WHERE THE UNINSURED get free medical help.
Archive for 2007
November 6, 2007
A BIG TERROR BUST in Europe. We’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing lately; it’s almost as if somebody’s selling them out.
SOME HOME THEATER ADVICE for people interested in setting one up. An earlier installment is here.
A CONSTITUTIONAL LAW THOUGHT: I was working on the revisions for my Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional? piece, which is moving through the Northwestern University Law Review’s editorial process with blinding speed, when something occurred to me. The conventional wisdom — summarized in this post — is that the Vice President presides over his own impeachment:
The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The Vice President is the President of the Senate. He presides. The Constitution provides for only one exception in cases of impeachment: “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” That’s because of the obvious conflict-of-interest of having the VP preside when the President is tried. But there’s no similar provision for having someone else preside if the Vice President is impeached.
This is generally treated as a drafting error. But if the Vice President is a legislative official, then it’s not an error at all — legislative officials aren’t civil officers of the United States, and hence aren’t subject to impeachment. Instead, they’re subject to expulsion by the house to which they belong, which in this case would be the Senate. This makes the impeachment problem go away, and perhaps even suggests that the Framers thought of the Vice President as primarily a legislative official. Of course, as I note in the piece — earlier draft is here — none of this produces results that the current Vice President is likely to find congenial.
UPDATE: Yeah, that shifts the drafting error to the provision saying that the VP is subject to impeachment. But still . . . Nah, it’s a loser. But the idea of floating half- quarter-baked ideas on the blog before publication is kind of a good one. At least, I like the reader mail it generated. Thanks!
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Thanks to Google Earth, a map of where the pork goes:
One of Sunlight’s resident creative geniuses (yes, there are many of them) have taken all the Defense Appropriations Earmarks and made them available for viewing within Google Earth. (You can only view this using Google Earth which you can download from this page.)
And as they say: a picture really is worth a 1,000 words. One of our policy wonks loved the flight simulator that allows you to fly over earmark locations. It allows you to fly your choice of two aircraft anywhere around the globe, with custom layers visible from the aircraft.
Follow the link for more information.
A STACKABLE ELECTRIC CAR for city driving.
YOUR MY TAX MONEY at work.
CONTRASTING British and American tactics in Iraq. The British approach, once hailed as more sophisticated than the American, seems not to have worked as well.
A LOOK AT Zero-G robot surgery.
BOGUS ROBOCALLS in the Kentucky elections.
THE INSTA-WIFE ORDERED You: Staying Young: The Owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty.
THE INSTA-WIFE ORDERED You: Staying Young: The Owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty.
VOTING ON EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH in New Jersey.
BIOFUELS ARE NOW officially evil.
A LOOK AT the spiraling cost of higher education.
DAVE KOPEL HAS THOUGHTS on equivocation and jury nullification.
And here’s something that I wrote on jury nullification, in response to Clay Conrad’s book on the subject.
WHY IS THE WORLD MORE CONCERNED with Musharraf’s coup than with Hugo Chavez’s emerging dicatatorship? Because enemies of the United States, like Chavez, get a pass.
UPDATE: Tom Maguire says it’s the nukes. Well, that would be a good reason, but I’m not hearing it so much from the people complaining about the lack of democracy. And it’s not clear that Musharraf’s coup is going to make the nukes less secure, is it? As opposed to treating Musharraf like we did the Shah?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Anne Applebaum on why actors and models want to hang with Hugo Chavez. “The Western weakness for other people’s revolutionary violence, the belief in the glamour and benevolence of foreign dictators, and the insistence on seeing both through the prism of Western political debates are still very much with us.”
MORE: Tom Maguire emails: “I am certain that you personally think Pakistan is currently more important than Venezuela – I base that on the number of Pakistan links in the last few days vis a vis Venezuela.” Well, yes, but I was talking about the moral condemnation.
Related thoughts here.
STILL MORE: Jon Kay takes a more positive view: “There is one important difference: in Pakistan, there’s a real chance of bringing Pakistan to the democratic fold with the pressure cooker. I sure don’t see any such chance in Venezuela.” But read the first comment for a more cynical take. Excerpt: “That explanation doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, since it’s not just the amount but the tone of the coverage. Maybe the Economist voices the appropriate concern, but my impression of coverage of Chavez is that it’s generally neutral to positive: accounts of some Hollywood nitwit or other’s giving Chavez a photo op, uncritically passing on Chavez’s diatribes against Bush and the US, thumb-suckers that regard resurgent leftism in South America as a generally hopeful sign.”
DAVID FREDDOSO: “Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) ended Guy Fawkes Day having done something no Republican has ever done before. He raised almost $4 million over the Internet without spending so much as a thin dime (beyond transaction fees, of course). This sort of thing just isn’t done.”
OH NOOO: “What do the Democrats do if–yes: if, if, if–the surge appears to have succeeded?”
BRENDAN NYHAN: Russert misleads on Thompson & WMD.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Senate Republicans show some progress on pork:
Staffers for the Senate Republican Conference today launched the Pork Report, which is being billed as a website that will “highlight questionable uses of taxpayer dollars included in this year’s appropriations bills.â€
The fact that Sen. Jon Kyl☼ (R-Ariz.), a member of the Senate GOP leadership team, has dispatched his staff to work on such an endeavor is pretty remarkable. Last year attacks on pork-barrel spending originated from conservative members such Sens. Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint — and certainly not leadership. But as Republicans have sought to return to their roots on fiscal restraint, earmarks have become an easy target. . . . ow that the GOP leadership is picking on pork, it would be nice to see all Republicans take a tough stand against wasteful spending like the water projects bill President Bush vetoed last week. They’ll have their first test when a vote to override Bush’s veto comes before them later this week.
Yeah, keep an eye on that. And note that the Club for Growth has released its latest 2007 RePork Card. Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper got a 98% rating, which is excellent. Not everyone did that well:
Rep. David Obey (D-WI) did not vote for his own amendment to strike all earmarks in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill. Rep. Obey scored an embarrassing 0% overall.
Ouch.
November 5, 2007
INSTAPUNDIT IS IN THE RUNNING for best individual blogger in the Weblog Awards.
EVAN COYNE MALONEY’S INDOCTRINATE U. will have a one-night-only screening in Cleveland on November 18.
EDWARDS ON IRAN: A flip, or a flop?
I’m voting for “flop.”
ANOTHER GRIM MILESTONE:
According to an analysis of ABC figures, for 538 daily U.S. newspapers, circulation declined 2.5% to 40,689,617. For 609 papers that filed on Sunday, overall circulation dropped 3.5% to 46,771,486. The percentages are based on comparisons from the same period a year ago and represent the majority of the paper’s reporting into ABC — less than half in the country.
For The New York Times, daily circulation fell 4.51% to 1,037,828 and Sunday plunged 7.59% to 1,500,394. . . . At the Star Tribune, daily dropped 6.5% to 335,443, and Sunday was down 4.3% to 570,443.
I blame George W. Bush.
UPDATE: Mickey Kaus: “New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal says that being top editor of the Times has made Bill Keller ‘crazier.’ … He also describes publisher Pinch Sulzberger as more involved in editorials than I’d thought . . . . That explains a lot!”