Author Archive | David Bernstein

I recently speculated that former President Carter’s apparent hostility to the organized Jewish community may date back to the lack of support he received from the Jewish leadership during both of his presidential campaigns. A much more informed commentator, Ken Stein, a former Carter advisor and Carter Center fellow, confirms my speculation in the Middle […]

I was very surprised this morning to hear NPR’s Nina Totenberg mention–more like emphasize–that ten of the twelve jurors in the Scooter Libby obstruction of justice trial are white, and two are black. I’ve been trying to figure out what possible relevance this has, and haven’t been to come up with anything. Is there any […]

Ha’aretz columnist Brad Burston: What Carter reveals, in the end, is that he knows the organized Jewish community of the United States in ways he will never know the Jewish community – or for that matter, the Palestinian community – in the Holy Land. He knows America’s Jewish leadership as do few American Jews. He […]

In December, Israeli forces deliberately murdered the three children of an important Palestinian official while the children were on their way to school. Surprisingly, there has been little worldwide outrage over this incident. Okay, that’s not exactly what happened. Here’s the edited version: In late December, Israeli Hamas forces deliberately murdered the three children of […]

I won’t bore you with all the details, but the basics: (1) our service, though pricey ($39.95 plus per month, compared to half that much for Verizon), was much worse than our prior experiences with DSL and cable–poor download and upload speeds (we paid for only the slower speed service, but it was much slower […]

I can’t let 2006 end without noting my outrage that my home county of Arlington, Virginia, has seen fit to raise the personal property tax on vehicles from 4.4 to 5% of value. The stated rationale is the need to provide property tax relief. Hello! Property values in Arlington have more than doubled in the […]

Via Ted Frank over at Pointoflaw.com, Judge Michael McConnell has a rather devastating (though unfailingly polite) review of Justice Stephen Breyer’s Active Liberty in the Harvard Law Review. As an aside, I’m a bit skeptical of McConnell’s conclusion that Supreme Court decisions regarding federal regulation of “intrastate commerce” have been accepted by the nation. Putting […]

Shmuel Rosner in Ha’aretz has a lengthy discussion of whether Jimmy Carter is anti-Semitic. I think it’s pretty clear he’s not, or at least that there’s no evidence that he is, if by “anti-Semitic” we mean someone who hates Jews and wishes them harm. The more interesting question is whether Jimmy Carter is “prejudiced” against […]

Via Drudge, this story from England is about a teacher who is in trouble because she told her nine-year-old student that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. The teacher seemed to think they already knew that, but apparently some didn’t. Being Jewish, I’m not much up on these things, but I’d have thought that the Santa thing […]

Washington Post: Republican leaders left behind just enough spending authority to keep the government operating through mid-February, less than halfway through the 2007 fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Democrats have signaled that when they take control of Congress in January they will extend that funding authority for the remainder of the year based largely […]

If you’re one of those people who think that libertarians are just greedy, cruel-hearted, selfish people who hate the poor, and you just can’t fathom how they think, you should read this article from Sunday’s Washington Post (hat tip: Barone blog via Instapundit). The article details how the dairy lobby ganged up on an entrepreneur […]

Regular readers of this blog know that the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education, which is responsible for establishing accreditation standards for American law schools, has been under attack on a variety of fronts. First, last Winter the Council pushed through hastily- and ill-considered “diversity” standards, that invited law schools to both violate […]

Tolls Brothers builders last week reported that the D.C.-area housing market, which was the first to collapse, seems to be finding a bottom; my wife and I have noticed that houses in Arlington suddenly seem to be selling, at least if they are priced right; and data from the MRIS shows sales in Northern Virginia […]

I don’t have any idea whether the gossip about Yale Dean Koh refusing to honor Justice Alito (or perhaps just being very intent on honoring Linda Greenhouse), linked to by Jonathan below, is true, but I do know that I met a bunch of Yale Law Federalists a few weeks ago, and they were quite […]

An article I was reading the other day reminded me how irritated I get when Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) claim that their brand of Judaism is “authentic” Judaism, as it’s been practiced for thousands of years; everyone else’s brand of Judaism is thus “inauthentic.” One doesn’t need to go back thousands of years to rebut such […]