Author Archive | David Kopel

The Washington Times has an interesting story today on how some Iraqi insurgents hope to affect the Presidential election: Mowafaq Al-Tai, a London-educated architect and intellectual, said different types of resistance fighters have different views of the U.S. election. The most pro-Kerry, he said, are the former Saddam Hussein loyalists — Ba’ath Party members and […]

Our conspirator-in-chief is not the only one. John Hospers, the first Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1972, endorses President Bush’s reelection. The letter is posted, with approving commentary, by Robert J. Bidinotto here. Meanwhile, Jesse Walker at Reason’s Hit and Run reports former Republican Congressman Bob Barr will vote Libertarian.

The truth comes out about that “wolves” ad.

Speaking at the Stanford University Law School on Saturday, Justice Breyer reportedly said about his vote in Bush v. Gore: “I had to ask myself: Would I vote the same way if the names were reversed? I said ‘yes.’ But I’ll never know for sure — because people are great self-kidders — if I reached […]

Rick Brookhiser quoting Muddy Waters. (The anti-immigration stuff, on the other hand, I could certainly do without.)

Earlier today FactCheck.Org revised its assessment of the vice presidential debate, correcting the error I noted here. Alas, while the posting notes it was modified on October 9, FactCheck.Org does not acknowledge that it made an error. That’s unfortunate for an organization that prides itself on catching others’ mistakes. Still, the correction is appreciated.

David Brooks offers a very different take on the Duelfer report than most stories I’ve read, concluding: I have never in my life seen a government report so distorted by partisan passions. The fact that Saddam had no W.M.D. in 2001 has been amply reported, but it’s been isolated from the more important and complicated […]

In today’s NYT: The press has been curiously reluctant to report my constant public support for the president’s strategy in Iraq and his policies to fight terrorism. I have been involved in the war on terrorism for two decades, and in my view no world leader has better understood the stakes in this global war […]

I am a big fan of FactCheck.org. I think they do solid work analyzing the veracity of political claims and ads. I also think that their analysis of the debates has been valuable and even-handed. In their analysis of last night’s vice-presidential debate, however, I think FactCheck.org got one wrong. On the issue of the […]

Apparently some airlines don’t take kindly to flight attendants who blog.

Should Ralph Nader be on the ballot? Should other third party candidates? I think so. I have a hard time identifying a principled reason for making it so difficult for independent candidates to get on the ballot. Of course there have to be rules and thresholds, but the thresholds need not be so high and […]

In response to my post below on Professor Ogletree’s plagiarism, Fabio Rojas writes: During grad school, I discovered there were two modes of “legitimate” academic work: craftsman and bureaucrat. The craftsman worked alone, or with one or two colleagues, to carefully write papers and books. This is the “classic” scholar approach. When you think of […]

The White House claimed to have all the records relevant to Bush’s National Guard service last February (see my prior post on documents here). Now we know that wasn’t true (and some were right to suggest the White House was still hiding stuff). At the same time, here’s additional evidence that Senator Kerry has not […]

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, […]

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 […]