Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Ok, since there was some confusion generated by some of my previous posts on the drug war, let’s start to simply look at some basic information so that we can perhaps, over time, establish some foundational issues from which discussion can be held. My general position, so that it is clear, is that we are [...]
As Doug Mataconis predicted yesterday, the opening gambit of conservatives seeking a reason to deny Elena Kagan confirmation to the Supreme Court is to charge that she’s hostile to the military, as demonstrated by her decision as dean of Harvard Law School to deny military recruiters the right to officially visit the campus because the [...]
Two prominent Republican Congressmen have come out against reading Miranda rights to American citizens suspected of terrorism. Congressional Republicans want to know whether the Pakistani-born American arrested in the Times Square car bombing plot was read his Miranda rights, with Sen. John McCain saying it would be a “serious mistake” if the suspect was reminded [...]
As you’re all likely aware by now, the man believed to have driven the vehicle in the botched Times Square bomb plot was arrested last night. Thus far, three things interest me: emerging evidence that this was part of an organized, international, terrorist conspiracy; the sheer ineptitude of the plot; and the media coverage. This [...]
Regular reader and commenter Michael Reynolds forwarded me Arian Campo-Flores‘ Newsweek article entitled “Are Tea Partiers Racist?” It contains provocative new data: Opponents have seized on these examples as proof that Tea Partiers are angry white folks who can’t abide having a black president. Supporters, on the other hand, claim that the hateful signs are [...]
CNN, the company that invented 24/7 cable news but now finds itself fighting for relevancy, should abandon it’s “View From Nowhere” model of telling viewers what’s important, Jay Rosen argues. Rather than try to compete with Fox and MSNBC as an ideological-driven outfit, though, CNN should instead re-invent the genre. He even has a prime-time [...]
Yesterday, the Atlantic Council hosted a rousing debate between Flynt Leverett and Michael Ledeen, moderated by David Ignatius, on the topic “Iran: Engagement or Regime Change?” In my New Atlanticist post, “Iran: China 1972 or Russia 1987?” I summarize the key points made by the participants and then conclude, I find that one rarely goes [...]
Glenn Reynolds, Stacy McCain, Jim Hoft, Lonely Conservative and others continue to point to rather thin evidence that UAH mass murderer Amy Bishop was a “socialist.” She went to Harvard after all. And one kid on a prof rating website called her one. QED! As I’ve previously noted, her politics seem rather irrelevant. Certainly, [...]
Neuroscientist Amy Bishop was denied tenure by the biology faculty at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. So she shot them. WAFF48: The woman accused of killing three faculty members at University of Alabama Huntsville has been charged with capital murder. Police said a female member of the UA-Huntsville faculty shot and killed three co-workers [...]
The most prominent argument against allowing same-sex couples to marry is that it somehow harms traditional marriage. Nate Silver argues that the anecdotal evidence would suggest just the opposite: A tolerant view of marriage coincides with lower divorce rates. Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. [...]
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton argues that we need to get the bureaucracy out of intelligence if we are to adequately assess the threats facing the country. Although the U.S. intelligence community (IC) has been stung by failures relating to the Christmas terrorist attack, these failures are symptomatic of far larger problems. In analyzing the [...]
There is a growing pocket of Republican skeptics of the war in Afghanistan, Reihan Salam contends, and they could cause serious problems for President Obama. Alas, his argument is short on examples and long on speculation. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican known for his independent streak, has made a conservative case for withdrawal. And [...]
The controversy over the hacked climate change emails continues to gain steam, forcing the East Anglia team to reverse course and promise to release their raw data. The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, “stolen” by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the [...]
Tyler Cowen dubs the paradox of choice — the idea that people become unhappy when given too many choices — “one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences.” He cites Tim Harford‘s recent piece in FT describing research on the subject: Is more choice better? Ten years ago the answer [...]
The University of East Anglia mail server was hacked earlier in the week and a string of private correspondences between esteemed climate scientists were published. In addition to some juicy internecine gossip becoming embarrassingly public, a few of the messages seem to reveal doubts about the evidence for global warming and at least one refers [...]
In my initial posting on the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Trial, I asserted that “there’s an incredibly good chance that Mohammed and his comrades will go free. The fact that KSM was repeatedly waterboarded would seem to taint any subsequent evidence, including his own confession.” This was based on the presumption that the whole point of [...]
Marc Ambinder finds a hidden news story in this WaPo report by Perry Bacon: Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about [...]
Not only did the government lose its case against two top Bear Stearns managers but at least one juror came away wanting to invest with them. Prosecutors missed the mark so widely in the fraud trial of Bear Stearns Cos. hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin that a juror said after their acquittal [...]
The Supreme Court hears oral argument today in Pottawattamie County v McGee, wherein they will have to decide if prosecutors have immunity from lawsuits even if they frame someone for murder. On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend “there is no freestanding right not to be framed.” They are [...]
A rather bizarre case in Illinois — even by the standards of that state. For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release [...]
Via Jonathan Adler, I see that world-renowned economist Robert Barro and his student, Charles Redlick, takes to WSJ to summarize their research report showing that stimulus spending doesn’t work. Oddly, take cuts do. The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus [...]
Though I follow a number of lawblogs, I missed a rather interesting Supreme Court decision until reading about it on the blog of entrepreneur Mark Cuban. For reasons understandable to those who follow Cuban, he has a Google alert for “prosecutorial misconduct,” which yields more results than one would like. It led him to Michael [...]
I’ve argued in the past that health care outcomes like infant mortality and life expectancies are not really very good measures of a country’s health care services since such outcomes are also a function of variables that are outside the control of health care services. A person who is morbidly obese and refuses to change [...]
A front page story in today’s WaPo by Michael Shear and Paul Kane, “Anger Over Firm Depletes Obama’s Political Capital,” proclaims, “President Obama’s apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious [...]