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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

Seeing Red -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on December 16, 2009
What stands out about Tuesday?s ?Red Alert? rally on Capitol Hill, at which participants urged senators to vote no on their version of Obamacare, is how quickly the phenomenon of thousands of grassroots conservatives? making a trek to Washington, D...

Holy Fools -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 16, 2009
Sen. Harry Reid has been a kind of reverse Houdini with a talent for getting into traps. To appease Democratic moderates, he proposed to drop the public option, which made liberals furious. To get back in their good graces, he suggested expanding Medicare by letting people as young as 55 participate in it -- but that led Sen...

When Summits Used to Matter -- By: Conrad Black

Posted on December 16, 2009
As the goings-on in Copenhagen demonstrate, the international summit has been gradually diluted over the last 50 years from a history-making occasion to little more than a pompous Shriners? convention -- no more stylish, and not as benign.When Pope St...

Obama and the Malleability of History -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 16, 2009
President Obama has given a number of major speeches touching on world affairs since he announced his bid for the presidency. All have invoked historical examples -- usually for moral purposes, but often at the expense of both literal and figurative truth...

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America Through the Reality Lens -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on December 16, 2009
Culturally, this has been the decade of the reality show. And what do we have to show for it? Not much more than the contestants themselves.Survey the wreckage. Richard Hatch, the first Survivor champion, was just released from prison (he didn?t pay taxes on his winnings)...

Socialism in Stages -- By: Dan Oliver Jr.

Posted on December 15, 2009
America debated three strategies during the Cold War. The Right wanted ?roll back? -- dreams of Patton driving his tank into Red Square. The Left wanted d�tente -- which is French for ?surrender.? The country loosely followed containment, a program outlined by George Kennan in 1946, which argued that the political contradictions of the Soviet state would eventually cause its own demise...

Planning the Next Bubble -- By: Kling & Schulz

Posted on December 15, 2009
This recession was not planned. The recovery will not be planned, either. One of the great conceits of Keynesian economics is that economic performance can be controlled by government technocrats. The reality is rather different.The housing bubble that finally burst last year was pumped up by at least three forces: new technology, media and industry hype, and, most consequentially, government planning...

An Immigration Time-Out -- By: John Derbyshire

Posted on December 15, 2009
I�find myself increasingly oppressed by the feeling that our big national policies are not merely mistaken, but deeply irrational.Take the president?s recent ?jobs summit.? Like several other people -- Pat Buchanan for example -- I was baffled by the absence of any talk about limiting immigration...

Senate Watch 2010 -- By: John J. Miller

Posted on December 15, 2009
A year after the decimation of 2008, Republicans are newly confident about their election prospects in the Senate. Then again, they have almost nowhere to go but up: The GOP occupies only 40 seats, compared to 58 for the Democrats (plus a pair of ?independent? allies, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont)...

Gitmo by the Lake -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 15, 2009
The Obama administration?s plan to move terrorist detainees from the security of Guantanamo Bay to a little-used state prison in Illinois is being hailed by supportive Democrats as a boon for local economic development. Even if the development were truly a boon -- and it?s more a boondoggle -- that would not come close to justifying it...

Slipshod Social Democracy -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on December 15, 2009
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.Harry Reid can rightly claim to be making history...

Christmas Reading -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on December 15, 2009
One way to reduce the wear and tear of Christmas shopping at the mall is to give books as presents. Books can be bought on the Internet, and they can be matched to the person who receives them without having to know that person?s measurements. Dick Morris?s new book,�Catastrophe, is an education in itself, on politics, on economics, and on foreign policy...

Civil Rights Commission Blunders Again -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on December 15, 2009
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission (yes, it?s still around, and yes, it?s outlived its usefulness) is about to subtract from national wisdom about college admissions by focusing on exactly the wrong problem.The commission has undertaken an inquiry to determine whether colleges may be discriminating against female applicants...

Laureate talk, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on December 15, 2009
I know you?ve heard a lot -- plenty -- about President Obama?s Nobel lecture, but let me just add a word. Conservative opinion on the speech is all over the map, which is interesting. To some conservatives, the speech came as a delightful surprise: The American president acknowledged American interests, and said those interests have to be defended; he also said that war is necessary from time to time, horrible as it is...

Commonsense Health-Care Reforms -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on December 14, 2009
Trumpeting the straw-man argument that ?doing nothing is simply unacceptable,? U.S. lawmakers continue to advocate a frighteningly sweeping government takeover of American health care. Those Democratic senators who dare to hesitate a bit before voting for this takeover are characterized as ?moderates...

Team Baucus -- By: Travis Kavulla

Posted on December 14, 2009
Max Baucus is at times a babbling monstrosity, grossly unable to wrangle his train of thought, ejaculating numbers without context. Anyone who has watched the ongoing spectacle of the Senate health-care debate knows exactly what I am talking about. For the past nine days of Senate debate, I have drunk my fill of the Baucus stream of consciousness as the senior senator of Montana has summoned his years-long intensive study of health-care policy and tried, haltingly, to make use of that wisdom on the Senate floor...

Talking Cures -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on December 14, 2009
Rachel Maddow recently indulged in a strange episode of media bullying, using a half a dozen disreputable and dishonest techniques to smear an obscure writer and psychotherapist, Richard Cohen, whose business it is to help homosexuals who wish to live heterosexual lives to do so...

What Senators Think They Know about Health Care -- By: Ramesh Ponnuru

Posted on December 14, 2009
The Senate floor debate on health-care legislation has included a lot of confident assertions -- many of them false.Sen. Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), for example, said during floor debate that the uninsured impose a ?hidden tax? of more than $1,000 per person...

Her Dysfunctional Argument -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on December 14, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com. � Denying women taxpayer-funded abortions is just like denying men taxpayer-funded aphrodisiacs...

The Just-War Tradition -- By: George Weigel

Posted on December 12, 2009
In November, the president of the United States ordered a surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan and called on other countries to do their duty in bringing that war to a successful conclusion. A few weeks later, the same president traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize...

Once More from the Top, Barack! -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on December 12, 2009
It wasn?t so long ago that Barack Obama?s speeches were being hailed as ?extraordinary? ?rhetorical magic? (Joe Klein in Time) that should be ?required reading in classrooms? (Bob Herbert in the New York Times). Pity the poor grade-schoolers who have to be on the bus at 5 a...

Not Dead Yet -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on December 12, 2009
?Expanding Medicare is an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me,? Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) told the Chicago Tribune. ?It?s the mother of all public options. We?ve taken something people know and expanded it.#...#Never mind the camel?s nose, we?ve got his head and neck under the tent...

The Good and the Bad of It -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on December 11, 2009
First the good news on the economic recovery that everybody loves to hate: Retail sales totally beat Wall Street estimates with a huge 1.3 percent gain in November. Core retail sales have increase 5.6 percent at an annual rate over the past three months...

Perpetual Motion -- By: Thomas S. Hibbs

Posted on December 11, 2009
Pascal once observed that, in the absence of a framing purpose for human life, the best life was one with access to a host of diversions. Moving its denizens from one diversion to another, modern society would seem to have discovered the key to life in an essentially unsatisfying universe: perpetual motion...

'The Mother of All Public Options' -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 11, 2009
In January, liberal activists were expecting 2009 to be the year when they would finally pave the way for a single-payer program. All that was needed was a new, government-run insurance plan for the working-age population. With Medicaid and Medicare, the government already provides insurance for the poor and senior citizens, respectively...

New Formula, Same Fallacy -- By: Christopher C. Horner

Posted on December 11, 2009
The U.K.?s Guardian reported this week that, according to a leaked draft text, a group of nations calling itself the ?Circle of Commitment? -- which includes the U.S., the U.K., Denmark, and possibly others -- is transferring the management of Kyoto II?s billions to the�World Bank...

Obama's Wheel of Fortune -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 11, 2009
No one in the Obama throng has ever believed much in the Roman concept of a ?wheel of fortune? -- rota fortunae -- so often alluded to by the likes of Cicero and Boethius. But that metaphor for changeable fortune reminds us that at times we all enjoy inexplicable good luck -- and therefore must brace for the moment when the wheel turns, and inevitable adversity follows...

Obama's Downsizing -- By: Henry Olsen

Posted on December 11, 2009
President Obama?s speech at the Brookings Institution last Tuesday indicated that he has grasped what everyone else already knew: Americans are more concerned about jobs and unemployment than anything else. What remains puzzling is why an administration that claims to be putting jobs first is still making job-killing bills the top items on its agenda...

An Irrational Act -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on December 11, 2009
Here?s the biggest problem with the Obama administration?s decision to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 jihadists to the civilian court system: It makes sense only if it?s being done for the wrong reasons -- to provide a forum for the Left to use al-Qaeda as a vehicle to put the Bush administration on trial, to give the Left the ?reckoning? that the Obama campaign promised before the 2008 election...

Global Warming as a Political Tool -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on December 11, 2009
On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation. The finding comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA?s jurisdiction...

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