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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

Gorgeous Details, Unsatisfying Story -- By: Frederica Mathewes-Green

Posted on December 02, 2009
Sometimes it?s the little things that count. Director Wes Anderson has always been good with the little things, filling movies like Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007) with extraordinary, eye-catching detail...

The Trick -- By: Michael G. Franc

Posted on September 30, 2009
President Obama has painted himself into a very tight corner with his promises on health-care reform.First, he has vowed repeatedly and unambiguously that no one with an annual family income of $250,000 or less will face a tax increase. He renewed the pledge in his September 9 speech before the joint session of Congress...

The Metamorphosis -- By: David Kahane

Posted on September 30, 2009
I have a nightmare. I have a nightmare that sometime before the 2010 elections, the scales will fall from your eyes and you will see us as we really are. I have a nightmare that you will read C. S. Lewis?s The Screwtape Letters and realize that it is not fiction...

Goldstone, Are You God? -- By: Brett Joshpe

Posted on September 30, 2009
?Are you God?? is an appropriate question to ask someone who takes on the role of judge, jury, and executioner. That is exactly what South African jurist Richard Goldstone -- who was chief prosecutor for the U.N.?s International Criminal Tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda -- did in leading an ?independent fact-finding mission? to investigate the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hamas last December and January...

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A Pragmatic Look at Obama's Pragmatism -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on September 30, 2009
?When John McCain said we could just ?muddle through? in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights,? Barack Obama thundered as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver last year...

A sickening light in the New York sky, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on September 30, 2009
Several readers have asked me to comment on what the Empire State Building is doing: The people in charge are lighting up the building red and yellow, in honor of Communist China. The PRC is marking its 60th anniversary. This regime, of course, is responsible for the physical destruction of tens of millions of people...

Hollywood Burning -- By: Jack Dunphy

Posted on September 30, 2009
So it has come to this: Drugging and raping a 13-year-old is now a ?so-called crime,? for which artistic talent, the approbation of peers, and the passage of time can coalesce to earn the rapist immunity from official sanction, if indeed any was called for in the first place...

What's Hiding in the Health-Care Bill? -- By: Mark Hemingway

Posted on September 29, 2009
Congressional Democrats are proposing a sweeping overhaul of the American health-care system, which represents about 17 percent of the U.S. economy. You might think they would feel a responsibility to explain the precise implications of this legislation to the American people before it comes to a vote...

House Remodeling -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on September 29, 2009
So how good could 2010 be for Republicans running for the House of Representatives?A phenomenal year is now in the cards, which is obviously not the same as saying that it will be a phenomenal year. In any off-year, discussion of the following year?s House races usually frames the battle for control of the chamber as a reflection of national mood...

The Iran Charade -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on September 29, 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.The revelation of an Iranian uranium-enrichment facility buried in a mountain at an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base near the religious city of Qom might seem ominous...

The Brainy Bunch -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on September 29, 2009
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt?s brilliant ?brains trust? whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, rather than ending it...

Who Needs Religion? -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on September 29, 2009
Well, that?s one way to look at it. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Orna Coussin praised Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement that began Sunday night and ends Monday night) as the ?ultimate green holiday.? Coussin is a secular Israeli and was expressing her appreciation for the fact that everyone is obliged to travel by foot on Yom Kippur...

Oscars of Entrepreneurship -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on September 29, 2009
Montego Bay, Jamaica -- As Americans debate bailouts, Washington?s assembly-line-to-junkyard automotive largesse, and its proposed annexation of our health clinics and surgical theaters, conversations on this island recently were as refreshing as the trade winds...

The Politics of (In)Justice -- By: Hans A. von Spakovsky

Posted on September 28, 2009
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may not look like a political weapon. But in the hands of certain government lawyers, that?s exactly what it has become.It requires certain (mostly Southern) states to get ?pre-clearance? of their voting-rules changes from the Justice Department...

You Mislead! -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on September 28, 2009
It is a good thing that other congressmen did not follow Rep. Joe Wilson?s lead. If they yelled out every time President Obama said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse. By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress...

Death Be Not Proud -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on September 28, 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. Earlier this summer, former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin was criticized for deploying hyperbole in her opposition to health-care-reform legislation...

Taming 'Animal Spirits' -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on September 28, 2009
If you wish to sample conventional economic wisdom in its refined form, you could do worse than to consult the McKenzie Quarterly, a recent issue of which contains a curious meditation on the subject of ?Animal Spirits? by Yale?s Robert Shiller and Berkeley?s George Akerlof, professors of economics who together have written a book by that title...

Everything begins with O, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on September 28, 2009
The Year Zero nonsense continues: Nothing counted, certainly nothing was praiseworthy, before the Obamas came along. Michelle had never been proud of her country. And, at the U.N., the president said this: ?For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months...

Dog-Feces Ice Cream -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on September 26, 2009
Half a decade or so back, I wrote: ?It?s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ?em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That?s the problem with the U.N.? Absolutely right, if I do say so myself...

The G-20: Less Is More -- By: James M. Roberts

Posted on September 25, 2009
Those who enjoy the endless rounds of televised high-level summitry that increasingly dominate the world of international diplomacy are in luck this week. First there was the confab of 192 heads of state or government at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York...

Rules for Counter-Radicals -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on September 25, 2009
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. That was Democrat Joe Trippi?s 2004 manifesto. Taking On the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era was the title of another guide, by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, issued last fall...

Afterthoughts from the U.N. Address -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on September 25, 2009
It was the most Obamaesque address to date.?For those who question the character and cause of my nation,? the president pronounced Wednesday, ?I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.?America is 233 years old. Some think that there are ample accomplishments speaking to our character and cause that predate Obama?s ascension to the presidency...

Obama Triangulates His Country -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on September 25, 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.In his address to the United Nations, Pres...

Obama's Great Chinese Bank Snobbery -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on September 25, 2009
In one of today?s richest ironies, America?s fiscal health -- such as it is -- hinges on the generosity of the Chinese Communist party. Annoying Beijing?s mandarins could prompt them to skip our Treasury auctions. If China stops lending the Treasury money to underwrite Uncle Sam?s spendaholism, the Federal Reserve will need to print even more dollars to nudge the day of reckoning back over the horizon...

A Great Good Man -- By: Charles Krauthammer

Posted on September 25, 2009
After the plain pine box is lowered into the grave, the mourners are asked to come forward -- immediate family first -- and shovel dirt onto the casket. Only when it is fully covered, only when all that can be seen is dust, is the ceremony complete.Such is the Jewish way of burial...

Obama's Self-Worship -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on September 25, 2009
President Obama?s speech to the U.N. has been called na�ve and even ?post-American.? It was something else as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.Beware of politicians who claim to be ?humbled by the responsibility the American people have placed upon me...

Iran's Not-So-Secret Secret -- By: The Editors

Posted on September 25, 2009
The main thing to remember about Friday?s revelation that Iran has a secret uranium-enrichment facility is that it is not a revelation.Sure, the facts are new. They are these: In addition to a uranium-enrichment site at Natanz that international inspectors have monitored for years, Iran has been constructing a facility inside a mountain near the city of Qom...

Fame Fizzles -- By: Thomas S. Hibbs

Posted on September 25, 2009
In an early scene in Fame, director Kevin Tancharoen?s remake of the Oscar-winning film from 1980, students who have made the cut for entrance into the highly selective New York City High School of Performing Arts assemble for an orientation session. The school?s principal admonishes them to forget fame: What they need is to learn discipline and dedication to a craft...

Punting National Security to the Judiciary -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on September 25, 2009
In a stunning display of political cowardice, the Obama administration has decided not to seek specific congressional authorization for a prolonged detention statute for Guantanamo Bay detainees deemed too dangerous to set free. It?s the latest troubling flip flop by the president, an utter abdication of the lofty promises he made during his much-heralded National Archives Speech just this May...

Kevin Warsh Is on the Money -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on September 25, 2009
Attendees of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh and members of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington should carefully read a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Fed governor Kevin Warsh. In a piece titled ?The Fed?s Job Is Only Half Over,? the former Wall Street investment banker sends a shot across the global economic bow...

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