Archive | April, 2004

The Associaton for Public Interest Law at George Mason Law School is holding its annual fundraising auction tomorrow night, starting at 8:00 p.m., at the Ballston Hilton in Arlington. Among other items that will be auctioned off are three Justice Stevens bobblehead dolls, courtesy of the Green Bag, which is published at GMU. These dolls […]

“So When Are We Going To Get That Free-Market Health Care Everyone’s Complaining About?” Read this post, all our lives are at stake. Here is the clincher: “If I had to make a wild guess, our health care system will be paid for by explicit or implicit public funds at a rate of 65-70%. My […]

Mark Kleiman writes, as part of his pragmatic argument against the government’s hiring contract security services: The private firms pay better than the regular military, and are using the money they get from public contracts to bid away experienced soldiers, leaving the Army short of skilled bodies. Why should we compete with ourselves in that […]

Mark Kleiman responds to my question about what’s wrong with mercenaries — contract private security people who provide security at U.S.-run Iraqi installations. Phil Carter has more and yet more. Mark’s and Phil’s posts, though stress that there’s nothing inherently immoral about the mercenaries themselves, but that using them is a bad idea that might […]

Brian Morris, who clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist the year I was clerking, is running for the Montana Supreme Court. If you’re a Montanan, you should definitely vote for him — he’s a very smart and highly qualified guy, and I’m sure would do an excellent job. There’ll be a debate involving the five candidates […]

has now graduated from high school to university, the San Francisco Chronicle reports: The quiet freshman from Seattle who sat in the back row had submitted a disturbing short story, a fictitious first-person account of a young serial killer. The story was so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust that the […]

Patterico’s Pontifications disapproves of them, and gives some pretty good reasons, including some important legal points in this post: Multiple separate violent crimes count as only one strike if tried in a single trial. Under this rule, serial murderers and rapists would get only one strike conviction for their multiple violent crimes. For example, Richard […]

The Arizona Daily Star reports: Some Tucson casino gamblers who don’t know when to quit are trying a new tactic: banning themselves from all casinos in Arizona. A year-old state law allows people to ask casinos to help prevent them from gambling. Violating a “self-exclusion” contract means casinos refuse to pay winnings, kick out banned […]

Archipelago of the Recherché (see here).

Are you surprised? Here is an update (follow the links if you are fuzzy on the background) over our exchange on my VC post on immigration and liberalism.

“I don’t want to hear anyone complaining about the deficit unless they immediately begin to list ways of taking things away from old people and making them work harder and longer. Otherwise you aren’t really bothered by the deficit at all.” Here is the link. As phrased the quotation is overstated and oversimplified, but it […]

mostly over the last couple of years (searches intentionally limited just to the name of the blog, and not including the name of the blogger without a reference to the blog): Query Mentions InstaPundit 480 talkingpointsmemo.com or (marshall w/s talking points memo) 223 plural(Atrios) 64 (the “plural” avoids “atrio,” but includes some false positives) DailyKos […]

Now on the Hugh Hewitt Show, talking about the Daily Kos controversy, together with John Hinderaker (Power Line).

One thing that puzzles me about the whole Daily Kos matter (see the original post, which has been rightly reviled, here and the non-apology apology here) — what’s wrong with people who provide security services for money? Security guards, both ill-paid and well-paid do it. Soldiers and police officers do it, too; I’m sure that […]

OK, here’s the Joel Feinberg story I promised. I never met the man. But this made an enduring impression on me from early in my undergraduate days. The acknowledgements of Feinberg’s books carry on a decades-long spat with one Josiah S. Carberry. This example from Freedom and Fulfillment is a particularly entertaining one: For a […]