Issue number 5 of this year’s Connecticut Law Review is an excellent symposium on firearms law, policy, and culture. The lead article is from Nicholas Johnson, of Fordham: Firearms Policy and the Black Community: An Assessment of the Modern Orthodoxy. Johnson (who is my co-author on the Second Amendment textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment) details the long […]
Archive | Politics
“Tyrone” Cowen on a Republican Victory in the Standoff
I had been considering posting something contrarian and cynical about the radical Republican strategy during the recent appropriation and debt standoff. But I now see that Tyler Cowen has published a post by “Tyrone,” his “evil twin brother,” that makes a provocative claim: I read what a strategic disaster the fracas has been for the […]
Public Ignorance About Crime Rates
By Ilya Somin on August 26, 2013 6:42 pm in Criminal Law, Democracy and Political Ignorance, Political Ignorance, Politics, Public Opinion
CNN recently published an interesting article about how most of the public believes that violent crime is rising, despite the fact that it has actually fallen dramatically over the last twenty years: You can’t escape the headlines. An Australian going to college in the United States is gunned down by teens who police say killed […]
Colorado Inside-Out 1973 Time Machine
By David Kopel on July 2, 2013 4:08 pm in Constitutional Amendments, Media, Politics, Presidency, Television, Voting Rights Act
This Friday, July 6, at 8 p.m. Mountain Time, is Colorado Inside-Out’s annual Time Machine episode, on Colorado Public Television, channel 12. These episodes have won three regional Emmy Awards. This year’s episode takes us to 1973, with discussions of Equal Rights Amendment ratification, political violence, the energy crisis, and Watergate. The characters are, from […]
We’ve Apparently Come to Admire the Petty Corruption of the Political Class
I noticed two anecdotes about the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, both of which were meant to be complimentary but in fact speak volumes about the petty corruption of our political class and how inured to it we’ve become. The first was told by a friend of his who was at a conference of Jewish philanthropists […]
Penalties for Underperforming Politicians
By Ilya Somin on May 29, 2013 11:15 am in Democracy and Political Ignorance, Political Ignorance, Politics, Public Choice
Law professor Glenn Reynolds (AKA Instapundit) has an interesting column in USA Today advocating that we increase penalties for politicians who do a poor job in office: As scandals explode across Washington… one thing that I’ve noticed is that the people involved don’t seem to suffer much…. Government officials are happy making and executing plans […]
IRS Admits Targeting “Tea Party” Groups
Some conservative and libertarian groups have long suspected that the Internal Revenue Service has targeted right-leaning non-profits for extra scrutiny, but such allegations were always difficult to prove (and often sounded a bit conspiratorial). Now, however, the head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations has admitted her division targeted “tea party” and “patriot” […]
I Think Jeffrey Goldberg is Trying to Defend President Obama
when he says, “Like many liberal American Jews, when he looks at Netanyahu he sees a conservative Republican and he fails to understand how a Jew can be a conservative Republican. I think he looks at Netanyahu in much the same way he contemplates Eric Cantor, the Republican (and Jewish) house majority leader. Like many […]
Republican Party Doing Surprisingly Well, from at Least One Perspective
Imagine in 1983, if you had told a Republican political operative that in 30 years: (1) Crime will no longer be an important political issue; (2) The USSR will have dissolved, and a Republican president will so botch a foreign war that the Democrats will have a clear public opinion advantage on foreign policy; (3) […]
The Trillion Dollar Heist
Whatever else one might say about the Trillion Dollar Coin, it would certainly set the stage for the ultimate heist movie. Maybe an “American Buffalo” needs Mamet, but this would write itself. In my version, a disgruntled Treasury worker swallows the coin, then goes on a hunger strike, holding the economy hostage until his demands […]
Homage to Catalonia
By Eugene Kontorovich on November 26, 2012 12:50 am in Constitutional Law, International Law, Israel, Politics, Secession, Uncategorized
Voters in the Spanish province of Catalonia yesterday gave a large majority to pro-independence parties, who now command 2/3 of the seats in the regional parliament. The practical impact may be attenuated, because the secessionist movement is weakened by being spread across four parties: separatists can’t unite. Madrid vows to resist any split. Spain apparently […]
Second Amendment Results, Final
Only reporting results which represent a change. U.S. Senate. Gains: Indiana (Donnelly replaces Lugar). NM (Heinrich replaces Bingaman). ND (Heitkamp replaces Conrad). Senate losses: Mass., Warren defeats Brown (-.5 with NRA C-rated Senator replaced by an F). Virginia, Kaine replaces Webb. Senate net: +1.5. Ted Cruz’s win in Texas won’t change Senate voting patterns, but […]
Gary Johnson Gets about 1% of the Vote
From the little information available out there, it looks like Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is getting about 1% of the vote, and doing so pretty consistently nationwide. This constitutes the Libertarians’ best showing since 1980, when they had a well-funded campaign (unlike this year) thanks to self-funded VP candidate David Koch, and also received […]
Second Amendment election results
As the results come in tonight, I will blog here about the results as they affect the Second Amendment. In an article last week for National Review Online, I previewed all the Senate and Governor races, and all the competitive House races. Election night starts with a net +3 for the Second Amendment in the Senate, […]
Trende on the Election: A Nailbiter
For those who can’t get enough election speculation, Sean Trende, whose work I think highly of, examines the relevant information and concludes that the national polls are more likely to be correct than the state polls (he was ambivalent on this before). He concludes that it’s going to be a very tight race, decided by […]