(Via WitNit.)
URLs du Jour
2006-02-22
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Professor Volokh looks
at an AP
story on Justice Scalia's talk at the American Enterprise Institute,
and asks if they're "fundamentally unserious." (Softball question, Prof.
The answer's yes.) He also notes that the AP was outreported
by blogger Ted
Frank both on overall substance and a relevant detail.
Interesting, not surprising. (Instapundit also comments.)
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While many people I like are going batshit over a United Arab Emirates
company taking control over some operations at major American ports,
it seems Dan Drezner is a welcome voice of reasonableness
and proportion. And Mullings points out that
the episode demonstrates
the Administration's usual ineptness at figuring out how
such things will play in the political arena and taking preparatory
actions. Dartblog
detects politically-motivated hypocrisy in spades, finding
folks who were against racial profiling, before they were for it.
However, as an ankle-biter noticed, Jimmy Carter thinks the deal is just fine. That's enough to make any concerned American worry about it.
Dafyyd seems to also have a sound analysis and a possible winning compromise. (As in: I can't see any obvious flaws. But why would you expect me to see any obvious flaws? Do I look like a foreign policy whiz?)
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Newspapers can cause a storm of violent reaction
for publishing cartoons of
Mohammed, okay. But it turns out
you can't even draw an inebriated hillbilly
getting kicked off a log into a ravine without irking
someone, specifically Lynda Ann Ewen, PhD, Professor Emerita of
Sociology, Marshall University, and Co-Director, Center for the Study of
Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia. Go figure.
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A recurring theme: we take the Internet too much for granted, and
we need constant reminders as how insanely great it all is. Today's
brief
essay on that topic is from Chicago Boy Mitch Townsend. In a
wish-I'd-written, he says:
You care about this because it is going to make your life better. You will have more money. Your children will have a library card that is close to the one the angels have in their wallets.
Exactly.
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Also good today is Jonah
Goldberg who demonstrates that liberals who favor a
"living Constitution" in most instances
are more than willing to pound a stake into
its heart when it comes to the NSA's warrantless surveillance.
Mathew J. Franck is also impressed
and proposes "a simple test" to distinguish principle from expediency
in Constitution-interpreters:
[A]nyone who defends Roe v. Wade in any way, shape, or form as an appropriate use of judicial power, has no standing to complain about anyone's constitutional argument on any question. Blab about whether you like this or that political outcome all you want, but don't try to convince us that you are actually interested in the integrity of constitutional reasoning.
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PBS: it's good for something.
(A new motto for them, perhaps?)
Check your local listings.