … The procedures that do apply to those tools have been redacted from publicly available versions of the FBI guidelines. Thus, it’s no shocker the AP seizure would seem like an “unprecedented intrusion” if the government doesn’t think it has to tell us about the precedents. And there’s no telling if the Justice Department rules (and the FBI’s interpretation) allow the feds to seize without warning other types of electronic communications records that could reveal a journalist’s e-mail, chat, or Web browsing activity.

If there’s an upshot to any of this, it’s that snooping on journalists could be the last straw that gets people to care about the administration’s ongoing effort to shut down leaks and prosecute whistleblowers.

Key to both surveillance operations are the ways in which executive powers have expanded, but also how privacy laws have failed to keep pace with technological progress.  If ever there were a time to call for a ‘Leveson in reverse’ commission to examine how both might be adjusted to better protect journalists and whistleblowers—rather than a toothless shield law, as the administration is proposing—now might be it.

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I just finished chatting about the IRS and AP scandals on the Marc Steiner show with Ari Berman of The Nation, the ACLU’s Gabe Rottman, and for the second half, FDL’s Kevin Gosztola. Podcast forthcoming here.

We disagreed, obviously, about how the IRS’s discrimination bears on campaign finance reform. I don’t see how the IRS scandal argues for putting even more power in their hands.

But I’d like to return to a finer point about which we disagreed but didn’t really get into. Berman seemed convinced that the discrimination was the result of front-line IRS employees deluged with a glut of new, post-Citizens United filings, that needed to come up with some criteria for sorting through it. This is more or less the argument the IRS itself has made (and somewhat similar to the one officials are making about Benghazi). For his part, Rottman contended that the politics didn’t matter so much as the discriminatory questioning itself. Here are four reasons why it’s hard to believe the IRS wasn’t just coping with an overflow of applications, despite the IG report’s assertion to the contrary.

• The questions themselves — If the IRS employees did not know that 501c4s are not required to disclose their donors when they asked for lists, then they are shockingly incompetent. So why did they want them? Either they intended to embarrass the donors by leaking them, or somewhat more benignly, it was just another question in a litany of unreasonable requests designed to hold up the approval process.
• Democratic calls to crack down on 501c4 groups — These are far from the only ones.
• Behavior and connections of IRS employees — The IRS commissioner knew about the targeting for at least a year and hasn’t reported it. She’s not even the one getting fired, and currently runs the IRS’s Affordable Care Act office. Director of the exemptions unit Lois Lerner’s initial apology contained a number of statements that were untrue, such as the number of organizations targeted and that it was confined to the Cincinnati office. Last night Jon Ward reported a congressional source said that Lerner hasn’t agreed to testify before Congress, is in Montreal, and has hired the same lawyer as Dominique Strauss Kahn.
• Leaks to liberal groups — ProPublica reported Monday that IRS employees leaked the applications of nine conservative groups. The National Organization for Marriage is now accusing the IRS of doing the same with their confidential information

There’s a lot we still don’t know, and today’s hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee (in progress) is only the first step in finding out. And IRS employees behaving in a partisan way does not imply White House involvement, of course. But I’d argue the totality of the evidence already points strongly toward there being political motivations behind the targeting.

Update: An early highlight from today

Update: David Freddoso, Garance Franke-Ruta, and Doug Donovan all point out that the Citizens United explanation is basically a red herring.

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Interesting, isn’t it? The IRS, EPA, and DOJ scandals all happened before the election. We’re only hearing about them now.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) May 14, 2013

 Yup. Sure is.

And you can add Pigford and Benghazi to that list, too. To recap:

– EPA chief Lisa Jackson, alias “Richard Windsor,” resigned in late December amidst a transparency scandal involving the use of fake email accounts to avoid scrutiny. Today,  the same organization that sued for access to those emails reveals that the EPA gave green groups fee waivers for FOIA requests 93 percent of the time, whereas the Competitive Enterprise Institute was required to pay 14 out of 15 times.

– The IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups (and small-government ones and ones whose stated mission is to “make America a better place to live”) went back to 2010, when they first started receiving egregiously detailed questionnaires. The White House has known since April, and pinned it on the Cincinnati field office originally, per the IRS commissioner’s apology. Not only is that claim not true—senior IRS officials have known since 2011, as the Washington Post reported last night, and they lied to Congress about it—but the Cincinnati office isn’t just a random peripheral subdivision, it’s the main office for processing exempt organizations claims. Not to mention CNN is now reporting that several other field offices were involved. Both the President and House Speaker John Boehner have promised to look into the matter. On the Senate side, Max Baucus will be heading up the investigation, and he actually encouraged investigating Tea Party groups.

– In the most shocking scandal yet in the president’s war on leaks—alternatively, war on whistleblowers—the Associated Press revealed yesterday that the Justice Department obtained two months’ worth of phone records from more than 20 different phone lines in an apparent attempt to trace the sources of a story about a foiled bomb plot by Yemen-based terrorists. The AP’s CEO has called it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”

Not every one of these could have been uncovered by the mainstream press, though all of them have to do with concerns raised by conservatives months or in some cases years ago that weren’t taken seriously. ProPublica’s decision yesterday evening to out the Cincinnati office as their source for confidential tax documents seems especially self-serving in light of the developing scandal. The Washington Post‘s story on Lisa Jackson’s resignation didn’t even mention her pseudonymous emails. You’d think a major newspaper would be concerned enough about transparency to do so. With a mainstream press this solicitous of the administration, is it any wonder they thought they could get away with snooping on reporters’ phone records? American Pravda, indeed.

Update: I guess I should have put that headline in quotes. Also, RNC chairman Reince Priebus has just called for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation.

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Whether the persistence of hipster eulogies is a sign of the West’s cultural stagnation or merely the slipperiness of the term, I couldn’t tell you. What’s incontrovertible is the hipster has been dying for about five years now. It’s true because sensitive, trend-spotting journalists have said so. But as far as I know this is the first time its death has been studied gromatically by political scientists:

Just 16% of Americans have a favorable opinion of hipsters, a new PPP poll on the much-discussed subculture shows. 42% have an unfavorable opinion of hipsters, and 43% aren’t sure. Democrats (18% favorable, 34% unfav) are twice as likely as Republicans (9% fav, 48% unfav) to have a favorable opinion. Voters age 18-29 have a favorable opinion of them (43% fav-29% unfav), but very few voters over age 65 do (6% fav -37% unfav).

Just 10% of voters say they consider themselves to be hipsters – and almost all of those are younger voters. Half of all voters aged 18-29 consider themselves hipsters; every other age group is 5% or less. … 27% of voters said they thought hipsters should be subjected to a special tax for being so annoying, while 73% did not think so. About one in five voters (21%) said they thought Pabst Blue Ribbon, commonly associated with hipsters, was a good beer. Democrats (29%) were more likely than Republicans (23%) to think so, while independents (11%) were least likely.

Almost a majority (46 percent) think they’re soulless cultural appropriators.

My favorite hipster eulogy is still this Adbusters—yes, I know it’s left-wing—piece, for the sheer hopelessness of it, and that it comes from their same political/philosophical position as most of the people we would describe as such. It quotes TakiMag contributor and Vice founding editor Gavin McInnes:

“I’ve always found that word ["hipster"] is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable,” he says. “I’m dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda.”

In other words, people use the word like they use the word “yuppie”—pejoratively. Since this isn’t something PPP regularly measures, we can’t be sure if opinion has soured, but I suspect not. My guess is the public at large always hated them.

At least now we know what polling firms do when there’s not a big election coming up.

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Yesterday’s Post carried this story on Senator Rand Paul’s attempts to reach out to the evangelical community, and carried this choice, heretical-by-libertarian-standards, quote:

In an interview a day before his Iowa trip, Paul, 50, also tried to make clear just what kind of politician he is. “To some, ‘libertarian’ scares people,” he said. “Some of them come up to me and they say, ‘I kind of like you, but I don’t like legalizing heroin.’ And I say, ‘Well, that’s not my position.’ ”

Paul said he believes in freedom and wants a “virtuous society” where people practice “self-restraint.” Yet he believes in laws and limits as well. Instead of advocating for legalized drugs, for example, he pushes for reduced penalties for many drug offenses.

“I’m not advocating everyone go out and run around with no clothes on and smoke pot,” he said. “I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.”

The evangelicals, at least according to the story, seem to be buying it:

[Pastor Brad] Sherman got that chance Friday when he joined other clergy members at the Cedar Rapids lunch to pose pointed questions to Paul. He said he came away liking what he heard. “He made it very clear that he does not support legalization of drugs like marijuana and that he supports traditional marriage,” Sherman said.

Not so much the libertarians, if Reason’s take (“I can’t help but wonder how Paul would be different from any other Republican president”) and my Facebook feed are any indication. Just like the flap over his position on drones, the outrage seems to be over a less elegant statement of the same position he’s held the whole time. Fair is fair, of course, and it’s entirely reasonable to take a politician at his word, but I have two thoughts.

First, many of the people now denouncing Paul for not wanting to end the drug war also share a sense that he’s concealing his radicalism. Second, assuming Rand Paul were to run in 2016, it’s highly likely that he’ll come out in favor of marijuana legalization, which a majority of voters now support—my guess would be by endorsing state-level initiatives rather than saying he’ll reschedule it at the federal level—but that probably won’t happen until he gets the nomination.

Comments made in the context of buttering up religious-right leaders shouldn’t be overinterpreted, especially given the American Family Association’s signal that they wouldn’t fight Paul on the marijuana issue. And there’s reason to doubt the assumption that the social conservative position is to favor an endless, wasteful drug war that is anything but Christian. Among religious leaders there’s more consensus about its failure than ever before, but radicalism isn’t going to get them to warm up to reform.

It’s also worth mentioning Rand’s carte blanche states’ rights position isn’t very different from his father’s, who, in the GOP presidential debate, didn’t actually say he’d legalize heroin, but that he’d leave it to the states. Despite some sloppy AP reporting to the contrary, the younger Paul believes basically the same thing; it works as rhetorical cover. I guess I part with a lot of libertarians in thinking it’s wise for him to be using it for the time being.

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