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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

Which Islam Will Prevail in America?

Posted on August 21, 2010
That is the real question at hand in the Ground Zero mosque debate. The real battle for religious freedom lurks beneath the Ground Zero mosque controversy. It is sadly ironic that our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty: That includes everyone from imam Feisal Rauf, the project's sharia-touting sponsor, to President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the rest of the Islamist-smitten Left, to the GOP's own anti-anti-terrorist wing...

Obama and the Muslims

Posted on August 20, 2010
It doesn?t look like he knows what he?s doing. I have tried diligently to detect some subtle rationale for this administration's policy toward the Muslim world. There have been some good moves, particularly the emphasis on Afghanistan and the serious effort, after eight years of grapefruit-league tokenism, to apply all means -- aid, diplomacy, and force -- to produce the desired outcome there...

Fleecing the Cornhuskers

Posted on August 20, 2010
Obamacare kicks Nebraskans in the wallet. Remember the Cornhusker Kickback? It was a giveaway to Nebraska brokered in order to secure the vote of one of its senators for Obamacare. After word of the scam broke, pressure mounted on Congress to drop the provision, which it eventually did...

Obama: More a Carter than a Reagan

Posted on August 20, 2010
There is a chart currently making the rounds that shows President Reagan's approval ratings during his first two years in office overlaid upon President Obama's. The trend lines nearly overlap. Liberal commentators are using the chart to argue that Obama's unpopularity is almost entirely attributable to the weak economy and thus comparable to that of Reagan, who also inherited a recession...

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China Wealthy? That?s Rich!

Posted on August 20, 2010
And even if it was, it?s time to realize that an affluent China could economically benefit the US. It was big news around the world: China has 'overtaken' Japan as the world's second-richest economy...

Obama?s South Vietnam?

Posted on August 20, 2010
In Iraq, Bush snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with the surge. Obama is in danger of reversing the process. At the end of the movie Charlie Wilson's War, the brilliant architects of the ouster of the Soviets from Afghanistan are begging for funds from Congress to consolidate their success on the ground...

D.C. Democrats: Clueless, Condescending, and Costly

Posted on August 20, 2010
The political class not only wastes trillions of our money, it adds insult to injury with each condescending statement. Why are Americans enraged? As this moribund economy limps through its third year of doldrums, Americans are sick of having their hard-earned money swiped by the Democrat-dominated political class in Washington, D...

The Point of No Return

Posted on August 20, 2010
The warnings of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln have never been more relevant. How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but also very different values and ways of governing? Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington...

The Stealth Obama Ocean Grab

Posted on August 20, 2010
Viva la Summer of Wreckovery. It's not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration's neon-green radicals are also training their sights on the deep-blue seas...

Moral Myopia at Ground Zero

Posted on August 20, 2010
Supporters of the mosque fail to see its true significance. It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero in New York...

Frank Comes Home to the Facts

Posted on August 20, 2010
The Massachusetts congressman acknowledges that market processes work. Can <I>Obama</I>? Can you teach an old dog new tricks? In politics, the answer is usually no. Most elected officials cling to their ideological biases, despite the real-world facts that disprove their theories time and again...

You?ll Get Served

Posted on August 19, 2010
The West Wing is on notice. If Republicans win the House this fall, Rep. Darrell Issa will wield the majority's sharpest investigative tool: the subpoena pen. 'Cabinet officers, assistant secretaries, directors -- I will be able to take on everybody that the president hires and relies upon; the people who tell him that everything is fine,' pledges Issa, the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in an interview with National Review Online...

Please, No More Teachable Moments

Posted on August 19, 2010
Obama should be building bridges, not aggravating local controversies. The president of the United States has it hard enough without needlessly wading into, and fanning, local controversies. The economy is battered by sluggish growth, high unemployment, record annual deficits, and near-unsustainable national debt...

Free Cities

Posted on August 19, 2010
State-to-state foreign aid can?t stop terrorism. But a new private-sector program could subvert it by creating enclaves of freedom and prosperity. 'Those attacks showed emphatically that ways of doing business rooted in a different era are just not good enough...

Big Government Forgets How to Build Big Projects

Posted on August 19, 2010
In another era, projects like the Pentagon were built swiftly and efficiently. When I drive from downtown Washington to Reagan National Airport, I often encounter delays on the George Washington Parkway due to the construction of a small bridge over an inlet of the Potomac...

Plan B in the War on Terror

Posted on August 19, 2010
It?s a ?shadow war? and it?s already underway. Back in 2007, those of us assigned as 'expert advisers' to the Baker-Hamilton Commission were given a straightforward assignment: Come up with a plan to salvage the deteriorating situation in Iraq...

Time to Be Serious about National Security

Posted on August 19, 2010
This administration?s commitment to the national security of the United States is open to serious question. One of the few campaign promises that Barack Obama has kept is this: 'We are going to change the United States of America!' As in many other cases, those who were thrilled by the thought of 'change' seldom seemed to consider whether it would be a change for the better or for the worse...

A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom

Posted on August 19, 2010
How to celebrate Cost of Government Day. Every year, Americans for Tax Reform calculates Cost of Government Day -- exactly how many days of the year Americans work to pay the total cost of government...

Decency at Ground Zero

Posted on August 18, 2010
With his slap in the face to 9/11 victims, Obama hits a new low. When the members of Manhattan's Community Board 1 voted 29–1 in favor of the 'Ground Zero Mosque,' some members of the board urged that the religious references in the proposal be deleted because they were 'uncomfortable' with such language -- so eager were they to avoid any appearance of infringing on the First Amendment...

The GSEs Are Dead. Long Live the GSEs!

Posted on August 18, 2010
Fannie and Freddie cost us $150 billion plus, but <i>next time</i> the government will get it right . . . ‘I feel like Marc Antony presiding over Caesar's funeral,' said Lewis Ranieri...

Gay Marriage on Hold

Posted on August 18, 2010
It's not often that we have occasion to speak favorably of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the federal appellate court that has earned a reputation for aggressive left-wing lawlessness. So let's take note that on Monday a Ninth Circuit panel -- with two of its three members being Clinton-appointed liberals, no less -- had the modicum of good sense needed to put an abrupt end to the closing act of Judge Vaughn Walker's anti–Proposition 8 farce...

Fixing Social Security

Posted on August 18, 2010
Republicans don't support privatizing the program, but they have few other options. So, President Obama believes that Republican leaders are 'pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress this fall...

Lack of Foresight Lets Mosque Controversy Balloon

Posted on August 18, 2010
This whole debate could have been avoided with a few phone calls. The Ground Zero mosque controversy is one of the stupidest debates of our time. I don't mean the substance of the debate (though there's no shortage of stupidity on that front either)...

Obama?s Big-Labor Ethics Loophole

Posted on August 18, 2010
A former SEIU lawyer is now ruling on SEIU-related cases. Everything you need to know about President Obama's fraudulent ethics pledge can be summed up in four words: SEIU lawyer Craig Becker...

So Much for ?We the People?

Posted on August 18, 2010
This administration has used many different ploys to circumvent the people?s right to debate their nation?s laws. ‘We the people' are the central concern of the Constitution, as well as its opening words, since it is a Constitution for a self-governing nation...

The Cynical Brilliance of Imam Rauf

Posted on August 18, 2010
There are thousands of sites where the imam could locate his monument to interfaith tolerance. But away from Ground Zero, the irony would be lost. Almost everything about the proposed Ground Zero mosque was cynically brilliant...

Progressive Lessons and the Tea-Party Takeover

Posted on August 18, 2010
Tea partiers should not form their own political party. It has taken a while for the 'experts' to acknowledge that the tea-party movement will be a major force in the upcoming election cycle. But they're wrong to compare it with other short-term partisan swings of the political pendulum...

Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

Posted on August 17, 2010
The West villifies Israel because it has undergone a paradigm shift away from the nation-state. As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their own way of life...

The Tolerant Pose

Posted on August 17, 2010
Intolerance is not just part of al-Qaeda, it is part of Islam. Non-Muslims are barred from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina -- not merely barred from building synagogues or churches, but barred, period, because their infidel feet are deemed unfit to touch the ground...

Obama?s Ground Zero Dodge

Posted on August 17, 2010
The president bravely asserted what no one contests, then voted ?present? on the question that matters. Pres. Barack Obama's ringing statement in favor of the Ground Zero mosque had a gaping escape clause: He didn't necessarily support the mosque...

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