Monthly Archives: January 2010

About last Friday

I’ll be on vacation this week, both from work and from blogging. But before signing off, I want to comment on President Obama’s appearance in Baltimore on Friday before the House Republicans. It was, as just about everyone agrees, an impressive performance by Obama, a performance that I think confirms my view that Obama remains very much a force to be reckoned with. Conservatives who think his extraordinary communications skills »

Keith Ellison’s disingenuous letter

Rep. Keith Ellison has written a letter to President Obama urging him to use diplomatic pressure to end Israel’s blockade of Gaza. 50 members of the House have signed the letter, including Ellison’s fellow Minnesotans Betty McCollum and James Oberstar. The letter pays lip service to the security needs of Southern Israel, which had been subject to repeated attacks from Gaza — attacks which, to my knowledge, never prompted Ellison »

For Obama, An Optimistic Scenario

Barack Obama’s first year was a disaster for the Democrats. His approval rating has been in free-fall, declining faster, I believe, than that of any first-year President in modern history. Congress, meanwhile, is held in near-universal contempt. If this year’s Congressional election were held next week, it would be a wipeout of epic proportions. Fortunately for the Democrats, they have nine months to go, and conditions will likely become more »

Policy-Driven Deception

The Science & Public Policy Institute has published an important paper on the manipulations to which surface temperature records have been subjected in order to promote the global warming dogma. It’s called Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? You should download and read it all; this is the executive summary: 1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it »

What Next for the Tea Parties?

More, Glenn Reynolds writes in The Examiner. More power; more influence; more respect: So far the Tea Party’s record is looking pretty good. But what happens next? Many people — er, well, many pundits, anyway — complain that the Tea Party movement is entirely oppositional: For a brief moment, the key buzzword was “nihilistic,” though the connection between Turgenev and Tea Parties seems rather tenuous. In fact, Tea Partiers seem »

The Left’s Parallel Universe

Frank Rich is perhaps the New York Times’ worst regular columnist. A homosexual activist and former drama critic, he substitutes a hysterical and abusive style for knowledge of public policy issues, of which he displays little or none. Even more than Paul Krugman, he can fairly be described as Keith Olbermann in print. In his current column, Rich describes the state of the Union as “comatose.” If you keep reading, »

The Holder hangover (and whence it comes)

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania during the presidential campaign in June 2008, Barack Obama addressed the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision granting Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Obama asserted that the “principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process — »

This day in basketball history

Forty-five years ago today, a sold-out Cole Field House at the University of Maryland hosted what is probably the most famous high school basketball game ever played. It featured Power Memorial of New York City against DeMatha of Hyattsville, Maryland. Power Memorial, led by the phenomenal Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), had won 71 consecutive games. Hardly anyone followed high school basketball at a national level in those days, years »

A crisis averted in Iraq?

I wrote here about the disturbing prospect that the disqualification of hundreds of Sunni candidates in the unpcoming Iraqi elections would degrade those elections and perhaps prompt a surge of sectarian violence. But now, as Max Boot reports based on statements by General Petraeus, it appears that, not for the first time, Iraqi politicians have averted the crisis through a compromise. According to Petraeus, the disqualfication list is no longer »

In the Clear

Newsweek reports that the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility will issue a report that exonerates Jay Bybee and John Yoo of professional misconduct in connection with their authorship of legal memoranda that argued or implied that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods were legal. This represents a softening of the initial draft of OPR’s memo, which would have found such misconduct, requiring referral to state bar associations for »

The High Cost of Misunderstanding Terrorism

The Obama administration will include $200 million in next year’s budget to help defray the security costs resulting from the criminal trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 terrorists. This is infuriating, of course: why should the taxpayers have to foot that expense? But it is also illuminating. Why, exactly, will these trials require $200 million worth of extra security? Aren’t Khalid and his pals ordinary criminals? Even »

Oriental despotism and Islam

Michael Curtis is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political science at Rutgers University. He has also served as president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East and as editor of the Middle East Review. Professor Curtis is the author of approximately 30 books. His latest, a prodigious piece of scholarship, is Orientalism and Islam. In this book, Curtis considers the writings of six sets of giant intellectual figures »

This Explains A Lot

Paul noted yesterday the economy’s strong resurgence in the fourth quarter–great news, seemingly. Yet the stock market was down on Friday. Why? Investors Business Daily offered this explanation: [R]ight now, the market seems to be saying: “It’s the policies, stupid.” Specifically, the socialistic policies that the Obama administration keeps pushing at Americans who know that’s not the way this great country was built. It isn’t just the efforts to socialize »

Deletions Illegal, But Won’t Be Prosecuted

The Information Commissioner’s office in Great Britain has ruled that the East Anglia scientists who are at the heart of the global warming scandal acted illegally when they deleted emails rather than produce them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. They will not be prosecuted, however, apparently because the law has a six-month statute of limitation. The linked news story speculates that the finding of illegality will »

Clearing my spindle

I’ve been saving a number of items to write about that I want to present for your information without further comment. In one way or another, they are interesting and informative. Over the past two weeks that John Hinderaker has been trying a lawsuit in Chicago, we’ve especially missed John’s updates on the global warming hoax. Items that John probably would have brought to our attention include Christopher Booker’s “Pachauri: »

Back in the Saddle

I’m home from two weeks in Chicago, where I was trying a case. Trial lawyers among our readers will understand what that means–round the clock work. I had no time to follow the news, let alone post. It will take a few days to catch up on what’s been going on; I’ll start with our radio show tomorrow morning at 11 central. By mid-week I hope to be able to »

Pictures from an institution

I’ve spent the past week in residence at the Hoover Institution as a media fellow along with Richard Starr of the Weekly Standard and Cristina Aby-Azar of the Wall Street Journal Americas. It’s been a blast. Here are a few notes. Among the highlights of the week has been the opportunity to catch up with Hoover research fellow, author and Dartmouth College trustee Peter Robinson. Peter is the host of »