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Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

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

The 'I Am Not George Bush' Policy -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on February 24, 2010
The first year of the Obama administration has been a vertiginous pile of confusions and contradictions. In hunting for a theme to its decision making, we might start with Obama?s relation to his predecessor. THE WORLD WAR II ANALOGYGeorge Bush, a purported conservative, ran up deficits reaching in aggregate $2...

Accounting for Fannie and Freddie -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on February 24, 2010
Back in December, while the holidays had everyone distracted, the Obama administration released a little-noticed announcement that it would be lifting the caps on federal assistance to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giants that collapsed in the summer of 2008...

Too Many Apologies -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on February 24, 2010
Tiger Woods doesn?t owe me an apology. Nothing that he has ever done has cost me a dime nor an hour of sleep. This is not a plea to be ?non-judgmental.? I am very judgmental about all sorts of things, including Tiger Woods?s bad behavior. But that is very different from saying that he somehow owes me an apology...

Better Here than There -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on February 24, 2010
?I have been over into the future, and it works.?Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, offered that review of the Soviet Union on his return from a fact-finding mission there. For decades, conservatives invoked that line as proof that a generation of progressives were Soviet fellow-travelers...

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A Mistake, Not a Model -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on February 24, 2010
After last Friday night?s bad-news dump about the end of DOJ?s witch hunt against Bush-administration lawyers, you might have thought it impossible for our attorney general to outdo himself. But the redoubtable Eric Holder was right back at it on Monday...

Afghanistan at the Crossroads -- By: Alex Alexiev

Posted on February 23, 2010
The capture of the Taliban?s second in command in Karachi has been treated in the media as a major U.S. coup and a watershed event in U.S.-Pakistani cooperation in the war against the Taliban. It is, regrettably, nothing of the kind. Even if Mullah Baradar is indeed the Taliban?s de facto military commander, the operational significance of whatever non-Mirandized information can be extracted from him is likely to be limited...

Aloha Segregation -- By: The Editors

Posted on February 23, 2010
A bill expected to pass the House today with overwhelming Democratic support would accomplish something peculiar for a liberal republic in the 21st century: It would partly disenfranchise a portion of one state?s residents, create a parallel government for those meeting a legislated criterion of ethnic purity, and would portend the transfer of public assets, land, and political power from those who fail to satisfy the standard of ethnic purity to those who do...

Trouble in Paradise -- By: Duncan Currie

Posted on February 23, 2010
Amid much wrangling over the economy, a bipartisan debt panel, and President Obama?s health-care summit, Congress has chosen this moment to tackle#...#Native Hawaiian sovereignty? Sometime soon, perhaps as early as today, the House of Representatives will vote on the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act (NHGRA), which is a modified version of legislation that has been kicking around since 2000 and failed to win a cloture vote in 2006...

Showdown at Blair House -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on February 23, 2010
Now that the White House has put a health-care plan on the table, Barack Obama says he wants the Republicans to do the same in Thursday?s meeting with congressional leaders. Instead, Republicans should show the president where we should be going and what?s wrong with what the White House has proposed...

2010 Reconciliation or 2005 Redux? -- By: Pete Hegseth

Posted on February 23, 2010
Four years ago yesterday, I awoke to a deafening explosion; al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents had destroyed the golden dome of the Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra, leaving only smoldering ruins visible from our command post. The bombing sent Iraq spiraling into near-genocidal chaos, with American troops caught undermanned and ill-prepared...

Economic Whodunit -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on February 23, 2010
During bad times, the blame game is the biggest game in Washington. Wall Street ?greed? or ?predatory? lenders seem to be favorite targets to blame for our current economic woes.When government policy is mentioned at all in handing out blame, it is usually blamed for not imposing enough regulation on the private sector...

Nancy Pelosi's Last Charge -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on February 23, 2010
Editor?s note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact kfsreprint@hearstsc.com or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246.In keeping with his new spirit of compromise, Pres...

A man named Lincoln, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on February 23, 2010
Longtime readers have heard me talk about, and cite, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart many times. He is a Republican from Miami, and he has been an invaluable member of Congress. Now he is retiring, for which Congress will be the poorer.I wrote about Diaz-Balart and his family back in 2003 -- for my National Review piece ?Meet the Diaz-Balarts,? go here...

Government -- Not God or Parents -- By: Dennis Prager

Posted on February 23, 2010
One of the major differences between the Right and the Left concerns the question of authority: To whom do we owe obedience and who is the ultimate moral authority?For the Right, the primary moral authority is God (or, for secular conservatives, Judaeo-Christian values), followed by parents...

Not Much of a Reputation to Lose -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on February 23, 2010
Amnesty International has been a handmaiden of the Left for as long as I can remember. Founded in 1961 to support prisoners of conscience, it has managed since then to ignore the most brutal regimes and to aim its fire at the West and particularly at the United States...

A Google in the China Closet -- By: Richard Samuelson

Posted on February 22, 2010
The clash between China and Google is the first shot in what could be a long war. Why should this be the case when, as Fareed Zakaria notes, the U.S. and China ?have powerful reasons to cooperate with one another?? Those reasons, however powerful, might not be enough...

Summit of Spin -- By: The Editors

Posted on February 22, 2010
President Obama would no doubt be delighted if Republicans were to accept the basic outlines of the Democratic health-care proposal: new regulations on insurers, a mandate that everyone buy insurance, and subsidies to help them do so. All the evidence of the last year suggests that this type of bipartisanship -- a Republican surrender -- is the only kind in which he is interested...

A Roadmap to Better Health Care -- By: James C. Capretta

Posted on February 22, 2010
It?s not often that a single member of Congress generates as much media interest and debate as Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan has with ?A Roadmap for America?s Future.? But, given the document?s focus and the political moment, the attention is entirely understandable...

Whining Russians -- By: George Weigel

Posted on February 22, 2010
The Olympics, having become Big Business, rarely open a window into the political cultures of the countries whose teams are competing. Few athletes (not to mention their sponsors, both the corporate sponsors and the national Olympic committees) are willing to do anything that upsets the international bonhomie -- that ?we are the world? spirit -- that presumably drives up the TV ratings and gets the customers to buy the ?gear? (or the Chicken McNuggets, or whatever)...

The Island of Dr. Pachauri -- By: Daniel Foster

Posted on February 22, 2010
On February 18, Yvo de Boer announced that come July, he will vacate his post as the United Nations?s top man on climate change in favor of a consultancy at the accounting firm KPMG. He will leave behind a U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change that is beleaguered and besieged -- the convention is reeling from its failure to reach a consensus on emissions policy in Copenhagen last December and witnessing the crackup of the scientific ?consensus? on global warming...

'The Double-Talk Express' -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on February 22, 2010
Washington, D.C. -- Unlike most politicians at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, former GOP congressman J. D. Hayworth roams the bowels of the Marriott Wardman hotel alone -- no phalanx of aides, no fuss. Yet his sun-flecked face is ubiquitous...

Issa vs. ACORN -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on February 22, 2010
Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, have issued a scalding report on ACORN and the SEIU. The main thesis -- that ACORN and SEIU are, operationally, in effect the same organization, an organization that illegally channels restricted money into political activity -- is argued persuasively, but the authors slopped the report up with tangential complaints and grossly exaggerated claims about ACORN?s role in the housing bubble...

What I Saw at CPAC -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on February 22, 2010
I recently joined former attorney general Ed Meese and a number of other conservative leaders in signing the Mount Vernon Statement. When I watched the evening press coverage of the statement?s unveiling, I could tell how the media thought of the event: A bunch of white guys were reaffirming what some dead white guys said...

Keeping You Safe -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on February 20, 2010
News from around the world:In Britain, it is traditional on Shrove Tuesday to hold pancake races, in which contestants run while flipping a pancake in a frying pan. The appeal of the event depends on the potential pitfalls in attempting simultaneous rapid forward propulsion and pancake tossing...

Parties to the Contract -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on February 19, 2010
An organization called the Tea Party Patriots, comprising a number of conservative grassroots groups, has unveiled a list of 20 possible items for inclusion in a new ?Contract from America,? and is urging people to visit its web site and vote for their top ten...

Palin Populism -- By: Michael Knox Beran

Posted on February 19, 2010
BILL O?REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world? SARAH PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values...

Bayhpartisanship -- By: Duncan Currie

Posted on February 19, 2010
Evan Bayh?s announcement that he will not seek reelection to the U.S. Senate has triggered much journalistic handwringing about the baleful consequences of political polarization, as did Arlen Specter?s abandonment of the GOP last spring. But Specter?s defection owed more to naked opportunism than to his ideological grievances with Republicans...

Pick an Excuse, Any Excuse -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on February 19, 2010
Remember that great scene from the Oscar-robbed classic The Blues Brothers? Jake and Elwood (John Belushi and Dan Akroyd) are finally cornered by Jake?s former fianc�e (Carrie Fisher). Jake left her at the altar with 300 guests and the best Romanian caterers in the state waiting...

Historic, holy cuffs, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on February 19, 2010
You remember the historic arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., right? And you remember President Obama?s statement that ?the Cambridge police acted stupidly.? And you remember the great ?beer summit? between Obama, Gates, Sgt. James Crowley, and Vice President Biden...

Blame Obama, Not the System -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on February 19, 2010
Editor?s note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact kfsreprint@hearstsc.com or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246.The ancient Israeli high court made it a practice, Justice Antonin Scalia notes, to invalidate death penalties if they were pronounced unanimously -- on the assumption that something must be wrong...

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