The House today passed a constitutional amendment that would give the Congress the authority to pass a law (or laws) prohibiting the desecration of the American flag. I'm enthusiastically ambivalent about the whole thing. Legal flag-burning has its advantages -- anytime someone does it you know that you can immediately disregard anything they say as […]
Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin "apologized" on the Senate floor yesterday -- sort of. "More than most people, a Senator lives by his words, words are the coin of the realm in our profession. Occasionally words will fail us and occasionally we will fail words." "On June 14, I took the floor of the Senate to […]
I watched a bit of AFI's Top 100 greatest movie quotes tonight -- if you're interested, the list is here. The list of the Top 400 nominees can be found here. [PDF format] The list is really mixed. Some of the lines are really good -- very quotable and memorable. Others ... well, it's just […]
Jon Henke over at Q&O highlights some spin from the lefty "think" tank the Center for American Progress on the Social Security crisis. NEW PRIVATIZATION PLAN WOULD EXPLODE FEDERAL DEFICIT: The Wall Street Journal claims that the proposal (which it calls "political jujitsu") would "create no new debt for the government." That's not true. Right […]
Four years ago, California's insurance commissioner, Republican Chuck Quackenbush, resigned in disgrace after it was discovered that he let several insurance companies avoid billions of dollars in fines in return for "donations" to a non-profit foundation that he ran. This same foundation conveniently used Quackenbush in "public service announcements" designed to boost his visibility and […]
Prompted by The New York Times' lame editorial "The Center Can Hold" -- which prompted me to file a request for a correction with Public Editor Byron Calame (no substantive response yet) -- Sen. John Cornyn responds to the charge that GOP senators are merely a rubber stamp for Bush's judicial nominees. To the Editor: […]
It looks like those sneaky senators are trying to get the despicable broadcast flag into law by hiding it in an appropriations bill. To paraphrase Peter Sellers in "Murder by Death": "Broadcast flag like television set on honeymoon -- unnecessary."
Donald Luskin points out that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's Friday column could've been his first-ever "crossover" column -- if only he had mentioned that those involved in Ohio's MDL scandal are Democrats. Instead, Krugman -- in a sin of omission -- makes it appear that Ohio Republicans are the state's big criminals. Quite […]
Volokh co-conspirator and the only person to gratuitously use my name in a newspaper column, David Kopel has a sensible suggestion on having a reasonable discussion on Guantanamo Bay. The more plausible analogy to Guantanamo is British interrogation of Irish Republican Army suspects in the early 1970s. Then, the British extracted confessions through "the five […]
Sen. Dick "U.S. troops are like Nazis" Durbin might find it enlightening to read this New York Times story which describes what torture really is -- and it doesn't involve Christina Aguilera. When marines [sic] burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead. […]