Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler

Speaking in New York City, former Vice President Al Gore called for civil disobedience and state attorneys general investigations against coal companies. “If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it […]

The Obama campaign has sent letters to radio stations in Ohio and Pennsylvania discouraging them from running ads by the National Rifle Association critical of Barack Obama. Ben Smith reports: “This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience about Senator Obama’s position on the Second Amendment,” says the letter from Obama general counsel Bob Bauer. “For […]

The Cincinnati Enquirer‘s Peter Bronson thinks Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner — “the most partisan state official in Ohio” — “is doing her best to bring Chicago elections to Ohio.”

One might expect conservative columnist George Will to be supportive of the Republican presidential nominee, but he’s none too pleased with McCain’s latest pronouncements, and raises concerns about the Arizona Senator’s temperament. Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the […]

Charles Calomiris of the Columbia Busisness School and Peter Wallison of AEI have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today arguing that the subprime mess is largely due to the actions of Fannie and Freddie (and their Congressional backers), and not due to financial industry deregulation or broader institutional problems. They also suggest the […]

The libertarian-leaning Republican has endorsed Constitutional Party candidate Chuck Baldwin for President, snubbing Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr. David Weigel has the details on Hit & Run.

Given the little dust-up over the Senator McCain’s comment that he would remove Christopher Cox as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and questions as to whether the President has such authority, I thought it would be interesting to quote portions of the D.C. Circuit’s majority opinion in Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB on […]

The Free Enterprise Fund has filed a petition for rehearing en banc in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, in which a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the Fund’s Appointments Clause challenge to the PCAOB’s composition. In my view, this case is an excellent […]

Politico reports that comedian-turned-Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken “phoned in” Saturday Night Live’s opening sketch lampooning Senator John McCain’s campaign ads criticizing Senator Barack Obama. n SNL insider said that, as of the Wednesday script read-through, Franken was the

Sebastian Mallaby makes a strong case against the Bush Administration’s proposed Wall Street bailout bill. With truly extraordinary speed, opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren’t actually insolvent. As recently as a week ago, no public […]

The Anchorage Daily News criticizes the McCain campaign for virtually taking over the Alaska governor’s office, particularly its response to the so-called “Troopergate” investigation. While I’ve seen little to suggest this is a serious scandal, the McCain campaign’s action hardly inspire confidence, and I think the ADN is correct that “Official state business . . […]

Speaking of glass houses, it’s somewhat ironic that a week after the Obama campaign complained of the McCain campaign’s dishonest advertisements (see, e.g., here), it ran multiple ads with false claims (here and here) of its own.

Billy Joel’s Glass Houses was one of my first LPs. I kept it in constant rotation during sixth grade. I always knew that this was one of several albums that sought to defend rock and roll from punk, disco and the like. The lyrics to “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” makes that clear. […]

The Washington Post has an excerpt from a forthcoming book on Dick Cheney providing additional details on the internal dissension within the Bush Administration over the legality of its terrorist surveillance programs. Interesting stuff! And, as with other accounts, David Addington does not come off too well.

It is interesting to juxtapose Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s decision to allow some absentee voters to register and vote on the same day with another recent decision that has the effect of invalidating over 1,000 absentee ballot applications collected by the McCain campaign. More than 1,000 absentee ballot applications in Greater Cincinnati have […]