Thinking about my post from last night, I realized how strange you might think me for assuming that there’s greater risk to liberty from police and prosecutors misbehaving than there is from letting a certain number of criminals get off on “technicalities.” Thankfully, with impeccable timing, we got this report today from the New York Times, summarizing a study by ... Read More
Sam Barr’s most recent post makes the rather shocking claim that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, is a racist, or at least that he is not a non-racist. Sam deduces this from the fact that Mr. Paul is not a “consistent libertarian,” that he “picks and ... Read More
In response to the South Park / Muhammad controversy, several bloggers with a libertarian bent have been pushing the idea of a “Draw Muhammad!” contest to retaliate against the New York-based Islamic extremist group Revolution Muslim. The idea originated with noted sex columnist Dan Savage, who has advertised it as a way to retaliate against Revolution Muslim’s “veiled threats” and “water down ... Read More
In case you aren’t sick of the subject, I have written a full-length take-down of the recent Harvard Salient article on Ethnic Studies. It originally appeared in today’s Harvard Independent. Check out my HPR blog post from last week if you want the pithier, more sarcastic version. An Embarrassment to Harvard Conservatives Harvard conservatives, those Aristotle-citing, modernity-bemoaning, Western canon-promoting Young ... Read More
I would like to think that the Committee on African Studies’ decision to hold a panel event entitled “Africa in the Media” together with the Department of African and African American Studies just two weeks after I finished writing an article about the same subject (you can read it here) is more than mere coincidence. Of course I’m biased, but ... Read More
For Obama’s first-year anniversary the New York Times rounded up some White House veterans to write about their respective presidents’ first years. This one, especially, surprised me: It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a huge expansion of the National ... Read More
Turning from the coca fields to the cocaine market While anti-drug policy rarely makes headlines in American politics today, the issue dominates politics in Colombia. The South American country is a hotbed for cultivation of the coca plant, the key ingredient in cocaine production. As of 2007, the Office of National Drug Policy reported that 167,000 hectares of the country’s ... Read More
Georgia’s troubles in the aftermath of the Ossetia conflict The South Ossetia conflict last August was a tragic farce that ran its full course in barely a week, inviting paraphrasing Porfirio Diaz’s saying about Mexico; poor Georgia, so far from God and so close to Russia! In days, it re-established Russian superiority in the Caucasus and ignominiously ended the Bush-era ... Read More
A new history of the disputed election of 1876
Rewriting the history of the Civil War
Area of the country most likely to suffer from an auto industry failure: The Great Lakes region, a Democratic stronghold with large investments in manufacturing. Area of the country most likely to benefit from an auto industry failure: The South, a Republican stronghold with large investments in auto assembly plants owned by foreign firms. On the upside, at least ... Read More
How President Bush Won Latino Voters and His Party Lost Them AgainBy Kenzie Bok ‘11 “George W. Bush’s first foreign trip as President was not to a traditional European ally but to a ranch in a remote region of Mexico, where he met with another newly-elected cowboy president: Vicente Fox.” As Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, University Professor and Co-Director of Immigration Studies ... Read More
