Archive | June, 2009

Marty Peretz has won a lot of ridicule of late, primarily for a series of ill-thought out blog posts. But his recent article on Obama’s Cairo speech is superb. (H/T: Instapundit) One aspect of the speech that hasn’t received sufficient attention is the focus on victimology: Israelis were victims of the Holocaust, Palestinians victims of […]

Among this morning’s four cert grants was Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, a challenge to the constitutionality of Florida’s Beach and Shore Preservation Act. Specifically, the petition challenges the Supreme Court of Flordia’s conclusion that the law does not deprive upland owners of littoral rights without just compensation in violation […]

FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch takes on Josh Wright for several of Josh’s blog posts on Truth on The Market. Josh responds with a long post here. In my view, Josh gets the better of the exchange, but I congratulate Commissioner Rosch on being willing to read, and engage, his critics. I wish more public […]

The Washington Post ran a news story on Friday (June 12, 2009, A1), titled “Obama Bows on Settling Detainees: Administration Gives Up on Bringing Cleared Inmates to U.S., Officials Say.” The article goes on to describe the situation of the Uighurs and how the administration, faced with revolt by his own party in Congress, and […]

I recently read Russ Roberts’s new novel, The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity. For those who don’t know Russ’s work, his novels are quite unusual. He writes novels that are designed to illustrate economic themes and concepts. Russ is an unusually clear and lively writer–especially for an academic economist–and he actually […]

In examining the provincial breakdown of the Iranian election results, I noticed some strange things. First, while Mousavi was leading Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 in Tehran in a poll last week, Ahmadinejad won Tehran 52% to 46% in the reported election results. In an authoritarian state, one would expect polling to understate the popularity […]

So far, the response of the Obama Administration to the Iranian election must be a disappointment to all those who desire freedom for oppressed people around the world. The response has been compared to that of George H.W. Bush to the events preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall, which initially was similarly “flat-footed.” (tip […]

The Obama Administration is continuing to defend the use of the state secrets privilege in seeking en banc review of Mohamed v. Jeppesen in the Ninth Circuit. The brief is here. As Marc Ambinder reports, the Obama Administration now “owns the state secrets privilege.”

Ann Althouse asked her Constitutional Law students to identify cases that did (or did not) exemplify “empathy” on their exam. Try it for yourself and see how you do. UPDATE: Here’s the “winner.”

Tomorrow the National Academy of Sciences will convene a workshop on geoengineering as a way to slow or reverse the effects of global climate change. Samuel Thernstrom thinks serious federal research on geoengineering is overdue. A geoengineering system would of course be controversial, but the policy question we face today is simple: Should the federal […]

Economist Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has a good piece in today’s NYT on medicare spending. It begins: Medicare expenditures threaten to crush the federal budget, yet the Obama administration is proposing that we start by spending more now so we can spend less later. This runs the risk of becoming the new voodoo economics. […]

The NYT‘s Nicholas Kristof joins the ranks of those urging an end to the drug war. The War on drugs, Kristof notes, has had three consequences: 1) “we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons”; 2) “we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad”; and 3) “we have squandered resources.” Writes […]

From the Washington Post: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to repeal and replace the controversial, $4 billion domestic security initiative known as Real ID, which calls for placing more secure licenses in the hands of 245 million Americans by 2017. The new proposal, called Pass ID, would be cheaper, less rigorous and partly funded […]

Jeff Rosen may have quit blogging, but he’s still writing articles about Judge Sonia Sotomayor. His latest appears in Time magazine. Here’s a taste: An examination of Sotomayor’s career supports the idea that on the bench, she has been a racial moderate, not a radical. At the same time, her opinions and speeches suggest that […]

has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (June 11 additions): Lacking artifice; unsophisticated, unrefined; wanting polish or technical skill. Later also: unsubtle, tactless. See here for our earlier discussion of the subject. Many thanks to Erin McKean for letting me know about this.