Author Archive | Jim Lindgren

American Atheists v. City of Detroit involves a program that

See here for details and links. UPDATE: Here’s a video from IJ about the case.

The case in Murray v. Geithner, and here’s an excerpt: A motion brought pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted tests the legal sufficiency of Plaintiff

A reader asked me about this today, and a radio interviewer didn’t ask me, with (in my view) unfortunate results. OK, not that unfortunate, because I’m pretty easygoing about this — when you bring an unusual name to a foreign country, you have to expect that people won’t always pronounce it the way you do. […]

Circuit Court Judge Bauer expresses his enjoyment of Judges Posner and Easterbrook’s roasting of Stephen Halbrook and Alan Gura’s argument that the Seventh Circuit is not bound by Supreme Court precedent (Cruikshank & Presser) denying that the Second Amendment is applicable to the states because these decisions failed to consider whether the right to keep […]

Mark the date: June 6, 2009. David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, sent me this email from BarackObama.com announcing a grassroots Health Care campaign, sponsored by Organizing for America: James — Remember this date: Saturday, June 6th, 2009. We will look back on that day as the moment when the fight for real health care […]

Cable news networks are reporting that President Obama has chosen to nominate Sonia Sotomayor for the US Supreme Court. I hope to learn more about Sotomayor before expressing a strong personal opinion on the choice, but my initial impresion is this: Compared to recent nominees, Sotomayor is a far more distinguished choice than was Harriet […]

In the course of Steven Malanga’s history of government policy promoting home ownership, he describes the milieu in the early to mid-1990s. Here is a nice example I found from the May 28, 1993 Washington Times: Low-income homebuyers, especially blacks, Latinos and other minorities, are being wooed in an unusual ad campaign started this week […]

In the City Journal, Steven Malanga has the best history of the government’s destructive attempts to promote home ownership I’ve read, starting with Herbert Hoover in 1922 and continuing through the current efforts to keep home prices from dropping to market-clearing prices. He covers a lot that I hadn’t known much about from the 1920s […]

In the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore review some of evidence on the problems of states that raise taxes substantially. Basically, it doesn’t work. Here’s the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are […]

The federal government cut Chrysler’s advertising budget by half: The Obama administration appears to have reminded Chrysler about the cost of accepting government bailouts: with federal funds comes federal control. A report this week in Advertising Age said that Chrysler wanted to spend $134 million in advertising over the nine-week duration of its bankruptcy. But […]

As I contemplate Northwestern Law School’s graduation address on Friday, I can attest that I’ve never sat through one as interesting as Mark Steyn’s lecture at Hillsdale College (tip to Instapundit). In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood

In the New York Times, David Hajdu, of the New Republic, has a nice review of a biography of W.C. Handy. The review is entitled “Blues Capitalist.” In “W.C. Handy ,” David Robertson, who has previously written a lucid biography of the slave rebel Denmark Vesey, casts overdue light on Handy’s essential role in establishing […]

President Obama campaigned on cutting soaring medical costs. So what happened when the state of California cut the state’s contribution to the wages of home medical care workers from a maximum of $12.10 per hour to a maximum of $10.10? SEIU, the powerful union that has been closest to Obama and is the parent union […]

Robert Churchill, the best young historian of gun rights, has his first book out, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement. (Back in 2001-2002, Churchill was one of the handful of Ph.D. historians who stuck his neck out to detail problems with Michael Bellesiles’s […]