I’ve been following the latest “Cato Unbound.”   In this month’s lead essay, Roderick Long notes that defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite, and asks if this is a fair charge.  His answer? No and yes. Matthew Yglesias, Steven Horwitz, and […]

Patrick Ruffini, over at NextRight, contrasts the pedigree of recent Republican presidential candidates with recent Democratict presidential candidates:

John McCain — probably the most explicitly ambitious of our recent nominees — was first elected to public office at 46 after a career in the military.
George W. Bush, part of one of the great political families, but […]

Some Democrats are saying that being governor of Alaska is roughly equivalent to being King of your Couch, as far as executive experience goes.  I decided to dig around.
Turns out that with a total state government expenditures of over $5.5 billion dollars in 2007, Alaska had the 32nd largest state government in the US.
Guess what?  […]

My Legislation professor, Joshua Schwartz, is buddies with SCOTUS Nominee Samuel Alito. Below are some of the comments he made in class today about his friend.

“Honest.”
“A very good guy that I am proud to call a friend.”
“Isn’t that great. ‘Hey dad, Sam Alitio was a Supreme Court Justice at your age - what are you […]

I thought I’d make my own contribution to the rumor mill surrounding Supreme Court Nominee Harriet Miers.
This morning I was talking with my Antitrust professor Richard J. Pierce, Jr. about Miers’ undergraduate degree in mathematics. He mentioned that GW’s Associate Dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies, Susan L. Karamanian, is “best friends” […]

According to Wonkette, a Gregory S. Paul, from Baltimore, MD, has published an article in the electronic Journal of Religion and Society studying the effects of religious beliefs on a society. As written up in the London Times under the title “Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’, Mr. Paul believes […]

Casey, Aly, and anyone else who got into our post-barbeque, post-beer, wide-ranging debate, I found a really interesting interview of Rene Girard which covers many of the topics we discussed.
Rene Girard is a prominent Roman Catholic conservative and emeritus professor of anthropology at Stanford University. The interview was conducted by Global Viewpoint editor Nathan […]

So, I’ve caught filibuster fever from fishkite. Hunting around to find the actual rules for Senate filibusters, I found this interesting bit:
In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes needed to invoke cloture to three-fifths (60) of Senate membership. At the same time, they made the filibuster “invisible” by requiring only that 41 […]

A new study from University of Wisconson journalism professor Dietram Scheufele shows that liberals who got much of their post 9/11 news from TV tended to show increased support for broading police powers, a typically conservative view. In contrast, newspaper reading tended to strengthen ideological positions on both sides: liberals became more liberal, and […]

Last Monday (11/22) I attended a speech by Tom Ridge, (now former) Director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The speech was part of a conference at GWU for attorneys employed by the DHS. Law students were invited to attend Ridge’s speech. The auditorium was packed.
Ridge was quite an entertaining speaker. He began by […]