I like to read Volokh Conspiracy. I enjoy their intelligent and thoughtful commentary on (mostly) legal matters from a conservative/libertarian perspective. But not all participants are cut from the same cloth. Take for example this post by Jim Lindgren, wherein he criticizes Diane Francis for making a pretty stupid argument for population control:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Lindgren’s response?

A welfare state is in one sense a big Ponzi scheme. Without increasing numbers of people entering the scheme, there is no money to pay the people receiving the money. As Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, you can’t run a welfare state without a growing population.

Francis, a visiting professor at Ryerson University, also blogs at the Huffington Post. BTW, Jim Geraghty reports that she has two children, which is one more than I have.

Huh? So…because Francis is (presumably) a liberal (because only liberals would argue for severe population control) her argument for severe population control is undermined because where would we get the new bodies to pay for the welfare state (which only liberals support)? Also, she’s a hypocrite. I mean, is that the argument? If you can tell you’re smarter than I am.

Filled with nonsequiter-ish snark, Lindgren misses a chance to gut Francis’ stupid argument:

…imagine you are a bit richer. You may have moved to a town, or your village may have grown. Schools, markets and factories are within reach. And suddenly, the incentives change. A tractor can gather the harvest better than children. Your wife may get a factory job—and now her lost wages must be set against the benefits of another baby. Education, thrift and a stake in the future become more important, and these middle-class virtues go hand in hand with smaller families. Education costs money, so you may not be able to afford a large family. Perhaps the state provides a pension and you no longer need children to look after you. And perhaps your wife is no longer willing to bear endless offspring. Higher living standards, better communications and more education enable you to rely on markets and public services, not just yourself and your family.

Macroeconomic research bears out this picture. Fertility starts to drop at an annual income per person of $1,000-2,000 and falls until it hits the replacement level at an income per head of $4,000-10,000 a year (see chart 2). This roughly tracks the passage from poverty to middle-income status and from an agrarian society to a modern one. Thereafter fertility continues at or below replacement until, for some, it turns up again (see article).

The link between living standards and fertility exists within countries, too. India’s poorest state, Bihar, has a fertility rate of 4; richer Tamil Nadu and Kerala have rates below 2. Shanghai has had a fertility rate of less than 1.7 since 1975; in Guizhou, China’s poorest province, the rate is 2.2. So strong is the link between wealth and fertility that the few countries where fertility is not falling are those torn apart by war, such as Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where living standards have not risen.

In other words, raising living standards is nearly as effective as a draconian family size restrictions. What conservative wouldn’t get behind an argument to make everyone richer, and let them have as many kids as they want (because they’ll want less kids)? You can even make the principled argument that the present debated measures to control greenhouse emissions would only slow this process, and result in degradation to the environment as a result of population overgrowth.

Or if you’re Jim Lindgren, you can use it to take a cheap shot at the left that doesn’t connect because it doesn’t make any sense. Which means that I’m apparently a better conservative blogger than Jim Lindgren.

You may be familiar with the Uighur people as a result of our years-long detention (and recent deportation to Bermuda) of Uighur separatists held at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of terrorism. It appears that, just as in Tibet, China’s heavy-handed policy of cultural assimilation of minorities has sparked violent protests and riots in Xinjian province, half of whose population is Uighur:

As northwest China’s Xinjiang Province settled into tense stillness on Wednesday after three days of deadly ethnic violence, a Communist Party leader from the region pledged to seek the death penalty for anyone behind the strife that state news reports say claimed at least 156 lives.

Li Zhi, the party boss in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital where the violence was centered, said that many suspected instigators of the riots had been arrested, and that most were students. His promise to seek the death sentence for those responsible came as China’s president Hu Jintao cut short his stay in Italy, where he had planned to attend a Group of Eight summit meeting, to return home and deal with aftermath of the riots, the worst ethnic violence in China in decades.

Mr. Hu had planned to meet with President Obama at the Italy summit to discuss climate change and other issues. China’s foreign ministry said in a written statement that he was returning to Beijing “given the current situation in Xinjiang,” where Sunday’s riots by ethnic Uighurs were followed Monday and Tuesday by reprisal attacks on the part of ethnic Hans.

The Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group, once were the majority in Xinjiang but now comprise only about half of the province’s 20 million people. In Urumqi, the provincial capital of more than two million where the violence has been centered, Uighurs are greatly outnumbered by the Han, who make up some 90 percent of China’s population.

The immediate cause of the riots appears to have been rumors that Uighur men had raped Han Chinese women at a factory far from Urumqi, rumors that led Han Chinese to attack Uighurs, which in turn prompted attacks on Han Chinese by Uighurs, kicking off a cycle of ethnic violence. The proximate cause however, is China’s policy of cultural annihilation, affected by the repression of the practice of Islam by Uighurs, as well as a state policy of encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang and so overwhelm the Uighur population. As in Tibet, China has expressed a policy of economic advancement, but the rising tide fails to lift all boats, as most of the benefits of the rapid economic growth go to the Han Chinese who have moved to the province. As in Tibet, Chinese leaders have responded to the violence by pouring troops into the region, and by rounding up those who they suspect of participating in or organizing the riots. As is always the case, there is no excuse for the killing of innocent men, women and children, no matter how grievous the injury inflicted upon your people. But Chinese leaders are well aware that their policies are the cause of this latest round of violence. So far the White House has only expressed “concern” about the rioting.

As a slight aside, here’s the typical right-wing take on the violence in Xinjiang:

As with military coups, not all protests are created equal. Chinese officials have begun to blame foreign agitators for fomenting the violence in Urumqi and throughout the Xinjiang region, as did Iran with their unrest over the rigged presidential election. Unlike Iran, however, China has some factual basis for this claim. Al-Qaeda has recruited and trained Uighur radical Islamists, who want independence for Xinjiang in order to establish a Turkic theocratic state, just as the Taliban created in Afghanistan.

That doesn’t mean that other Uighurs don’t have legitimate claims on democratic reform and independence for better reasons, of course. The AQ-Taliban connection to the Uighurs makes it difficult to determine which forces are in play in Xinjiang at the moment, though. Broad assumptions in either direction would be a mistake, especially since the “freedom fighters” causing most of the trouble in that region don’t support freedom at all — just a change of tyrants.

Like a typical right-winger, Morrissey judges the validity of the Uighur’s desire for freedom on what sort of freedom they’d like to have, and who they associate themselves with to get it (not what acts they perpetrate though; terrorism is okay, if it’s perpetrated against a regime hostile to the United States.) Because the Uighurs desire a “Turkic theocratic state” (Morrissey demonstrating his command of Wikipedia with a reference to the Uighur’s ethnic grouping) where the religious preference would be Islam, and because Uighur’s are strongly suspected of having trained at Al Qaeda facilities (though only to return to China to fight the government there) their desire for freedom is not as legitimate as the desire of say, the Tibetans, whose religious preferences don’t trigger pants-wetting on the part of right-wingers, and who do not affiliate with religious terrorists. Morrissey’s judgement is not unusual in it’s obtuseness, but it remains disappointing that right-wingers judge all matters in the world of foreign policy through their own peculiar lens. The Iranian dissidents are approved of, because they are opposed to a leader both feared and hated by the right. The dissidents in Honduras are not approved of, because they support a leader viewed with suspicion and disdain by the right. The rioters in Xinjian are not approved of because their separatists have mingled with Al Qaeda and because they are Muslim. None of this has anything to do with validity or invalidity of claims of religious or political oppression; it’s all merely an ad hoc judgement based on who right-wingers do and do not approve of in the world. As an approach to foreign policy this is neither principled nor coherant (nor workable), but it makes perfect sense to a right-wing authoritarian who quivers under their sheets at night at the thought of Latin American electing quasi-socialist leaders, or Muslim terrorists slipping into their room at night to force them to wear burkas and pray to Allah.

UPDATE: Oh dear. Via Local Crank, more right-wing idiocy on the Uighurs. Honestly, who could have predicted that 9/11 would make right-wingers suckers for Chinese propaganda?

UPDATE II: And this post from Glenn Greenwald, who plays the thought exercise “What if the Uighurs were Christian?” You can probably guess his conclusion.

While Rush Limbaugh and the people on FOX News were in a tizzy over President Obama’s landmark speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, Egypt today, I found it interesting that the consistently crazy conservative blog Hot Air described the speech as “surprisingly good.” It’s qualified praise, of course, but still, any praise is astonishing given the “OMG President Obama is subservient to the Saudi King!” posts of the blog’s recent past.

Anyway, it’s not an overstatement that President Obama’s speech (which was a campaign promise) was as rhetorically brilliant and substantive as normal. I highly advise you to watch and/or read it in full here. He offered tough words to Al Qaeda (who clearly don’t know how to deal with him) and those who would justify 9/11 and deny the Holocaust, while simultaneously calling on Israel to stop the expansion of settlements (and promoting a Palestinian state) and admitting the the CIA’s role in deposing Mosaddeq. He calls for expanded rights for women in the Muslim world but says that while the U.S. will always promote democracy it won’t force it on others. He asks Iran to stop pursuing nuclear weapons, but recognizes their right to peaceful nuclear energy and recommits to a nuclear-free world in general (could this hurt Ahmadinejad’s re-election hopes? Let’s hope so). Seriously, Barack Obama is so different from what we’ve seen before it’s still, even nearly five months in now, amazing to know that he is indeed the President of the United States and is making history everyday.

Of course, U.S.-Muslim relations will not instantly be rid of tensions with one speech, but it’s a damn good start and a down payment on President Obama’s promise of a new foreign policy.

UPDATE: Pro-western coalition wins in Lebanon and the man expected to be the next prime minister hails President Obama’s speech. Others is the Muslim world also reacted positively.

Amusing headline to this story: “Judge assails cases doubting Obama’s citizenship.” Quote:

In an argument popular on the Internet and taken seriously practically nowhere else, Obama’s critics argue he is ineligible to be president because he is not a “natural-born citizen” as the Constitution requires.

In response last summer, Obama’s campaign posted his Hawaiian birth certificate on its Web site. But the lawsuit argues it is a fake and that Obama was actually born in his father’s homeland of Kenya, even though Hawaiian officials have said the document is authentic.

“This case, if it were allowed to proceed, would deserve mention in one of those books that seek to prove that the law is foolish or that America has too many lawyers with not enough to do,” U.S. District Judge James Robertson said in his written opinion.

The lawsuit didn’t even use Obama’s legal name but called him “Barry Soetoro,” the name he went by while attending elementary school in Indonesia. It’s one of many that has been filed claiming Obama is ineligible to serve as president.

Robertson ordered plaintiff’s attorney John Hemenway of Colorado Springs, Colo., to show why he hasn’t violated court rules barring frivolous and harassing cases and shouldn’t have to pay Obama’s attorney, Bob Bauer, for his time arguing that the case should be thrown out.

Emphasis mine. So maybe the case won’t end up in one of those books, but it will almost certainly end up on this website if people keep trying to make this stupid argument.

In a piece he entitles “The Top 10 Rightblogger Stories of 2008” (but the Economist’s Democracy in America blog titles more aptly “Your year in wingnuttery“) Roy Edroso chronicles the most ridiculous right-wing blog memes of the last year (via the Opinionator.) It is no less than a stunning and hilarious chronicle of the ineptitude, stupidity and mean-spiritedness of right-wing bloggers who grew increasingly hysterical as the campaign season wore on. (However, I must rise to the defense of Megan McArdle at the Atlantic who should not be included amongst the “rightbloggers” Edroso lists, and whose only crime is a general sort of cluelessness that sometimes infects her blogging.)

After years of remarkable patience, Ben Shapiro has finally had it with radical Islam:

So enough. No more empty talk. No more idle promises. No more happy ignorance, half measures, or appeasement-minded platitudes. The time for hard-nosed, uncompromising action hasnt merely come — its been overdue by seven years. The voice of our brothers blood cries out from the ground.

I was not aware that two wars against proponents of radical Islam and green-lighting a couple of bombing/invasions against radical Islam in Somalia and Lebanon counts as “empty talk” and “idle promises” so I’m not entirely sure what measures Shapiro thinks we should take next. Conveniently, his column ends exactly at the point at which the reader would think Shapiro might offer some useful suggestions. Funny, that. 

Is basically summed up by their separate reactions to facts. In the face of polling giving every indication that Obama will comfortably win tomorrow, Democrats wait with baited breath for the election to be stolen from them. In the face of polling giving every indication that McCain will go down in flames tomorrow, right-wingers trumpet the imminent McCain victory. 

Yes, this is what the right has come to; faced with undeniable polling evidence that shows McCain trailing nationawide and in key battleground states, they attack the integrity of polls. This blogger’s powerful argument against the fairness of polling comes in the form of a story about a horse that can count, and research into conformity. No, I’m serious. No really….I’m serious. Instead of asking you to read the whole thing (I wouldn’t ask that of anyone) just read David Weigel’s takedown of the stupid here.

I’ll have more to say about this China “threat” at later point, but my first thought upon reading this by James Fallows is, will a Democratic President put an end to these ridiculous “Bloggers Roundtable” sessions that merely serve as opportunities for authorities in the military to put useful idiot right-wing bloggers to use?

Updated post here.

UPDATE: More MSM treatment, more right-wing bloggers look like fools.

UPDATE II (Adam): Think Progress has the skinny on the involvement of Mitch McConnell’s office.