Archive | September, 2004

on the election and the war in Iraq here.

Glen Whitman has a very good post on this, going into considerably more depth than the item below does.

I’ve been putting off writing this post, thinking that I was going to have one last burst of blogging– about the Red Sox or APSA, most likely, since I’ve certainly got nothing useful and original to say about either the current, unpleasant, stage of the presidential election or the current, worse than unpleasant, state of […]

The BBC reports: Brazil’s federal police force says a government campaign to cut gun crime by offering to buy back weapons is going twice as well as expected. Police said they had met their target of collecting 80,000 guns in under three months, rather than six months. . . . Actually, that means that a […]

Say that the memos are indeed a hoax. Could CBS be civilly liable in various ways? A bunch of readers asked me this, so I’ll try to answer, in several posts. (Please note that I’m getting even more than the usual amount of e-mail on these issues, so some will end up being discarded, or […]

A reader writes: “Is it in the public interest for a television station owner to use forged documents to try to remove a sitting politician? . . . Personally, I’d think that if CBS knew or should have known that the documents were forged, license forfeiture for the CBS owned and operated stations would be […]

What about libel lawsuits against CBS, some ask — for instance, by Bush himself, by Killian’s heirs, or by General Staudt, who was accused in one of those memos of leaning on Killian? The Killian lawsuit is easy to dispose of: Dead people can’t sue for libel; that’s the libel rule in all 50 states, […]

The posts above all assume that the people at CBS were at worst negligent (again, assuming they were wrong, which has not been proven but which I’m just assuming for purposes of the legal analysis). But what if someone — for instance, the forger, or even someone in the media — does lie in a […]

Thanks to the wizards at the Associated Press for the insight.

Trade guru Jagdish Bhagwati has a powerful op-ed in today’s WSJ (print edition) dissecting Senator Kerry’s trade stance, and suggesting that Kerry is not likely to be a free trade president if elected. How does one forgive him his pronouncements on outsourcing, and his strange silences on the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations? Indeed, […]

“[B]ad policy, bad politics, and extraordinarily trivial as a substantive matter.” Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

The Harvard Crimson reports that noted Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree will be disciplined for plagiarizing the work of Yale law professor Jack Balkin in a recent book. (Hat tip: How Appealing) Professor Ogletree claims the plagiarism was inadvertent, and there is no reason to suspect otherwise. The Crimson story nonetheless suggests that Professor Ogletree […]

Several days ago, the Chicago Sun-Times ran an editorial that begin with this paragraph: How ridiculous is the notion that private citizens should be able to tote machine guns? It takes someone with extreme positions like Alan Keyes to righteously argue that cause. Most Americans — Democrats and Republicans — are against claiming Second Amendment […]

Guestblogging over at The Leiter Reports, Jessica Wilson offers advice to Palestinians and supporters of Al Qaeda on how to respond to the military aggression of the Israelis and the United States. She writes: I am not a wise person, though I aspire to be. But I know how a wise person responds to aggression. […]

The Kerry campaign pounced on a new round of charges about President Bush’s National Guard service. It even began playing John Fogerty’s classic Vietnam protest song, “Fortunate Son.” In hindsight, this may have been a questionable move. The song may remind some of Kerry’s own anti-Vietnam excesses, while others note John Fogerty himself served in […]