A quick word on Ron Paul, then some links and my schedule next week.

Given all the stuff that’s come out over the past few days — and it’s just way too much to link to, just get on the internet or twitter and open a few doors — I don’t think any libertarian in good conscience can continue to support Paul as a candidate in any capacity. I certainly can’t. There’s no reasonable doubt left that Paul willfully lent his name to some mixture of very ugly segregationist thought crossed with the conspiratorial ideology of an anti-government militia man. Now, people can change (i.e. Bobby Byrd) and you can associate with ugliness for the greater good (i.e. northern Democrats during the 20th c.), and those sorts of rationalizations are fine as far as they go. But I’m not running a party and Ron Paul’s not a serious candidate. So I’m done with him. I was probably going to vote for Gary Johnson in the general anyway. So that’s fine.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not room for regret. All this makes me very sad for what could have been. For all the grave-dancing going on around the Internet right now by liberals and conservatives alike, I’m not afraid to say that the discrediting of Paul comes with some very serious negatives for the Republican party and for America. He was more or less the only person on the debate stage this year who cared one bit about civil liberties or the prospect of reversing the unsustainable American empire. And for voicing that, I’m grateful to him. To the degree that his positions on those issues are marginalized, and to the degree that Romney and Gingrich and whoever else is left do not have to grapple with them, it’s our loss.

I thought Jonathan Bernstein had a nice take on why different people support Paul, and what the revelation of these newsletters means for those people. I definitely fall into the camp that thought of him not as a serious candidate, but as a positive force in the party and a protest vote against what I believe is a conservative ideology gone off the rails. Needless to say, his economics were beyond kooky and many of his positions too extreme for my pragmatic libertarianism, but I admired his foreign policy honesty and loved his civil liberties stances. It’s the endless frustration of a thinking libertarian to have to deal with racists and conspiracy theorists and plain old crackpots. How we have now gone 10 years down the post-9/11 road and still haven’t been able to find a libertarian politician who can credibly fight for the mantle in either party makes me shudder that it might not be possible. And so we’ll keep waiting. For who, I do not know.

But I do know that it will never be Ron Paul.

Anyway, here are a few links from my reading this week:

I haven’t really written on the payroll tax battle per se, and that’s because there are just a million good takes things to read. I suggest starting with Sullivan’s roundup, and branching out from there.

Here’s my old grad school friend Tom Pepinksy on exogenous variation in comparative politics.

Polls is magic, says Roger Simon. You are a moron, says Seth Masket. John Sides agrees.

Here’s a libertarian cause that is uniting the conservatives and liberals: stopping SOPA.

Matt Yglesias asks why we subsidize college at all, rather than just make transfer payments to the poor. Good point.

Kevin Drum looks at the disaster that was the LA school district trying to get rid of junk food in the lunch room.

Blogging will be spotty over the next week — we’re headed up to northern New York for Christmas — but I’ll definitely post the remaining entries in the GOP Candidate Venn Diagrams series, and probably a few other items. Happy Holidays to all and safe travels.