Politics

Harriet Miers is a Bear Market

The steady pace of bad news for Harriet Miers appears to have accelerated within the last 24 hours, based on the prices at an Internet gambling site trading on her nomination to the Supreme Court. Tradesports, an Irish betting service that provides a system for speculating on current events, has a contract on the confirmation of Miers that has plummeted. Prices in a bet like this range from 0 (no chance) to 100 (absolute lock), and Miers hit an all-time low of 11 today. The current price of 20, ... (read more)

2005/10/21

Hysteria is Contagious

An article on the 50-year effort by scientists to revive the 1918 Spanish flu virus reads like a Michael Crichton novel: He chose three villages in the permafrost zone -- where the ground never thaws -- that had mass graves containing corpses from an epidemic that sounded like influenza. The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. Of the three, a place called Teller Mission looked promising. Seventy-two of the 80 ... (read more)

2005/10/18

Harriet Miers, Bush's Stealth Bomb

A letter to National Review columnist David Frum: I graduated from law school this past May, and am currently a **th Circuit law clerk. I have always been a member of the Federalist Society, and have devoted much of my recent spare time to working on several law review articles that, while on subjects esoteric to non-attorneys (such as subject matter jurisdiction priority over personal jurisdiction), remain important to the proper position of the courts in our governmental system. I'm ... (read more)

2005/10/08

Everyone Who Uses Must Converge

Last March, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he shot a judge and three other people to death escaping an Atlanta courthouse. During a seven-hour ordeal, she read to him from the Bible and The Purpose-Driven Life. He eventually let the 27-year-old woman leave and tell the police his whereabouts, surrendering peacefully. Wall Street Journal pundit Peggy Noonan was deeply moved by the incident: Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours. This is Nichols's mug ... (read more)

2005/10/05

$500,000 for a Flying Fish

There may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids. A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to the Anchorage Daily News. A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- ... (read more)

2005/10/05

Bill Bennett's Reproducible Error

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post responds to Bill Bennett's on-air musing about blacks and abortion: He should know enough history to understand why black Americans would react strongly when whites start imagining experiments to limit black reproduction. For hundreds of years, this country was obsessed with the supposed menace of black sexuality and fertility. Bennett's remarks have to make you wonder whether that obsession has really vanished or just been deemed off-limits in polite ... (read more)

2005/10/04

This post on The Corner, the weblog of contributors to the conservative magazine National Review, sums up how the Harriet Miers pick is going over with the right wing: I am actually hoping there are no more vacancies during this presidency. ConfirmThem appears to be considering a name change. ... (read more)

2005/10/03

This is Anna Badkhen

The most compelling stories from a newspaper reporter in Iraq are being penned by Anna Badkhen, a 29-year-old foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. She frequently writes stories that bring first-hand accounts from frontline soldiers home, such as her article this morning of a Marine platoon outside Sada, a town near the Syrian border that's one of five controlled by insurgents: The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, ... (read more)

2005/10/01

Throw the Book at Google

Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is a clear violation of copyright. I'm not so sure. If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call it Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright? Selective quotation of a book is fair ... (read more)

2005/10/01

Grover Cleveland Will Have His Revenge

Blogs for Bush contributor Mark Noonan: I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge -- you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received. DailyKos diarist Hunter: This is the world you forged and, unfortunately for you, I'm beginning to take a fancy for it. Welcome to the politics of your own party, finally sprouting from the ground on which you planted the ... (read more)

2005/09/30

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