Sarah Palin just appointed 47-year-old Morgan Christen to Alaska’s Supreme Court. Christen will have the opportunity to serve up to 23 years in her new position because of Alaska’s mandatory retirement age for judges kicks in at 70. Plainly put, 23 years is more than long enough, though it would be nearly a decade less…
Category: Politics
Liberals’ Distrust of Local Government
It seems as though whenever there’s a problem at a local or regional level there’s an uncontrollable urge to fix it with a national solution. That, Matthew Yglesias says, is because “make sense to take action at the level of a small sub-unit of a large economically integrated country”. It does make sense to have…
Convergence of Ideological Opposites
My father’s definition of the range of ideology is this: I believe personality definitions are spherical in nature and can be defined by spherical equations (and a sinusoid). The far fringes meet and touch on the other side of reality. Once you get past + (conservative) & – (liberal) 90 degrees (reality) you slowly progress…
Dawn Johnsen: Another Lying Liar in Line for an Important Job with the Obama Administration
The National Review’s Andy McCarthy been absolutely brutal in refuting Dawn Johnsen’s testimony that the DOJ Office of Legal Council nominee gave to Senate Judiciary Committee. In exposing Johnsen’s lies about her own written record, McCarthy exemplifies everything that is good about the American media. A virtual round for Andy, please, on the house. Here’s…
Obama’s Health Care Plan to be Mandatory?
Ezra Klein says that Barack Obama will ask Congress to include a mandatory participation clause when he spells out the broad strokes for his proposed health care plan: Administration officials have been very clear on what the inclusion of “universality” is meant to communicate to Congress. As one senior member of the health team said…
Bankrupt Homeowners’ Apologist Rejects Ethics, Responsibility, Common Sense
Matthew Yglesias has his doubts about whether homeowners who default on their home loans bear any responsibility whatsoever for the financial mess they have caused. Certainly lenders deserve a share of the blame for failing to run their businesses, well, like businesses. The federal government played a huge part in the fiasco as well, as…
Indiana University: Press Favors Republicans (and Hell Freezes Over)
Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, both associate professors in the Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications say that Republicans were the beneficiaries of media bias during the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential elections: In their research, Democrats were more likely to be subjects of the “lip-flap” effect, while Republicans more often got the last…
Eager to Regulate, Some Economists Reject Reality
Nouriel Roubini, a professor at the Stern Business School at New York University, says that the current fiscal crisis was caused by the failure of “the laissez-faire, unregulated (or aggressively deregulated), Wild West model of free market capitalism” and that nationalization of financial institutions and heavy regulation is a requirement of a stable economy. Evidently…
More Congressional Censorship, Inadvertent This Time?
I recently wrote about public libraries planning to ban older books because of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act passed by Congress last year. The NY City Journal has picked up on the story now that the damage seems to be spreading to retail book resellers. Not until 1985 did it become unlawful to use…
Lies, Damn Lies, and We’ll Force You to Listen to Them
More members of the Democratic Congress are revealing their desire to re-regulate the talk radio marketplace by breathing new life into the corpse of the Fairness Doctrine. The reason behind the plans is obvious and it has nothing to do with the public welfare. AM radio was essentially worthless until conservative political talk shows began…