Author Archive | Jacob Levy

Yes, yes, I knew that, as Virginia Postrel notes, a bad fashion sense isn’t actually any defense against a charge of acting fashionably, and that she was suggesting that I might be responding to peer pressure from my fellow academics. I gave a non-responsive defense because a responsive defense to that kind of charge just […]

My endorsement of Kerry, my criticism of Bush on grounds of competence, and my criticsm of Badnarik on security grounds have led to some very odd e-mails and blog posts; they’ve left me disagreeing with people I’m ordinarily very closely algined with and agreeing with people I’d really rather not. But this has to be […]

via Dan Drezner, a Chicago Tribune story on the myriad health benefits of coffee. (registration required). Though the virtues of coffee drinking may have been debated in the past, now there appear to be new reasons to rejoice over java. More and more studies have linked coffee consumption to a number of health benefits, including […]

My friend and sometime mentor in matters libertarian Roderick Long responds to my post below about Michael Badnarik’s position on terrorism and 9/11. The following three propositions are distinct: a) The kind of interventionist foreign policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke terrorist attacks than to deter them. b) The specific attacks the […]

Last week I quoted from a Robert Novak column on the Zarqawi story. George Stephanopolous has written a letter to the editor of the Post taking issue with the column. (Registration required.) Novak mischaracterizes an exchange I had with Condoleezza Rice on the June 27 edition of “This Week.” I did not ask Rice, as […]

Aeon Skoble, one of my favorite correspondents and now a guest-blogger at Liberty & Power, asks, quite reasonably, All of the reasons he gives for being dissatisfied with Bush are perfectly valid, but I don’t see why that implies voting for Kerry. Why not vote 3rd party, or just stay home that day? Bush’s shortcomings […]

Not Gephardt.

Robert Novak at Town Hall calls the Zarqawi story an “urban legend,” and says his source at the CIA agrees. One CIA source puts this aborted Zarqawi raid in the same category as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9-11,” which spreads such false information as George W. Bush’s conspiring to get Osama bin Laden’s relatives out of […]

Jesse Helms turns against the tax cuts. William F. Buckley turns against the war. Bruce Bartlett makes the fiscal case for Clinton nostalgia, and Julian Sanchez says he’s hearing a lot of that sort of thing. Tyler Cowen requests an invitation to join the Ranks of the Shrill, over the tightening of the Cuban embargo. […]

I’ve gotten lots of e-mail about the Zarqawi story (see posts here and here) that has asked, more or less, why I would ever believe anything from the mainstream media with its obvious anti-Bush bias. I’ve responded, over and over again, that I know the rules reporters for major mainstream American news sources work under, […]

Jonah is right, other than his parting shot at DC. Adam Graha-Silverman is right. John Podhoretz is just being silly. Went to see the movie yesterday afternoon with someone known to you all. Loved it. It was pretty close to (though not quite) pitch-perfect as a movie. It included lots of easter eggs for the […]

I’m working to synthesize a lot of information. For now: David Meyer has a very thorough rundown and chronology. It includes the passages from a Greg Miller LA Times article from February of 2003– a full year before the NBC story. [l]awmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say they have been stymied […]

I have a question. Has there ever, in the four months since it broke, been a refutation of, an official response to, or even a developed conservative talking point on the story that Pentagon plans to take out Zarqawi before the Iraq war were vetoed by the White House, because Zarqawi was more convenient as […]

Alan Wirzbicki has a new article up at TNR on one of my favorite subjects: the US-Australian alliance. He writes that Aussie PM John Howard faces a tough challenge from antiwar Labor party candidate Mark Latham in elections that could take place as soon as August. Not surprisingly, Iraq is high on the agenda. Most […]

Eugene identified guest-blogger Cass Sunstein as “a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School,” but he’s also Professor of Political Science. That means that, for as long as Cass is here with us, Chicago Political Science will tie UCLA Law and George Mason Law at two co-conspirators each. (This has been true […]