Legal Commentary

People who are too smart to find the word "arms" in the Second Amendment

Posted on March 22, 2008
I'll warn you up front: This is as harsh an assessment as I've ever written on this blog. I know this guy has lots of credentials that are supposed to mean he's smart and well-educated. But I've read this blog post about the pending Heller case before the Supreme Court about five times now...

Congrats to Mark Yudof

Posted on March 20, 2008
In the fall of 1977 and spring of 1978, Mark Yudof was my first-year section's Contracts professor at Texas Law School. I especially remember him for his very dry wit, and he was quite engaging ? a raconteur of a professor, teaching with relish that most essential and transformative of first-year law school subjects.

Beldar's one-paragraph, one-picture reaction to Obama's speech on Rev. Wright and racism

Posted on March 19, 2008
In his speech yesterday on racial matters in Philadelphia, the supposedly "post-racial" candidate of the 21st Century revealed himself to be as fully immersed in ? and therefore constrained by and a prisoner of ? identity-based politics as any traditional Democratic candidate who's ever lived, breathed, and pandered...

Review: Beldar's watching, and highly recommends, "John Adams"

Posted on March 18, 2008
As I age, I become more sentimental, and about more things. One topic of my sentimentality is American history generally, and the American Revolution and the American Civil War especially. Thus, I identified completely last summer when reading this post by Ann Althouse, who described listening to an audio-book version of Paul Johnson's George Washington: The Founding Father while she...

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Happy St. Pat's

Posted on March 17, 2008
Short and sweet: I extend to each of you my favorite Irish toast: "May misfortune follow you each and every day, for all the rest of the days of your life ? and may it never, ever catch up!"

Durbin: "To hold Sen. Obama accountable for speeches and sermons that were given before he joined the church is fundamentally unfair"

Posted on March 17, 2008
At least the lightbulb of the junior senator from Illinois shines much more brightly than that of the senior senator from Illinois, who seems to have missed the fact that the junior senator joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, and that even when he was away in law school (1988-1991), Sen...

DKos announces preemptive civil war against Hillary and Clintonistas; no time to wait for U.N. mandate

Posted on March 17, 2008
The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Hillary Clinton's campaign is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this campaign's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble...

Most frighteningly plausible fantasy I've read this month

Posted on March 17, 2008
On the Balkinization blog, Michael Stokes Paulsen posts the Opinion of the Court (written by Mr. Justice Kennedy, and joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Clinton) in Spitzer v. United States. (H/t InstaPundit.) The largest flight of fantasy is that the underlying conviction is for solicitation of prostitution, which, of course, is not ordinarily a federal crime...

Why I'm unpersuaded by Obama's disavowal of Rev. Wright's political polemics from the pulpit

Posted on March 15, 2008
BY MR. WISENBERG: Q Mr. President, I want to, before I go into a new subject area, briefly go over something you were talking about with Mr. Bittman. The statement of your attorney, Mr. Bennett, at the Paula Jones deposition, "Counsel is fully aware" ? it's page 54, line 5 ? "Counsel is fully aware that Ms...

Lies about "the George W. Bush Recession? of 2008" are well underway

Posted on March 14, 2008
The headline reads: "Most Economists Say Recession Has Arrived as Outlook Darkens." The breathless, unequivocal text at the beginning of the article is unrelentingly foreboding in tone: The U.S. has finally slid into recession, according to the majority of economists in the latest Wall Street Journal economic-forecasting survey, a view that was reinforced by new data showing a sharp drop...

With "friends" like this on his defense team, no wonder Spitzer continues to be delusional

Posted on March 14, 2008
Today's New York Times reports that "[f]ederal prosecutors are investigating whether Gov. Eliot Spitzer used campaign funds in connection with his meetings with prostitutes, including payments for hotels or ground transportation." The story is moderately interesting, if not surprising, insofar as it reports the basis for the feds' interest...

Spitzer's very guilty, but exactly of how much is still unclear

Posted on March 12, 2008
If you read this morning's Wall Street Journal, you'd come away with the impression that Eliot Spitzer spent a mere $19k on high-dollar hookers to get himself into his current troubles. Turn instead to the New York Post, and you'll see allegations that he blew at least $80k on a habit that went back 10 years...

Spitzer "casts himself not just as an enforcer of the law per se, but also as an enforcer of a broader social compact"

Posted on March 10, 2008
The quote in the title of this post comes from a 2005 article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on "Spitzerism" as a law enforcement philosophy. It was written by The New Republic's Noam Scheiber. In response, I posted here to agree with Scheiber that Eliot Spitzer, a rising-star Democrat who was at that time New York State's showboat...

A peculiar and ostensibly conservative assessment of the Bush-43 Administration as a "failed presidency"

Posted on March 09, 2008
Having just praised a short article in the Weekly Standard's online version by Ed Whelan, I find myself reluctantly obliged to pan a very long one also published there by Jeffrey Bell, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (of which Mr...

Blog milestones

Posted on March 09, 2008
During the past week, BeldarBlog passed the 1000-post mark, with something over 11,500 comments and 1062 trackbacks. TypePad's stats, which vary some from Sitemeter's, show slightly over 2 million "lifetime page views" at an average rate of 1245 per day since I started blogging in August 2003 (including some long periods of inactivity)...

Obama's potential judicial appointments

Posted on March 08, 2008
The rest of the article is definitely worth reading too, but in two concise paragraphs, Ed Whelan gives us the essential things we need to know about what kind of federal judges a President Obama would appoint (emphasis Ed's): Although Obama has served in the Senate for barely three years, he has already established a record on judicial nominations and...

The Democratic Party leadership's reflexive anti-Americanism

Posted on March 08, 2008
I'm a conservative. In particular, I'm a hawk on the Global War on Terror, but I'm also a hawk on foreign policy and national security matters more generally. That's obvious to anyone who's even skimmed the surface of this blog, and I make no bones about it...

Backyard astronomy

Posted on March 04, 2008
If you were looking through a simple backyard telescope at the Earth and its Moon, this is what you'd see. If your backyard were on Mars.

Psst! Senator Obama! Got a light?

Posted on March 01, 2008
From Ellen DeGeneres' interview with Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on Thursday, February 28, 2008 (my transcription, from a video clip that is available, at least for now, on YouTube): DeGENERES: Here's the big question: Have you been able to not smoke? When there's so much pressure and so much stress, to try to do such a ? it's such a...

New Hillary TV ad in Texas promises that in the New Clinton White House, she won't be sleeping with Bill

Posted on February 29, 2008
Sort of, anyway. Maybe it just implies that she won't be sleeping at all. Meanwhile, the famously nocturnal Bill must be off-camera, in the next room playing Hearts or maybe having phone sex.

Highly specific Texas primary exit-poll datum (one voter)

Posted on February 27, 2008
I took advantage of one of Harris County's many, convenient early voting locations tonight about 6:15 p.m. There was about a 15-minute line, but there were probably two dozen electronic voting machines up and running, with a full complement of four volunteers doing the check-ins, so the line moved quickly...

If foreign citizens would cheer, swoon, and sing "Kumbaya" along with Pres. Obama, does that make him a fit commander-in-chief and head of state?

Posted on February 24, 2008
WaPo's David Ignatius opines today that Barack Obama is just so damned cool that the rest of the world outside America ? allies and enemies alike ? will join in the swoon for him that has caught up so many of Obama's American supporters. Thus, Ignatius argues, America will actually be better off having a president whose military, foreign policy,...

Best advice (from a GOP perspective) so far in 2008 for the eventual Democratic nominee

Posted on February 19, 2008
Columnist E.J. Dionne, in today's WaPo, gives us an op-ed entitled "A 'Challenge' Worth Challenging," in which he writes: [O]ne of John McCain's favorite lines ? his declaration that "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists," or, as he sometimes says, "extremism" ? could define the 2008 election...

The short list; or, "How to solve the problem that neither Barack nor Hillary can be persuaded to take the #2 slot"

Posted on February 19, 2008
Scott Ott is always worth reading, but at his best he's simply brilliant.

McCain privately apologized to Cornyn shortly after May 2007 profane shouting

Posted on February 17, 2008
Back in May 2007, I made one of the bigger fusses of anyone in the right-of-center blogosphere over Sen. John McCain's rude behavior toward one of my home-state senators, John Cornyn. I'd previously written from time to time about my disapproval of McCain's positions on a variety of substantive issues, especially his leadership of the GOP renegades from the so-called...

Is Hillary offering Barack the Veep slot via a press leak?

Posted on February 10, 2008
It's always amazed and amused me how many times, in negotiations over settling a lawsuit, my opponents will say something like this: "We'd consider paying something in the $200,000-$250,000 range" or "We'd probably take something in the $250,000-$300,000 range...

Don't kid yourself into thinking that the enthusiasm of Obama supporters can be dismissed as being a "personality cult"

Posted on February 07, 2008
Music. Rhythm and repetition. Striking visual images, especially of people and their faces. I can't imagine that the ancient Greek and Roman politicians two millennia ago failed to make good use of these in connection with their elections (or, failing that, their rabble-rousing) because they can inspire extremely powerful reactions...

Are we at war? And what is the political consequence of that for conservatives in this election?

Posted on February 06, 2008
Are we a nation at war? I ask you to ask yourself that question afresh. Most of my regular and even occasional readers, including some who are life-long Democrats, will be tempted to give a reflexive, automatic, and affirmative answer to that question...

Why is this young man's hair mussed?

Posted on February 02, 2008
This is my younger son, Adam, age 15, in a photo snapped earlier today. Adam's a freshman at Bellaire High School here in Houston. On Saturdays, it's not uncommon for his hair to be mussed. But the reason his hair is mussed in this particular way on this particular day is pretty cool, in my admittedly biased opinion.

Inquiring minds want to know

Posted on January 31, 2008
Unasked question at tonight's Democratic debate: Senators, please explain to America and the world what the exact difference would be between the Marine forces you each have already planned for the task of securing the rooftop of the new American embassy building in Baghdad as the last American helicopter loads up to leave from there en route back to the...

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