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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

Where the Unemployment Isn't -- By: Jay P. Greene

Posted on January 06, 2010
This year, when you hear President Obama and congressional Democrats talk about increasing government spending to create jobs, you should understand that it isn?t really about jobs. It?s about paying off powerful interest groups that helped these Democrats gain power -- a fact that?s clear from the billions they?ve directed to education...

Enemy Combatants or Criminal Defendants? -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on January 06, 2010
Writing in the New York Times, Michael Kinsley defends treating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the al-Qaeda operative who recently tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit) as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant. He argues that, since any line to be drawn between waging war and engaging the criminal-justice system is going to be arbitrary, the U...

A No-Fly List? Count Me In -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on January 06, 2010
Almost exactly ten years ago, I boarded a Northwest Airlines plane in Minneapolis. As I started toward my veal-pen seat in steerage, I saw the faces of the preboarded aristocrats in business class. But before I could glare at them with proletarian rage and envy, I heard a loud bang and felt a sharp pain on the top of my head...

Dangerous Minds -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on January 06, 2010
Ideas are such intangible things that it is hard to believe that they have had a huge impact on the lives of people who are not intellectuals and who, in many cases, have paid little attention to those ideas. Yet both secular and religious ideas have moved the emotions of many -- and have moved leaders who moved armies...

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Man bites dog in music, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on January 06, 2010
Friends, I can?t tell you how unusual this is: A classical musician -- a very famous one -- has spoken out in behalf of a very unpopular cause: Israel. For a story, go here. I am speaking of Evgeny Kissin, the 38-year-old pianist. He was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and in 2002 became a British citizen...

Hume's Gentle Witness -- By: Peter Wehner

Posted on January 06, 2010
Brit Hume?s comments on Fox News Sunday -- ?I don?t think that [Buddhism] offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith,? and, ?My message to Tiger [Woods] would be: Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world? -- have unleashed a torrent of criticism from the Left, including the various circus acts over at MSNBC and the Washington Post?s Tom Shales...

Exit Dodd -- By: The Editors

Posted on January 06, 2010
Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who has announced that he is not seeking re-election, will leave behind a lot of friends when he leaves office: Most notably, he was a ?Friend of Angelo? -- that?s Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of kamikaze mortgage-lender Countrywide -- having secured from him a sweetheart mortgage deal that saved him $75,000 or so, and a friend of Harry Reid, who helped to keep the Senate?s ethics watchdogs, such as they are, off Dodd?s ankle over that dodgy deal...

The Divine Right of Intellectuals -- By: David Hogberg

Posted on January 05, 2010
In his 1988 book Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Paul Johnson wrote that one of the lessons of the 20th century was ?beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice...

Buckeyes on the Prize -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on January 05, 2010
If you sent a nice arrangement of flowers and a sympathy note to the Ohio Republican party after the elections of 2006 and 2008, you were gracious and not exaggerating by much.If the party wasn?t dead, it had suffered one of the steepest drops in recent memory...

The Preemptive Scapegoat -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on January 05, 2010
A few of the old progressives, believing that America?s real enemy was Joe McCarthy and not Joe Stalin, would protest that they were not pro-Communist, but anti-anti-Communist, if anti-Communist meant Richard Nixon and Whittaker Chambers and such. There was much dishonesty wrapped within that argument, but there was something to it...

Love in an Economic Downturn -- By: Interview

Posted on January 05, 2010
Are economic downturns a blessing in disguise for marriages? This one is, reports W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the�National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, associate professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University...

Intellectuals and Society -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on January 05, 2010
There has probably never been an era in history when intellectuals have played a larger role in society. When intellectuals who generate ideas are surrounded by a wide range of others who disseminate those ideas -- whether as journalists, teachers, staffers to legislators or clerks to judges -- the influence of intellectuals on the way a society evolves can be huge...

Democratic Payoffs, Er, Stimulus -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on January 05, 2010
When a non-American scholar I admire let slip a casual reference to ?American corruption? a few years ago, my chauvinistic pride was wounded. This isn?t Mexico, after all, or even Italy, where bribes are the normal social lubricant. Still, an unsentimental examination of government dollars at work seems to confirm my friend?s observation...

Death of a Theory -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on January 05, 2010
Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab couldn?t ignite the bomb in his underwear on Flight 253 on Christmas Day. All he managed to blow up was a worldview. His failed attempt put paid to the notion that terrorism is the byproduct of a few, specific U.S. policies and of our image abroad...

An Awful First Year -- By: Conrad Black

Posted on January 04, 2010
This has been an astonishing presidential year. President Obama bounded into office with a quiver full of soft-pointed arrows for every policy area. A whole year has been wasted buying, senator by senator and influential congressmen one at a time, a health-care bill that is almost certain to be hideously expensive and to lower the level of health care for millions of people...

Staging a Show Trial on Same-Sex Marriage -- By: Edward Whelan

Posted on January 04, 2010
Midday on December 31, a curious document suddenly appeared on the official website of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Entitled ?Notice Concerning Proposed Revision of Civil Local Rule 77-3,? the document states that the court ?has approved for public comment? a revision of this rule...

The Woolsey File -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on January 04, 2010
From his farm about ten miles south of Annapolis, R. James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence, keeps a close eye on Washington, D.C. Fifteen years ago this month he told President Clinton that he?d be leaving Langley, but Woolsey, now 68, has hardly left the arena...

The Constitutional Crisis and the Security Crisis -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on January 04, 2010
?We do not want a situation where the executive is defying the courts,? a senior Obama administration official told the Washington Post. The spokesman was rationalizing the administration?s release of jihadist detainees, who are returning to the jihad and targeting Americans...

Will the American People Finally Revolt? -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on January 04, 2010
Where is Nelson Mandela when we need him?In an especially memorable moment in Clint Eastwood?s fine new film Invictus, South Africa?s first black president (exquisitely portrayed by Morgan Freeman) inspects his first official paycheck.?This is terrible,? Mandela says...

'Uncharacteristic of a great country," &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on January 04, 2010
In China, the government is abusing and imprisoning another very brave dissident. This one?s name is Liu Xiaobo. I was interested in the response of our government, the American government. Before Liu?s sentencing, State Department spokesman P.�J. Crowley said, ?As far as we can tell, this man?s crime was simply signing a piece of paper that aspires to a more open and participatory form of government...

The Joke's on Us -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on January 02, 2010
On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh? But the Pantybomber wasn?t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet...

Capitalism Fingered as Fiend of the Past Decade -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on January 01, 2010
On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I?m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff...

Whose Fault Is It? -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on January 01, 2010
It may not be President Obama?s fault that our multi-billion dollar homeland-security apparatus is more Keystone Kops than 24, anymore than it was President Bush?s fault that city, state, and federal agencies failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina...

War? What War? -- By: Charles Krauthammer

Posted on January 01, 2010
Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: ?The system worked.? The attacker?s concerned father had warned U...

Our 2009 Chickens and Their 2010 Roost -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 31, 2009
In the coming year, plenty of chickens will be coming home to roost.�� Take foreign relations. In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions. As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes and those with whom we had uneasy relationships...

Decade of Disillusion -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on December 30, 2009
If the 1990s were the decade when history ended, in Francis Fukuyama?s famous formulation, the 2000s were the decade it came back and human nature exacted its revenge for our fatuousness.The 1990s were prefaced by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an exhilarating burst of liberty for tens of millions...

Our Year of Obama -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 30, 2009
America is at a day of reckoning that it never quite expected to face. Not long ago, tired of eight years of Republican rule, terrified by the September 2008 financial panic, unimpressed by the campaign of John McCain, and mesmerized by the hope-and-change elixirs and landmark candidacy of Barack Obama, the American people voted for change...

Predictions 2010 -- By: An NRO Symposium

Posted on December 30, 2009
What might happen in the upcoming year? We asked a few of National Review Online?s sages to prophesy the events of 2010.� JOHN DERBYSHIRELooking over last year?s predictions, I seem to have batted not quite .500, which actually isn?t bad as these things go, but chastening none the less...

December Diary -- By: John Derbyshire

Posted on December 30, 2009
Ten years on the web�� End of a decade�? one for which there is still no settled name. This will probably take care of itself. You don?t really need a name for a decade until it?s past and gone. We didn?t talk about ?the Sixties? in the Sixties, though we haven?t stopped talking about them since...

Lessons Learned -- By: An NRO Symposium

Posted on December 30, 2009
What can we learn from 2009? National Review Online asked a few friends to name the most important lesson of this past year. RICK BROOKHISER ?Say not, the struggle naught availeth.? This is the lesson of 2009. In 2008, liberalism was glorified in the person of Barack Obama...

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