Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler

From the Washington Post: The House is taking another, albeit weaker, stab at trying to keep bailed-out financial institutions from paying their employees hefty bonuses after lawmakers had second thoughts about their vote two weeks ago to tax the bonuses away. A new bill, which passed 247-171 on Wednesday, would allow the bonuses if the […]

Thursday’s Washington Post had a follow up story on the OLC opinion that legislation to provide voting representation for the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives is unconstitutional. According to the story, the OLC opinion was approved by a political appointee, namely Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Barron. The story also notes that […]

Yesterday, the White House acknowledged that state governors, not state legislatures, control the acceptance and disposition of stimulus money. The AP reports: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has won a key victory in his fight to control $700 million in federal stimulus money intended to help the state’s schools, with the White House acknowledging in […]

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on an Obama judicial nominee, David Hamilton, albeit not in the usual hearing room and without the standard webcast or many Republican Senators. Most committee Republicans refused to attend on the grounds that they were not given enough time to review Hamilton’s record. Hamilton has been […]

This morning NPR ran an interesting story suggesting Congress disregarded the relevant science when it passed a ban on certain phthalates in children’s toys. The measure may have been backed by Democrats, such as Senators Feinstein and Boxer, but it was signed by President Bush. More evidence of a Republican “War on Science.”

In response to serious allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, the Department of Justice is seeking to have Senator Stevens’ felony convictions thrown out. The Washington Post editorializes: this extraordinary reversal cannot erase or forgive the ugly behavior that gave rise to the indictment in the first place. Trial records and testimony painted a picture of a […]

The Washington Post story linked by Orin below, if accurate, suggests that the new Administration has not ended the politicization of the Department of Justice. According to the Post account, Holder sought to circumvent an unfavorable OLC opinion by seeking a more favorable answer to a different question from elsewhere in the department. Asking the […]

From the Washington Post: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation’s workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled. UPDATE: More from Hans Bader here.

The new study alleging bias in the ABA’s evaluation of judicial nominees, “Bias and the Bar: Evaluating the ABA Ratings of Federal Judicial Nominees,” by Richard L. Vining Jr., Amy Steigerwalt, Susan Navarro Smelcer, is now available on SSRN. Here’s the abstract: In this paper, we (1) investigate what factors explain the ABA ratings of […]

I don’t know much about IP, nor the class-action litigation against Google for digitizing books, but this op-ed by Lynn Chu makes me think I should be concerned about the suit’s potential settlement. After Google began digitizing the University of Michigan library in 2004, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful […]

Don Baudreaux has an interesting post on the ubiquity of free trade.

The WSJ had an interesting symposium on the role of the Fed in the housing bubble. Contributors included David Henderson, Gerald O’Driscoll, David Malpass, Judy Shelton, Vincent Reinhart, and our own Todd Zywicki.

The Washington Post has an interesting story on conflict between Freddie Mac and the feds. Half a year after the government seized Freddie Mac, confusion about its role is stoking tensions between the company and its regulator, including a dispute this month over how much the mortgage giant should reveal to private investors about its […]

The New York Times reported this week on the creation of a new research center at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change: the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. “This is unique,” said Paola Bacchetta, an associate professor at Berkeley and an editor of the collection […]

“Tracks of My Tears” is the poignant confession of a broken-heared man. The song was a signature of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and co-written by Robinson, Warren Moore, and Marvin Tarplin. I was surprised to learn that the song never topped the charts, but it’s on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Songs […]