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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

Professor of Contempt -- By: Roger Kimball

Posted on February 03, 2010
With Howard Zinn, contemporary American academia found its court historian. Zinn, who died January 27 at 87, was like a gigantic echo chamber, accurately reproducing -- and actively reinforcing -- every left-wing cliché with which the academy has abetted its sense of election these past several decades...

Obama Appears Blinded by His Own Ideological Biases -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on February 03, 2010
?I am not an ideologue,? President Obama insisted at his truly refreshing confab with the Republican caucus in Baltimore last Friday. When he heard some incredulous murmurs and chuckles from the audience in response to the idea that the most sincerely ideological president in a generation is no ideologue, he added a somewhat plaintive, ?I?m not...

Run, Larry, Run -- By: Michael Knox Beran

Posted on February 02, 2010
Just when the gloom in the Empire State seemed thicker than ever, a ray of light pierced the darkness. The New York Post reported on Friday that economist and CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow was said to be contemplating a challenge to Sen. Chuck Schumer in response to a Draft Kudlow movement...

January Diary -- By: John Derbyshire

Posted on February 02, 2010
Get a government job (1) Among the many citizens who have heeded my call to GET A GOVERNMENT JOB! is#...#Mrs. Derbyshire. Laid off several months ago from her job in retail sales, she is now deep in Civil Service test-prep study guides, currently this one...

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The Attorney and the General -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on February 02, 2010
Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding...

An Obama-Sized Government -- By: The Editors

Posted on February 02, 2010
The president has a peculiar understanding of leadership.By all accounts, federal fiscal policy has now run completely off the rails. Budgetary pressures have been building for years because of unconstrained entitlement spending and Washington?s unchecked appetite for ever-more activist government...

More Washington -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on January 30, 2010
The world turns. In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father. In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants...

About (Saving) Face -- By: Bill Burck & Dana Perino

Posted on January 30, 2010
The end is near for the Obama administration?s plan to try KSM and four other 9/11 conspirators in federal court in downtown Manhattan. The handwriting was on the wall for weeks as the extraordinary costs of the trial -- as much as $1 billion in security expenses alone over four or five years -- became apparent and the Underwear Bomber reintroduced the American public to domestic terrorism...

The Small-Business Dilemma -- By: David Malpass

Posted on January 29, 2010
The economy has strengthened some in recent months -- helped by inventory building and excess monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve -- while payroll employment is finally stabilizing. But the economic forces that are working in favor of GDP growth in the short term are not creating a longer-term reason for businesses -- small firms, in particular -- to invest and hire...

First Amendment 451 -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on January 29, 2010
David Bossie irritates President Obama. Bossie did not get the usual upturned chin or expletive-riddled call from Rahm Emanuel this week after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, his non-profit corporation, in a landmark free-speech decision...

Trusting Fox -- By: Ramesh Ponnuru

Posted on January 29, 2010
Fox News is Americans? most trusted source of news: That?s what Public Policy Polling reported earlier this week. ABC?s director of polling disputed the poll?s findings largely because of its use of ?robopolling.? But now a second poll using a different methodology -- and human callers -- has reached a similar conclusion...

Obama Letting It Ride on a Bad Bet -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on January 29, 2010
In 1964, Barry Goldwater gave an uncompromisingly conservative and liberty-loving speech to the Republican National Convention. A reporter in the audience couldn?t believe his ears. ?My God! He?s going to run as Barry Goldwater!?I had a similar reaction to President Obama?s State of the Union address...

Obama's Reality Problem -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on January 29, 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.Justice Samuel Alito let a pained expression pass his face and muttered, ?Not true...

Soft on Terror -- By: Charles Krauthammer

Posted on January 29, 2010
The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U...

Blame Canada -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on January 29, 2010
The state of our union is mostly free.This may shock citizens who call America the ?Land of the Free.? Alas, as the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, Washington has transformed Francis Scott Key?s timeless truths into mere lyrics.In conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, Heritage?s 16th annual Index of Economic Freedom ranks 179 of Earth?s economies on ten factors including fiscal discipline, free trade, labor freedom, and corruption...

Carteresque -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on January 29, 2010
In 1960, Fidel Castro addressed the U.N. General Assembly for four and a half hours. President Obama didn?t hit that target last night -- it only felt like it. The president had some things to get off this chest -- and if it took 70-plus minutes, well, lucky us, we got to listen...

The Case of Obama vs. New York -- By: The Editors

Posted on January 29, 2010
The Obama administration has begun to back away from its plans to bring the 9/11 plotters to trial in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an erstwhile supporter of the trial, changed his mind on grounds that it would be too risky and too costly. Lawmakers from both parties began voicing opposition...

Amis Speaks -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on January 29, 2010
Kingsley Amis didn?t stick to friendly territory. The English novelist, poet, and essayist lampooned university elites but taught at Swansea, Cambridge, and Princeton. He criticized Dylan Thomas?s poetry but served as trustee of Thomas?s estate. He blasted conservatism in his youth, leftism afterward...

A Responsible Choice -- By: Adam B. Schaeffer

Posted on January 28, 2010
In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed spending another $4 billion annually on K-12 public education. He did not mention that state, local, and federal governments already spend well over twice what they did in 1980, or that there has been no discernible improvement in student achievement during that period...

Statist Quo -- By: The Editors

Posted on January 28, 2010
Everything changes except President Obama. His agenda doesn?t change. He has had no second thoughts about the wisdom of his health-care policies, or any of his policies; resistance is always and only a reason for redoubling. Also unchanging is the condescension with which he articulates his agenda: He faulted himself for not explaining health care well enough to the easily confused American public...

Help where it's wanted, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on January 28, 2010
As you may have read, Israel has played a big role in relieving Haiti, following the hugely destructive earthquake. Unfortunately, the Israelis have a lot of experience in digging people out of rubble, etc. They are a people who have faced bombings over and over...

The Sun Also Flares -- By: Clifford D. May

Posted on January 28, 2010
Had the earthquake that hit Haiti shaken Florida instead, the death toll would not have been so tragically high -- over 150,000 at last count. In Haiti, as in other impoverished countries, buildings are often shoddily constructed, infrastructure is weak, and governance is incompetent...

Trashing the Job Makers -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on January 28, 2010
A year ago Barack Obama inherited a recession brought on by financial panic following the collapse of the housing bubble. The market crash was made worse by Wall Street shenanigans and recklessness at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Job losses followed.In response, Obama pushed through a stimulus bill that went well beyond the borrowing done by George W...

Voting for Higher Taxes -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on January 28, 2010
When Scott Brown was elected to the Senate in Massachusetts, it was because he rode a ?wave of voter frustration? (Associated Press) and ?capitalized on voters? disaffection with the status quo? (New York Times). ?Anger? and ?antipathy toward federal-government activism,? more than support for Brown, drove Massachusetts?s voters to go with the Republican (Washington Post)...

Is It Just Politics? -- By: Max Schulz

Posted on January 28, 2010
Reciting his boilerplate clean-energy language in the State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Obama managed to say one thing that stood out. He called for ?building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.? Well, that?s new...

Obama's Secret Edu-Judges -- By: Frederick M. Hess

Posted on January 28, 2010
Late last week, word leaked out that the Obama administration has selected the 58 reviewers for state applications to its $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) fund -- and has no intention of revealing their names. It appears that the ?disinterested superstars? that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promised last September will remain hidden until after the RTT winners are announced in April...

The Doddering Old Party -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on January 27, 2010
Call him ?Senator.? Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut?s attorney general, beats his Republican opponents -- Rob Simmons, Linda McMahon, and Peter Schiff -- by 20 points in Rasmussen Reports? latest poll. But some conservatives still think Blumenthal, who has never faced a serious challenge in his 27-year career, sports a glass jaw, and they?re looking for the prizefighter who can shatter it...

Roth's Humble Pie -- By: Mark Goldblatt

Posted on January 27, 2010
Philip Roth has written one famous novel about masturbation and more than a few masturbatory novels about fame. With The Humbling, his 30th book, he?s added to the latter column, which is not to suggest that it?s a total waste of the reader?s time. But five full decades after the publication of his first collection of stories, Goodbye Columbus, Roth?s imaginative powers are in obvious decline...

State of the Union: Right-Leaning -- By: Ramesh Ponnuru

Posted on January 27, 2010
President Obama will be delivering his State of the Union address tonight to an increasingly conservative electorate. A new poll of 1,000 likely voters, done by John McLaughlin and Associates for the National Review Institute, finds voters skeptical of big government, hostile to the health-care legislation being considered on Capitol Hill, and interested in conservative alternatives...

Obama versus Obama -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on January 27, 2010
There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama. The first one we met was Barack the radical progressive, in his primary campaign against Hillary...

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