Anyone in DC tomorrow who likes (or hates) this blog should swing by The Fund for American Studies (1706 New Hampshire Avenue NW) for an AFF Roundtable featuring Doublethink alum James Poulos and current Conventional Follyer David Donadio among other interesting, garrulous, friendly people. We’ll be debating what foreign policy on the Right means after this momentous election, and how we should be thinking about the way forward in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Drinks are at 6:30, panel begins at 7pm. If all goes reasonably well, we’ll continue the debate in some bar around Dupont afterwards. If things go catastrophically awry, we’ll just go to a bar and drink in silence. Either way, you don’t want to miss this.

Roundtables are free for AFF members and $5 for non-members. If you intend to come, please try to RSVP to cindy@americasfuture.org.

See you there!

The scope of the tainted milk scandal seems to be expanding daily:

Milk tainted with melamine, a compound banned in food, has killed three other babies, two in China’s northwestern Gansu province and one in eastern Zhejiang. The health scare erupted after Sanlu Group last week revealed it had produced and sold melamine-laced milk, and a subsequent probe found a fifth of 109 Chinese dairy producers were selling products adulterated with the substance. [Emphasis mine] At the latest count, 6,244 children have become ill with kidney stones after drinking powdered milk laced with melamine, with three deaths and 158 suffering “acute kidney failure.”

Reading this reminded me of a Chinese academic and America expert I met over dinner last spring in Beijing while I was traveling with a delegation sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (the good people who brought you “ping-pong diplomacy”). Her current topic of study? America’s muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, and incidents such as these, which led to our modern regulatory institutions.

No one had to spell out the obvious parallels to China’s current situation. That very morning, the New York Times had reported on a mass demonstration against a planned petrochemical plant near Chengdu, a project which had been approved by the central government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Such demonstrations seem to be generally tolerated, so long as the protesters don’t directly challenge the central government’s authority or legitimacy, as these protesters took pains to do:

“We’re not dissidents,” said Wen Di, an independent blogger and former journalist living in Chengdu. “We’re just people who care about our homeland. What we’re saying is that if you want to have this project, you need to follow certain procedures: for example, a public hearing and independent environmental assessment.”

Of course, there’s one big difference between China today and the U.S. in the first half of the last century: For all its imperfections, America had a democratic system of government which was better suited structurally for responding to scandals like these in a productive way.

Smile, Hill, it’s not so bad. Two or three more and you might actually like the taste!

When Sullivan gets himself worked up into a froth and goes off the rails, as he has here with Clinton’s win in Ohio, he can turn into quite a ridiculous figure:

I just had a Jager shot, and hope to get drunk very soon. So this is my last post of the night. Here’s what I’ll do in the morning: find out who won the most delegates in the March 4 states, and check someone else’s math (yes, I’m not going to get it wrong myself) to see who subsequently has the numbers to win. And then take a deep breath. And say what I think. Right now, emotion clouds the mind. Oh, and Jager.

It’s uncomfortable to read him at times like these, especially given that most of the time I quite enjoy his blog. Warts and all, I guess, is the name of the game.