CPAC 2011 begins this Thursday, and The American Conservative will be playing several roles. Our “On War” columnist and director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, William S. Lind, will be making the case for slashing the defense budget on a panel at 11 am Friday morning in the Harding room of D.C.’s Marriott Wardman Park (the CPAC venue). Yours truly will be making some introductory remarks for Joseph Salerno’s “Unmasking the Federal Reserve” talk, as part of the Campaign for Liberty’s panoply of events. The Salerno talk is at 11 am Saturday in the Virginia Ballroom. C4L also has TAC TV star Jack Hunter and TAC contributing editors Tom Woods and James Bovard taking part in several events — see the full schedule of Campaign for Liberty CPAC activities here.
TAC personnel will have literature available and be helping out at the Committee for the Republic booth, and the committee has what promises to be a very lively panel, featuring Bruce Fein on the topic of cutting the defense budget and returning to a small-r republican foreign policy, at 1 pm Thursday in the Virginia Ballroom. Donald Rumsfeld may be receiving a “Defender of the Constitution” award — they must mean the Soviet constitution — but in many ways this looks to be a very bad CPAC for neocons.
regularron 
sal magundi 
This is all positive, but can I make one small inconvenient observation? It is not going to help the credibility of the call to slash the defense budget, a move I wholeheartedly endorse, that it is being made by the director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. I like Mr. Lind and I understand what he is up to with this project and this is not intended as a personal swipe at him. It may well be that in a modern city public transportation is both essential and desirable. And it would follow that good public transportation is better than bad public transportation. But at best it is a local and state issue, and public transportation advocacy, like so many other things, is often pursued at the federal level. I just point this out because I can see the defense hawks now squawking that defense is a constitutional function, arguably the primary function. This is already being done by people who are critical of Rand Paul, for example, for including defense in his proposal for cutting the budget. Just consider this knowing your enemy.