The American Conservative

The Pakistani cricketer turned aspiring prime minister fell 15 feet from a campaign platform during a rally Tuesday. He’s hospitalized with three fractured vertebrae, but his campaign may benefit from a sympathy vote, according to Jon Boone in the Guardian:

Mohammad Malick, a prominent journalist, said the images in the broadcast would more than compensate for the loss of time on the campaign trail. “This really resonates because people like the image of a fighter, of a warrior,” he said. “He took this terrible fall and he’s recovering quickly – that is a powerful image.”

Malick said it could also help boost voter turnout, which analysts believe will benefit Khan more than the frontrunner, Nawaz Sharif, the head of his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N).

A poll published by the political magazine Herald on Wednesday showed the [Khan's] PTI and PML-N were virtually tied, with the latter leading by less than a percentage point among the 1,285 people surveyed.

For background on Khan, from the cricket field to Pakistan’s politics shaded by Islamism and military force, see his biographer Christopher Sandford’s recent TAC story, from shortly before Khan launched his election bid.

Earlier this week, Yemeni citizen Farea al-Muslimi testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights about the effect U.S. drone strikes have had in his country. “The drone strikes are the face of America to many Yeminis,” he warns:

With Straussian eminence Walter Berns in attendance—he asks the final question—Jonathan Rauch and Justin Raimondo debate “Is Gay Marriage Good for America?” for American University’s Janus Forum.

Rauch frames his pro-SSM argument as socially conservative, a “Burkean social fabric thing,” in the words of one audience member. Raimondo has a radical libertarian counterblast to that, and he notes the irony that while genetic determinism is frowned upon in discussions of race or sex, it’s invoked as a source of authority by those who argue for same-sex marriage. He calls it “pseudo-science mixed with moralism” and latter-day “Lysenkoism.” Rauch is concerned to protect religious liberties, while Raimondo, foreseeing dire consequences for Christians who refuse to accept a new definition of marriage, warns that “people who are oppressed inevitably turn into the worst bullies” once they have government power on their side.

It’s a debate unlike any other on this issue, inspired in part by Raimondo’s TAC article “The Libertarian Case Against Gay Marriage.”

Here’s C-SPAN’s video of American Conservative contributor and Daily Caller News Foundation editor James Antle discussing his new book, Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? In his talk, Antle makes the point that Republicans can prevent bigger government and scale back or even eliminate existing programs, if they’re willing to pay a political price for doing so:

The most successful conservative Congress in history, actually, in my argument was the do-nothing Congress after World War II, where Robert Taft was the leader of a very successful long-term movement to control federal spending. They didn’t repeal the New Deal, but where they decided to strike, they struck decisively. They abolished programs, they didn’t trim them. They eliminated price controls and the militarization of the U.S. economy; they didn’t sort of tinker around its edges. They cut military spending. They also prevented the enactment of something that would have been way to the left of Obamacare, a British National Health Service-style of national healthcare that was being supported by the Truman administration. They didn’t have a lot of public opinion on their side, they didn’t have a friendly president, they had a very hostile president in Harry Truman, who was a firm believer in the New Deal consensus, but nevertheless they were successful.

One reason however why their work has not been replicated very often is that politically they were the least successful. Ronald Reagan was re-elected. The Republicans held the Senate during the Reagan years until the 1986 elections. After the Gingrich elections, the Republicans controlled the House until the 2006 elections, so they had the House for 12 years, and the Senate for most of that time period. The do-nothing Congress was voted out in the next election. But in terms of actually saving this country from a much bigger government, and making it possible for us to even have the debates that we were having with Reagan and Gingrich, I don’t think you can argue with their success.

Watch his C-SPAN talk, or buy the book, for more.

An incredible manhunt is underway. Police have surrounded a 20-block area in
Watertown, as the entire city of Boston remains shut down. One suspect is now dead, while the other is the subject of an unprecedented search effort. From the bombs going off on Monday to the current pursuit, new tools of public information conveyance merged with the old in a frenzied rush of identification, misidentification, and false certainty.

It’s still early w unconfirmed scanner reports but if Redit was right with the Sunil Tripathi theory, it’s changed the game 4ever

— Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) April 19, 2013

For instance, in the middle of a wild Thursday night, before the Tsarnayev brothers were officially identified, several reports erroneously suggested that one of the suspects was in fact a missing Brown student previously fingered by users on Reddit. Ryan Chittum has more:

And then there were the keyboard crimefighters at Reddit. At one point a police dispatcher, apparently incorrectly, said that the suspects’ names were Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who disappeared last month, and Mike Mulugeta. Reddit, still smarting from the backlash to their amateur sleuthing, took a very premature victory lap.

Earlier this week Alexis Madrigal warned against the giddy overzealous vigilantism on Reddit:

Read More…

Boston’s WCVB has more astonishing raw footage from the early hours gunfight in Watertown, Mass., where police closed in on the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, who answered with (according to several reports) machine-gun fire and thrown explosives. Science journalist Seth Mnookin, who teaches at MIT, was on the scene—and tweeted it. The night’s developments began with the murder of a police officer at MIT, followed by the Watertown gunfight, and a manhunt for one of the suspects. The other suspect apparently died after the firefight.

Much of this information comes from Twitter, in particular from relayed reports from police scanners in the area. Needless to say, news of this sort is subject to revision. But the Boston Globe is among the more established sources that confirms the outlines of what happened overnight. At first it was unclear whether the MIT incident was related to the marathon bombings—but the subsequent exchange of heavy fire between police and the suspects, who seemed to have explosive devices in their possession, tended to dismiss most doubts.

Update – This post has been corrected to include new information. We now know the two suspects are apparently brothers from in or near Chechnya. The elder died in a firefight and the younger is still at large.

Raw footage of the blast is harrowing: a father and son filming the fire at the West, Texas fertilizer plant were close enough to be shaken and deafened by the explosion.

The Telegraph has a somewhat less disturbing clip of moment of detonation in the report below. The plant contains more than 12 times as much chemical fertilizer as was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Read the bill here. It’s the brainchild, so to speak, of Republicans John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Jeff Flake and Democrats Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Robert Menendez, and Michael Bennet.

TAC contributing editor Jim Antle discussed the politics of the GOP’s immigration turnabout on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC program last month:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On the latest Bloggingheads, Betsy Woodruff of NRO and TAC’s own Jordan Bloom discussed Rand Paul’s speech at Howard University, libertarians and the GOP, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and Sarah Palin’s legacy. Check it out here:

TAC contributing editor Justin Raimondo will be discussing his essay “The Libertarian Case Against Gay Marriage” and debating Jonathan Rauch of Brookings on the subject next Tuesday, April 16, at American University in Washington, D.C. The debate begins at 8 pm and takes place in AU’s Mary Graydon Center, Rooms 4 & 5.

Here’s a sample of Justin’s argument:

Extending the authority of the state into territory previously untouched by its tender ministrations, legalizing relationships that had developed and been found rewarding entirely without this imprimatur, would wreak havoc where harmony once prevailed. Imagine a relationship of some duration in which one partner, the breadwinner, had supported his or her partner without much thought about the economics of the matter: one had stayed home and tended the house, while the other had been in the workforce, bringing home the bacon. This division of labor had prevailed for many years, not requiring any written contract or threat of legal action to enforce its provisions.

Then, suddenly, they are legally married—or, in certain states, considered married under the common law. This changes the relationship, and not for the better. For now the property of the breadwinner is not his or her own: half of it belongs to the stay-at-home. Before when they argued, money was never an issue: now, when the going gets rough, the threat of divorce—and the specter of alimony—hangs over the relationship, and the mere possibility casts its dark shadow over what had once been a sunlit field.