Paul Boutin

While I was kicking back in cellphone-free Occidental, California this weekend, the folks back home in San Francisco put on a (mostly) peaceful anti-war demonstration. Note to the dipsticks who, as usual, ended up on my block trying to march on the mall: Instead of presuming people who shop are your enemies, why don’t you try recruiting them to come over to City Hall next time? A random poll of folks in the Kenneth Cole store would probably find most of them on your side. You need to decide if you’re opposed to war, or to people with more disposable income than you. That said, the giant dove was cool.

My editor and fellow Star Wars fan in Slate:

If the old libel against American liberals is that they’re socialists, the new European libel against socialists is that they’re liberalsóclassical ones. Here are some of the economic promises on which Zapatero’s Socialist Workers Party campaigned: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 30 percent, cutting income taxes, and reducing the value-added tax. Oh, and they’re going to balance the budget and control inflation. The man expected to be the Socialist finance minister, Miguel Sebastian, is a U.S.-educated economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He’s promising to put his faith in the Invisible Hand. “There will be a strict separation between politics and business,” he told the Financial Times. “We will be a market-friendly government.” These are socialists?

Read the whole thing - Chris dug up lots of telling factoids about socialism as it is today in the EU.

NYT on Bush’s “fright-wing support.” The guy from Fugazi explains why it’s not a contradiction.