Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler

The federal government backs a program creating moral hazards and encouraging risky home loans. Why am I not suprprised? The WSJ reports: Mortgages that allow consumers to put little if any money down when buying a home have largely disappeared as a financing option available from private lenders. But they are still available — and […]

Today’s NYT has an informative article by Adam Liptak on the two habeas cases from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that the Supreme Court agreed to hear yesterday. The article focuses on Cone v. Bell, which is the more interesting of the two, and not only because it is the third […]

My last posting about the European soccer championships generated some of the usual soccer/anti-soccer comments, which I had hoped to avoid so that we could talk about the games, instead of talking about whether we should be talking about the games . . . Listen, I understand that some of you don’t like soccer – […]

As many of you know, there has been an ever-shifting internet rumor launched publicly by an extremely unreliable pro-Clinton blogger, Larry Johnson, that there is a video recording of Michelle Obama saying some intemperate things at Trinity United Church. The way that this story is being spread leads me to think that there is little […]

Here are the main foreign policy comments in the prepared text of Barack Obama’s Minnesota speech tonight (via Drudge): And it’s not change when he [John McCain] promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians — a policy where all […]

AP reporting: Hillary Rodham Clinton has told congressional colleagues she would be open to becoming Barack Obama’s vice presidential nominee, saying she would consider it if it would help Democrats win the White House. Clinton, a New York senator, made the comment on a conference call with other New York lawmakers Tuesday, according a participant […]

At 1:23pm ET, an AP story was released, reporting that Hillary Clinton would concede tonight because Barack Obama has clinched the nomination. [Although I don’t have the original timestamp for the more definitive AP story that their delegate tally showed that Obama had won, the earliest timestamp I’ve found so far is Breitbart’s at 1:26pm […]

This fascinating New Republic story about Barack Obama’s days as a community organizer came out over a year ago: Chicago pastors still remember Obama making the rounds of local churches and conducting interviews—in organizing lingo, “one-on-ones”—where he would probe for self-interest. The Reverend Alvin Love, the Baptist minister of a modest brick church amid the […]

I watched some of the recent Congressional grilling of oil industry executives and was struck by how gracious they were. I would have been so indiscreet as to respond by suggesting that Congress was far more to blame for high oil prices than Big Oil. Mark Steyn also seems to have had negative thoughts about […]

Under the UN system of carbon trading, it seems that most of the projects that receive money for reducing carbon emissions would have been built anyway. Thus, most payments do not actually reduce emissions. At least that is the conclusion of two recent studies. From the Guardian’s environmental editor (tip to Tim Blair): Billions of […]

State and local governments are upset by the imposition of various requirements for the receipt of federal homeland security funds. In order to receive full federal funding, state and local governments are required to develop plans to ensure they are prepared for terrorist threats, such as the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), among other […]

Godsmack, “Running Blind,” off The Other Side. It begins: Can’t find the answers I’ve been crawling on my knees Looking for anything To keep me from drowning Promises have been turned to lies Can’t even be honest inside Now I’m going running backward Watching my life wave me goodbye Running blind I’m running blind Somebody […]

Donald Boudreaux ponders the implications of Senator Hillary Clinton’s claim that her difficulties in the Democratic primaries are due to sexism. So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley and Yale – who has earned millions in the private sector, won two terms in the U.S. Senate, and gathered many more votes than John Edwards, […]

The Washington Post reports on a portion of an OLC memo — just a sentence really — concerning the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that reinterprets the word “exclusive” to mean something less. A 1978 law appeared at first glance to be an impediment to using new procedures for such surveillance. It stated that the […]

Linda Greenhouse’s exploration of the relative paucity of 5-4 decisions thus far this term generally overlooks the most likely and plausible explanations: Last year’s high proportion of 5-4 splits along ideological lines was itself and outlier and an artifact of the OT2006 docket. Last term had a relatively large proportion of exceedingly close and difficult […]