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Bench Memos - National Review Online

Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

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Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 05:00:54

As Obama Kowtows, Unions Eye the Private Sector -- By: Michael Barone

Posted on July 15, 2010
The Obama administration is dominated by labor unions. Yes, Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders do owe the unions something: Unions gave $400 million to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle, and thus expect to get something in return. What they haven't gotten out of the Democratic Congress is the thing they wanted most -- the card-check bill that would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections...

From Berlin to Jerusalem -- By: Clifford D. May

Posted on July 15, 2010
Last month, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, called on Palestinians to defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which he said was 'threatened by the plans of the enemies of God,' by which he meant Israelis. It should go without saying that this is a lie...

Holder?s Hypocrisy -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on July 15, 2010
Attorney General Eric Holder has developed a bad habit of accusing others of acting in bad faith while doing so himself. Take the issue of Guantanamo Bay. In Aspen, Colo., last week, Holder accused Congress of playing politics by preventing President Obama from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center -- as Obama had serially promised to do within a year of his inauguration...

Business Knows More than Obama -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on July 15, 2010
With a bad-blood, confidence-destroying battle royale going on between Team Obama and business, you would think a highly publicized White House jobs summit would have produced some kind of positive announcement that gives a nod to the business point of view...

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Karl Rove?s Mea Culpa -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on July 15, 2010
In Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove offered a candid confession. His biggest mistake as a top White House adviser, he wrote, was to endorse the decision not to mount a vigorous defense when Democrats accused President Bush of lying the nation into the invasion of Iraq...

Censorship as ?Tolerance? -- By: Jacob Mchangama

Posted on July 14, 2010
In 1670, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote an emphatic defense of freedom of thought and speech. Spinoza affirmed that freedom of expression is a universal and inalienable right and concluded: 'Hence it is that that authority which is exerted over the mind is characterized as tyrannical...

A Crackpot in Robes -- By: The Editors

Posted on July 14, 2010
The Defense of Marriage Act, a bipartisan law signed by President Clinton, implicitly recognizes the power of state governments to enact same-sex marriage laws -- for themselves. But it prevents state governments from deciding the issue for other states or for the federal government: These other governments do not have to recognize the same-sex marriages to which some states -- in practice so far, that means some state judiciaries -- have chosen to grant legal status...

The Inflation Canard -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on July 14, 2010
Where's the inflation? The calls have come tauntingly, from the usual suspects. The Keynesian economists who warned of deflation in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis are trying to declare victory now, pointing to falling price levels as evidence that they were right...

The Psychology of Recession -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on July 14, 2010
I asked a businessman two weeks ago why he said that he was neither hiring nor buying new equipment. He started in on 'rising taxes.' 'But wait,' I interrupted. I pointed out that income-tax hikes haven't taken effect. The old FICA income caps are also still applicable...

Obama?s Crisis Is GOP?s Opportunity -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on July 14, 2010
It wasn't supposed to be like this. The Obama administration came into power with the political winds at its back, the media at its feet, and Americans open to major change. The White House even had a slogan: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The logic behind the axiom is unassailable...

Will It Be Lincoln or Kagan? -- By: Tony Blankley

Posted on July 14, 2010
Abraham Lincoln, address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861: 'I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. 'That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence#...

The National Association for the Advancement of Coddled People -- By: Michelle Malkin

Posted on July 14, 2010
Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decided to ride the anti-tea-party wave back to political relevancy, its most recent activist crusade involved a silly space-themed Hallmark graduation card. Yes, the NAACP has been lost in space for quite some time now...

The Reeducation of Rand Paul -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on July 14, 2010
Soon after Rand Paul won Kentucky's GOP Senate primary in May, his campaign was rocked -- not by an affair or a kamikaze YouTube clip, but by his own textbook libertarianism. In a series of post-election interviews, Paul criticized parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, expressing concern about the federal government's power to regulate private behavior...

A Great Country That Could Be Better -- By: Conrad Black

Posted on July 13, 2010
The Supreme Court of the United States having vacated all of the spurious charges that have caused me to spend the last three U.S. Independence Days as an involuntary guest of the American people, I expected I would be in more celebratory mood this July 4 than on the last two...

Holder: Aiding al-Qaeda -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on July 13, 2010
Eric Holder is chief among the many Obama Justice Department lawyers who, during the Bush years, donated their services as private attorneys for the benefit of al-Qaeda terrorists. His motive was to frustrate efforts to treat our wartime enemies as just that: wartime enemies...

Gated or X-Rated? -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on July 13, 2010
Across the country, schools are removing vending machines that contain sugary sodas on the grounds that kids should be kept clear of anything that might contribute to the obesity epidemic. The first lady has made reforming school-lunch programs a high priority so that kids will consume only nutritious, healthy fare...

How to Cut Military Spending -- By: Lawrence Korb

Posted on July 13, 2010
Kevin Williamson calls the report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force, of which I am a member, a 'strange' and 'shoddy' document. Allow me to disagree. Williamson begins by dismissing a quotation from John Podesta (my boss at the Center for American Progress) -- 'an overall defense strategy that is fiscally unsustainable will fail every bit as much as a strategy that shortchanges the military' -- as 'of no interest...

Farrakhan Demands Reparations from Jews -- By: Daniel Pipes

Posted on July 13, 2010
Louis Farrakhan recently sent a three-page letter along with two books to the heads of 16 Jewish organizations. Dated June 24, 2010, the letter is resplendent with a crescent-and-moon flag and Farrakhan's impressive-sounding title ('National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam')...

Real Education -- By: Dennis Prager

Posted on July 13, 2010
(If every high-school principal gave this speech at the beginning of the next school year, America would be a better place.)To the students and faculty of our high school: I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people...

Too Much House -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on July 13, 2010
Asheville, N.C. -- The Biltmore House, the extravagant mansion built by Cornelius Vanderbilt's grandson in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, makes the White House look like a gardener's cottage.George Washington Vanderbilt opened his new home -- the largest private residence in the U...

Signs of the Times -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on July 13, 2010
If you could spend vast amounts of other people's money just by saying a few magic words, wouldn't you be tempted to do it? Barack Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money just by using the magic words 'stimulus' and 'jobs...

Time for Something Completely Different -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on July 13, 2010
If there's a characteristic American trait, it's moving ahead. Our great 19th-century chronicler, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted how Americans would leave their new homes -- onto the next thing! -- even before they had a chance to finish the roofs. That's why Pres...

Unequal Justice -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on July 13, 2010
Voters at a precinct on Philadelphia's Fairmuont Street witnessed unusual sights and sounds on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2008. Two members of the New Black Panther party, King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, stood within 15 feet of this polling station dressed in military-style black jackets, black berets, and black combat boots...

Public Policy Polling or Controlling? -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on July 12, 2010
For political junkies, the biggest names in polling, like Gallup and Mason-Dixon, never seem to offer new results frequently enough. But political reporters, like nature, abhor a vacuum, and so newer polling organizations have stepped in to fill the void, becoming widely cited and shaping the conventional wisdom about this year's competitive races...

New Start: Romney Is Right -- By: The Editors

Posted on July 12, 2010
Mitt Romney caused a furor last week when he wrote a Washington Post op-ed opposing the New Start treaty. Democrats and liberal commentators rushed to accuse Romney of bad-faith politics, of ignorance, and of a dangerous extremism. He'll never get into the Council on Foreign Relations now...

General Mattis Moves to CENTCOM -- By: Mackubin Thomas Owens

Posted on July 12, 2010
The president has nominated Marine Gen. James Mattis to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, replacing Gen. David Petraeus, who has assumed command of the effort in Afghanistan. This is a welcome move. There is now a remarkable military tandem in place in the Greater Middle East, one that Victor Davis Hanson has compared to Grant and Sherman...

Mechanical Failure -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on July 12, 2010
The Democrats are pushing for yet another stimulus package to revive our moribund economy. As of this writing, they have been unable to round up the requisite 60 votes to push the package through the Senate. President Obama has urged deficit-wary moderates to get on board, calling the bill 'essential' to addressing the ongoing economic 'emergency...

Agitators in Oakland -- By: Michael M. Rosen

Posted on July 12, 2010
Oakland, Calif. -- 'The silent majority of people here, eking out a living, they just want to come home and be with their family at the end of the day,' an off-duty Oakland police officer I'll call Gary is telling me in a cop bar not far from department headquarters...

The Case against Confirmation -- By: Orrin G. Hatch

Posted on July 12, 2010
After studying Elena Kagan's record, actively participating in her hearing, and listening to the views of folks in Utah and across the country, I do not believe that she meets the standards we should require of federal judges -- especially Supreme Court justices...

Obamacare in Kenya? -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on July 12, 2010
‘Hello, my name is Joe Biden. I work for Barack Obama.' With that, the vice president brought Obamacare to Nairobi last month. If not the policy exactly, the strategy: confuse and obscure, make opponents the enemy of the good.Biden was in Kenya leading what sounded a lot like a rally for the new constitution there, one that will be voted on in August...

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