Archive | September, 2009

Ann Althouse mentions looking for an Aldous Huxley quote. Below is my favorite Aldous Huxley quote: I have been told by an eminent academic critic that I am a sad symptom of the failure of an intellectual class in time of crisis. The implication being, I suppose, that the professor and his colleagues are hilarious […]

My colleague Josh Wright and co-blogger Todd Zywicki have an important essay criticizing the Obama Administration’s proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The premise behind the CFPA is that consumers’ choices need to be limited by government regulators because otherwise consumers are likely to make mistakes caused by their own cognitive errors. Josh and […]

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner calls in the Financial Times for a tax on global financial transactions as a means of funding the currently moribund UN Millennium Development Goals. It is an idea that has been floated repeatedly since the 1990s – sometimes with the emphasis on the tax itself as a means of deliberately […]

The Washington Post has an interesting article on the Justice Department investigation of CIA interrogations, suggesting the inquiry may be narrower than some hoped or feared. It begins: The Justice Department’s review of detainee abuse by the CIA will focus on a very small number of cases, including at least one in which an Afghan […]

My senior essay at Yale was an intellectual biography of Irving Kristol up through the founding of The Public Interest in 1968. I was particularly interested in what caused him to move from Left to Right, as I have always been intrigued by ideological migrations. What I discovered, interestingly enough, was that Kristol’s migration occurred […]

On The Politico’s Arena, Professor Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, of Washington and Lee, replied to my Politico post on the constitutionality of a health insurance mandate (that I reproduced here yesterday): I interpreted Fred’s question to ask whether the current Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of an individual mandate, not to ask my for my […]

Further to Chief Conspirator Eugene’s post below on religion and public officials, I tried my best to answer that question in an article on Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee during the primary in the Weekly Standard (this link directly to the magazine; easier than the SSRN link below). The first part is snark – Andrew […]

The New York Times obituary is here. UPDATE: I have deleted the comment thread, as unfortunately it brought out the worst in our readers; although a few of the comments were thoughtful, most were not.

alpha beta gamma

One more time.

Still more.

Today the DOJ filed its motion to dismiss in another case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, Gill v. OPM, pending in a Massachusetts district court. It argues that DOMA is constitutional because (1) there is no basis for applying heightened scrutiny to the denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples married in Massachusetts, and […]

Foobar.

The St. Petersburg Times reports: In an interview at his law office, [St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Bill Foster] talked about some of his beliefs and refused to talk about others. “Dinosaurs are mentioned in Job, so I don’t have any problem believing that dinosaurs roamed the earth,” he said, referring to the book of Job, […]

This week, the National Journal poll of political bloggers asked a bonus question, about which “columnists, bloggers and television or radio commentators most helped to shape their opinion or worldview.” For right-leaning bloggers, the top five were, in order: Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, and Eugene Volokh (!). All hail the Master […]