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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

Farewell: A ?True Story? That Isn?t

Posted on September 01, 2010
How the spy codenamed ?Farewell? helped push the Soviet Union to its own farewell. ‘True stories' are the highest form of fiction, and so it is with Farewell, a Cold War spy film that, for all its charms and graces, changes too much history in order to fit its story...

China: The View from Hawaii

Posted on September 01, 2010
While Washington sounds an uncertain trumpet, Pacific Command has no illusions about the rise of China. Honolulu -- Visiting America's Pacific-based military forces, one gets the clear impression that they feel their countrymen are finally catching up with their views on the growing Chinese threat to Asian stability...

Glenn Beck?s Ecumenical Moment

Posted on September 01, 2010
The ?Restoring Honor? rally showcased a nation dedicated to its constitutional heritage. Predictably, the 'Restoring Honor' rally on the National Mall last Saturday has evoked a lot of consternation...

Arizona vs. the U.N. Human Rights Police

Posted on September 01, 2010
An indignant President Obama complained last week, 'I can't spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead.' Fine. How about plastering a copy of his presidential oath of office there instead? The kowtowing commander-in-chief is in dire need of a daily reminder that his job is to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States' -- not international law or global diktats...

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The Business of America Is Business

Posted on September 01, 2010
Profits up, rates down, tax cuts, and a stock rally. How about some optimism. Corporate profits are at all-time highs and bond rates in the Treasury market are virtually at record lows. That's a good combination for stocks, and it helped trigger a 255 point rally in Wednesday's trading...

Slippery Oil, Slipshod Coverage

Posted on August 31, 2010
In their reporting on the Gulf spill, the media have been wallowing in exaggeration. So who's responsible for the Great Oil Spill Panic of 2010? Surprise, surprise: Scientists are starting to complain about the media's alarmist interpretation of their preliminary public assessments...

Race to the Top
Limps to the Finish Line

Posted on August 31, 2010
By serious reformers? rankings, Colorado and Louisiana lead the states in education reform. So how did they lose out? That was another $4.35 billion poorly spent. Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the winners of the second and final round of the administration's heavily promoted and widely cheered Race to the Top school-reform program...

Send Out Biden

Posted on August 31, 2010
It takes a special amount of shamelessness to keep hawking the virtues of stimulus spending. Joe Biden was an inspired choice as spokesman for the 'summer of recovery.' If the Obama administration wanted someone with little credibility to lose, who will say anything without a hint of shame or compunction, whose mouth habitually outruns the facts and common sense, it found its man...

The Passing of E-6

Posted on August 31, 2010
?The Last of the Luddites? laments the demise of film photography. Most people have no idea what 'E-6' is. To avid baseball fans, E-6 is the way to record an error by a shortstop on your scorecard...

Here?s a Concept: Let?s Not Talk About Race

Posted on August 31, 2010
Liberals keep unfairly tarring conservatives with the label ?racist.? On a regular basis, we are enjoined, usually by a leading Democrat, to overcome our reticence -- or, in Attorney General Eric Holder's formulation, 'cowardice' -- and engage in a hearty national conversation about race...

The New Moral Equivalence

Posted on August 31, 2010
Prominent media hosts equate Christian and Muslim violence. There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War...

Ground Zero Mosque: It?s Not the Location, It?s the Sharia

Posted on August 30, 2010
What?s most worrisome is Imam Rauf?s dedication to Islam?s repressive laws. Location, location, location. So far, the Ground Zero mosque controversy has focused excessively on its proximity to the scene of the September 11 massacre...

Personal Accounts Are No Cure-All

Posted on August 30, 2010
How conservatives should think about Social Security reform. I don't usually spend much time disagreeing with people I mostly agree with, but a column in National Review by the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner -- my old boss and an all-around great guy -- presents a chance to talk about why Social Security reform has proved to be such a difficult task for those who believe in free markets and individual choice...

What Women Want -- for Real

Posted on August 30, 2010
The new feminism of life as it is really lived. Could politics end the mommy wars? What mommy wars, you ask? One short answer is: the ones that make for awkward silences at cocktail parties when a woman is asked what she does and she responds that she raises her children...

Encouraging Developments from the Edges of the Anglosphere

Posted on August 30, 2010
Restive Alaskans, Aussies challenge elite assumptions. In this tumultuous political year, the latest sharp surprises come from the far reaches of the Anglosphere -- Alaska and Australia. These were lands to which Capt...

Salzburg Souvenirs, Part IV

Posted on August 30, 2010
Today, I think we'll wrap up this Salzburg journal, these 'souvenirs.' For the first three installments, please follow the links: I, II, and III. Cynthia Polsky is a grand, wonderful, and invaluable lady of New York. She and her husband Leon do any number of things, serving on boards, keeping the arts alive, and so on...

Why They Can?t Condemn Hamas

Posted on August 28, 2010
Rauf and his friends employ different methods, but they are on the same team. Hamas is a shibboleth. If you want to know whether an ostensible Muslim 'moderate' is really moderate, ask him if Hamas is a terrorist organization...

Salzburg Souvenirs, Part III

Posted on August 27, 2010
Okay, Salzburgers, welcome to the third installment: this third installment of these scribbles about Mozart's hometown, and its assorted doings. For Parts I and II, go here and here. Where were we? Doesn't matter -- I'll just type. One of the guests in our interview series is Christiane Karg, a young soprano -- German...

Obama?s Manichean World

Posted on August 27, 2010
How the HAMP program is using taxpayer money to subsidize irresponsible behavior. President Obama has a weakness for thinking in categories. For someone who provokes swoons among liberals for his great intellect, he has repeatedly evidenced an unsophisticated, one might even say simple-minded, view of the world: Workers good; bosses exploitative...

The Last Refuge of the Liberal

Posted on August 27, 2010
Labeling all opponents ?bigots? allows the Left to forgo real debates. Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people...

Race to Nowhere

Posted on August 27, 2010
Tear the schools down. In the way these things happen, we had a sudden deluge of education stories these past few days. For this Long Islander, the news was local, state, and national. Our local news concerned a school-district referendum on spending $2 million to add buildings to our intermediate school (grades 4-6)...

?Moral? Hazard in Politics

Posted on August 27, 2010
Government handouts encourage citizens to act less prudently. One of the things that make it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured...

Dorsal Fins Surround White House

Posted on August 27, 2010
Liberals are frantically trying to explain away Obama?s problems. You've got to wonder when White House political guru David Axelrod will look at the churning pools of poll data and, like Chief Brody in Jaws, say: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat...

The Rump Majority

Posted on August 27, 2010
Losing independents has made Democrats desperate. The frustrations of minority status can drive a political party batty. The temptation is to substitute belligerence for thought, insist on a self-destructive purity, lash out at the American public, and question the wisdom and viability of the country's institutions...

Hurricane Katrina and the Race Card: Five Years Later

Posted on August 27, 2010
West and other race-baiters have not been held accountable for their lies and distortions. This weekend, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, civil-rights activists and hip-hop stars will hold what they call a 'healing ceremony' to commemorate the disaster...

The Sources of American Anger

Posted on August 27, 2010
Barack Obama, the great healer, is proving to be the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. Behind the anger over the Arizona immigration mess, the Ground Zero mosque, the economy, and the new directions in foreign policy are some recurring general themes that reverberate in each particular new controversy...

Boehner?s Pro-Growth Message

Posted on August 27, 2010
Is a mighty stock rally next? It's a bit too early for House Republican leader John Boehner to measure the drapes and pick out new wallpaper. But the Intrade pay-to-play prediction markets are now showing a 76 percent chance of a GOP House takeover in November, along with a 60 percent probability that Republicans will capture at least seven new Senate seats...

In Search of Certainty at the Fed

Posted on August 26, 2010
Our monetary PhDs need to get on the same page about policy. The Federal Reserve is increasingly becoming a costly source of uncertainty for an economy that already has more than enough to worry about...

Decline, but Not Inevitable Decline

Posted on August 26, 2010
The U.S. is in deep but not irreversible trouble. For decades, I have been a militant anti-declinist in terms of America's place in the world. The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon...

Muslims + Mainstream Media = Madness

Posted on August 26, 2010
The media?s biased coverage of the Ground Zero mosque leaders. Wow! The Washington Post has identified 'rabble-rousing outsiders!' I don't think I've heard language like that since Southern segregationists complained about young civil-rights activists descending on Mississippi...

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