Current Affairs

UPDATE TWO: Professor Reynolds has updated and clarified the post discussed below. Please keep Reynolds’s update in mind as you read the following, which was drafted before the update. (My personal view of Reynolds’s update is, “well done.”) Yglesias has also updated; please read it as well. [Ad hominem attack by yours truly on a … Read more

It’s happening fast, which suggests that it’s a serious problem. I join with krempasky of Redstate in offering prayers and best wishes for him and his family.

Read here: George P. is up bragging about some bill that made it easier for people who can’t afford a downpayment to buy a home. This sounds like the sort of thing that would attract strong bipartisan support. It also seems like a pretty bad idea. How many initiatives do we need to encourage bad … Read more

From Judge Richard Posner (7th Circuit), guest blogging at Lawrence Lessig’s blog (UPDATE: Also read our own Edward Underscore, below): At last, high-level Administration acknowledgment that global warming is real, and that human activity (mainly the burning of fossil fuels, principally oil, natural gas, and coal, and deforestation in Third World countries) is a principal … Read more

But to a certain someone out there: my own SO saw the relevant livejournal post, she called me right away and now I’m offering both my congratulations and a prayer or two that everything goes perfectly. I know that you’ll do great at it. Now blog about it, already – my own readers are probably … Read more

… no, I’m being quite serious. The Swift Boat / Kerry brouhaha going on right now* is unlikely to have all that much of an effect on my daily life – but the fact that JibJab settled its copyright issues with the Guthrie estate quite possibly will. More accurately, the possibility that my habit of … Read more

SCOTUSBlog has an interesting post: “The Pentagon’s effort to deny members of the military services any of the benefit of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas has faltered on the first try. By a 4-1 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) has indicated that it assumes that … Read more

I’m sure Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife know Bay Buchanan, Gary Bauer, and the other conservative voices who “encouraged” President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment chiseling discrimination into our nation’s most important document. My guess is they’re not as fond of the Cheneys as they are of Bush (the Cheneys doesn’t wear … Read more

Giblets of the Fafpeople — who is the Lord Of All That Is and, I am reliably told, my secret Santa (thanks for the Gold Toes!) — wants to discuss missile defense: So on Tuesday George Bush said his plan for a missile defense shield showed he was living in the future. So far into … Read more

But I fully endorse this post by Gary Farber and this one by Bjørn Stærk (picked up by Volokh, and InstaPundit, and Giblets, and others too numerous to mention). I’ve touched on this subject before, but Stærk does a better job than I in puncturing this particular balloon. Go read him. And, if you agree, … Read more

… Constant Reader Slartibartfast has posted pictures of his brush with Hurricane Charley Treesbane. A good thing that it was his oaks and not him that were injured; the Command Post has an updated list of things that those who were less fortunate can use. Meanwhile, Constant Reader Catsy is coming to a conclusion about … Read more

Via The Light of Reason and Newsweek: On June 16, Porter Goss introduced a bill that gives the Director of Central Intelligence a variety of new powers to coordinate intelligence activities. It also contains one truly scary provision, which Newsweek describes as follows: “The Goss bill tracks current law by stating that the DCI shall  … Read more

Joseph Darby, the soldier who slipped the disk containing the Abu Ghraib photos under the door of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, setting in motion the process that brought the torture to light, is in protective custody. You can read the story of how what he did affected his life and that of his wife … Read more

From today’s Washinton Post: “Since 2001, President Bush’s tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign. The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, … Read more

There’s been a lot written on “In Defense of Interment,” which attempts to defend the Japanese internment during World War II as a perfectly rational self-defense measure and then, purportedly, apply the lessons of internment to the present day War on Terror. I say “purportedly” because Malkin — for reasons that are never well explained … Read more

I’m relieved because the latest decapitation video turned out to be fake: SAN FRANCISCO – A video aired Saturday that purportedly showed an American being decapitated in Iraq (news – web sites) was a hoax. The man shown in the video, reached by The Associated Press in San Francisco, said he videotaped the staged beheading … Read more

The Republican National Convention is coming to town (in case you haven’t heard). Secretly, this pleases me greatly. Not only do I not have to travel to protest, but I think it’s fitting that what is shaping up to be one of the greatest debates of our lifetime, in part, takes place here. I know … Read more

The US and other countries are currently negotiating a treaty banning the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium by any country, including those which have not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (e.g., Pakistan) or have withdrawn from it (e.g., North Korea.) Off the top of one’s head, this would seem like a Very Good … Read more

Well, it’s not exactly concise, but Timothy Sandefur offers an excellent “Guide for The Legally Perplexed” on The Panda’s Thumb. It’s well worth your time, even if much of it is old news.

This is a very interesting PJ O’Rourke / Colin Powell interview that Macallan found – and I’m not just saying that because Elvis was mentioned in the course of it. Although that certainly didn’t hurt.

So the BBC (hat tip Wilfred) is running further with the idea than the US media that the Terror Alerts announced Sunday are timed to promote some GOP political advantage (considering how old the intel is there’s an argument to be made there). They offer that it was timed to “to knock presidential challenger John … Read more

My girlfriend is back from her weeklong engineering conference at San Jose, CA; regularly scheduled blogging will resume… later. In the meantime, everyone play nice and only call each other names in a fashion designed to reinforce group-bonding rituals, or to advance the plot, or both. Or you could talk about this, which sounds like … Read more

Saw “Orwell Rolls in His Grave” the other night. Tackling the whoredom that passes as mainstream media these days, Director Robert Kane Pappas assembles an impressive cast of media experts (including a priceless 1980 interview with Peter Mitchelmore, the New York Post’s former editor, on his way out…to say he was candid is a gross … Read more

UPDATE — INSTA-REACTION: Who woulda thunk they’d send Clinton, not Gore, on offense. Not I. But it’s smart, I think. … Yes, yes — I think it’s smart. There’s a bunch of open threads for the convention, but not this one: Here’s your opportunity to snark. I caught parts of Al’s opening speech; honestly, not … Read more

Surely this will be overturned on appeal: A state appeals court ruled that a verbal agreement between a woman and her sperm donor was invalid, and ordered the man to pay child support for the woman’s twins. The three-judge panel ruled Thursday that the deal between Joel McKiernan and Ivonne Ferguson — in which McKiernan … Read more

WARNING: this post may be a result of hanging around with too many lawyers for too long–an experience which may have made me too quick to word-parse. We now know that Berger took whatever documents he was taking at least three separate times. One of his major defenses (as expressed through his lawyers) has been … Read more

Seriously. Why can’t we. After the Annie Jacobsen story about what she was as a possible terrorist dry run broke over a week ago, would it kill some major news company to help flesh things out just a little bit? Supposedly the guys involved were a Syrian music band. Why don’t we know the name … Read more

I just finished reading this: When One is Enough. My older sister recently attempted for the second time to have a baby. She got pregnant, but she miscarried. Nothing that they can really put a finger on; she’s just not well suited to have children. My sister is almost 40; I don’t think that she’ll … Read more

There’s been lots of outrage on the left about the supposedly ultra liberal PBS offering CNN’s “Crossfire” conversative Tucker Carlson his own current affairs program, so I thought I’d check it out. As fate would have it, tonight he interviewed Jonathan Rauch about gay marriage. Remarkably there are only two heel marks on my television … Read more