Just wanted to thank again everyone who responded to the ancient Rome question that I posed a few months ago — I have all the responses (over 200 of them), and I will definitely go through them in several weeks, as soon as I get the Crime-Facilitating Speech piece (and a couple of the pieces […]
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Not the best headline:
From the Chicago Sun-Times: Orland Park Muslim activist appeals his exile to high court (Thanks to Jim Maule for passing this along.)
Sharpton:
The exit polls show Sharpton getting 10% of the vote in South Carolina, which various pundits had claimed he might win. Now that it’s become clear that Sharpton wasn’t even a serious contender for the black vote, should we allow the Democrats a moment to wallow in their shame for allowing this racist demagogue a […]
More speech suppression:
From the Tampa Tribune: After moving to Florida from Pennsylvania this summer, [Krista] Abram, 16, spent her first few days attending Tarpon Springs High School bewildered by her peers’ and teachers’ ambivalence to the daily sight of Confederate battle flag images at the school’s north Pinellas County campus. Abram saw dozens of students wearing shirts, […]
Yet again on Proculian Meditations:
Proculian Meditations says, commenting on my earlier post: Here’s the sad part, the state of politics in the capitalist (so-called) democracies is now so degraded that anyone who points to the fundamental importance of class struggle can be dismissed as a joke or as the intellectual equivalent of a single-celled organism (aka “strident libertarian”). This […]
Rethinking immigration:
Let us think about immigration policy in general terms. Here are some basic options: 1. Let everyone in.2. Let everyone in but terrorists and the infectious.3. Let many people in but try to control their behavior ex post.4. Try to keep as many people out as possible.5. Try to influence who gets in.6. Create new […]
Judicial Running Dogs of Capitalism:
More Proculianisms:There is not a single judge on the federal bench who isn’t willing to be dishonest if that is necessary to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Some judges, like Reinhardt, are dishonest in the service of capitalism with a “gentle mask,” and others, like Kozinski, are dishonest in the service of greed […]
Embedding Not a First Amendment Right:
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected a claim by Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine that journalists have a First Amendment right to be embedded with military units so as to facilitate war coverage. Specifically, Flynt claimed a right (in his attorney’s words) to “go[] in [to battle] with the military.” […]
You Can’t Say That! Website: The site, just launched, is meant to provide complementary and supplemental materials for readers of my You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws, especially for students interested in pursuing related topics for research papers for First Amendment seminars or undergraduate courses in Civil Rights […]
Bush’s “Radical” Budget:
Bush’s latest budget apparently isn’t as profligate as his first three, but the way the Times and Post are going on, you would think we were seeing the second coming of Grover Cleveland (whose portrait proudly hangs in my office). Here is the money quote from the Post: “In all, Bolten said, the budget would […]
Big News From Israel:
Sharon has made plans to evacuate all Israeli settlers from Gaza, and most from Samaria. Some accuse him of trying to distract attention from his domestic political woes, notably a bribery scandal. But I also think that Sharon, while a Likudnik ideologue, is first and foremost a Zionist and a military man–seeing no hope for […]
Garcia Marquez:
I very much enjoyed Garcia Marquez’s new memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. I would go so far as to call it a modern classic. It is both poignant and slow, and quite out of temper with what passes for entertainment these days. Nonetheless I found it to be entrancing in a virtually Proustian manner. […]
The thought never even crossed my mind
when naming Benjamin: Tacking Jr. or II onto a boy’s name is too common, a new father decided, so the self-described engineering geek took a software approach to naming his newborn son. Jon Blake Cusack talked his wife, Jamie, into naming their son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. Version 2.0 was born Tuesday . . . […]
Think Fingerprint Evidence is 100% Certain?
Think Again.
Being upfront about Affirmative Action:
Stuart Taylor argues that universities should be required to reveal the scope and content of the racial preferences they use in admissions. I don’t know that I’d require this of private universities, but I do know that while I have ambiguous views on the merits about preferences, I hate the hypocrisy, obfuscation, and outright lying […]