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Conservative Punk Magazine. Thanks to reader Charles Chapman for the pointer.

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I’m no expert…

On the ins and outs of counterterrorism policy, or the national security and intelligence bureaucracy more generally. Dan Drezner is much closer to being such an expert. When I walked into his office and said, “So what should we think about Clarke?” he replied that he was writing his blog post at that very moment. […]

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Black + White = Grey:

Surely you know the Beatles’s White Album, and rapper Jay-Z did the Black Album. One enterprising producer (Brian Burton) mixed the two together, using creative sampling techniques. He came up with The Grey Album, which drew legal opposition from The Beatles. Imagine rap beats, riffs and lyrics with White Album instrumentals and vocal snippets in […]

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Pledge case and Newdow’s standing:

A reader writes: [A]s I understand it, there are two issues [related to the Newdow Pledge of Allegiance case]:1) whether the father has standing [given that he’s not the custodial parent]; and2) whether the use of “under God” in the Pledge violates the Establishment Clause. Say the Court reverses based on standing, and as a […]

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At the risk of repeating myself —

no, at the certainty of repeating myself — I thought I’d rerun something I posted last week. I heard the trope I object to below re-quoted in a radio broadcast today, and got mad all over again:      As readers of this blog know, I’ve been quite critical of people calling others “traitors” simply because they […]

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In the record:

Howard Bashman (How Appealing) reports that a blog post of ours was just “entered into the record of today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ‘A Proposed Constitutional Amendment to Preserve Traditional Marriage,’” by U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). I’m tickled pink! Many thanks to Howard for alerting me to this.

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Cornered:

I disagree with Ramesh Ponnuru a lot; but he’s a very smart guy and an honest and civil debater. His stuff keeps me coming back to the Corner (even more than Jonah Goldberg’s Star Trek and comic book and Simpsons references– after all, geeky pop culture stuff isn’t that hard to find on the web, […]

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Arab Citizens of Israel:

Israel has made many, many (many!) egregious errors in dealing with its Arab citizens. Unfortunately, the end result of these errors, combined with the latent hostility of an Arab community that has never fully accepted the legitimacy of Israel, is that any settlement that is ultimately reached with the Palestinians in the West Bank and […]

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Terrorism hits Close to Home:

Amidst all the headlines about Yassin yesterday, you may have read that an Arab man attack three individuals on Ben-Gurion street in Ramat Gan, Israel with an axe, injuring one seriously. The incident took place right outside my girlfriend’s father’s apartment buidling. Worse, my girlfriend happens to be in Israel right now visiting her father, […]

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The Administration’s Response to Dick Clarke:

While I do not disagree with Jacob’s assessment of the statement identifying the assassination attempt on President GHW Bush as terrorism, here is the entire White House response to Clarke’s allegation. It is worth reading in its entirety, but I found the same item that includes this questionable example of Iraqi support for terrorism interesting […]

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More on Law and Revolution:

I second Jacob’s recommendation of Harold Berman’s masterpiece, Law and Revolution. I was a student of Berman at Harvard in his course The Western Legal Tradition, and we read an early manuscript of Law and Revolution which at the time was sort of infamous for being unpublished for so long. I believe I wrote a […]

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Life imitates the Onion: According to Reuters, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has watched Mel Gibson’s controversial Passion of the Christ at a private screening and said it was not anti-Semitic. With endorsements like this, who needs condemnation? (And, no, the Arafat line doesn’t prove anything about Gibson’s movie — it just struck me as funny, […]

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Assassination:

In general, I thought and still think that the claim that we went to war in Iraq as Bush Jr’s retaliation for the assassination attempt against his father was bogus, silly, and unserious; it acts as a kind of deflection from the hard questions about the costs of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. (There are […]

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The End Result of the Peace Process:

Allison Kaplan Sommer reports from Israel that the “man in the street” has given up worrying about Palestinian reaction to self-defense measures: “They see that when we try to make nice and compromise we get terror attacks. And when we’re tough and aggressive we get terror attacks. Nothing we do seems to lower the motivation […]

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Sabotage, and outsourcing source code and object code:

As I’ve mentioned before, outsourcing source code does indeed pose the possibility of cyber-sabotage: Some computer programmer in Pakistan or Russia might sneak some harmful code into a program that will run on many American computers (including perhaps Defense Department computers).      This problem, though, can arise even without the outsourcing of source code, and while […]

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