IS YOUR ROTH IRA SAFE? Don’t Get Cocky.
Archive for 2011
May 13, 2011
CLOSE ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK: CBO: Our 2001 Ten-Year Budget Projection Was Off by $11.8 Trillion.
ALEX LONG: The Freewheelin’ Judiciary: A Bob Dylan Anthology. “This paper, presented as part of a symposium on Bob Dylan and the Law at the Fordham University School of Law, explores the ways in which judges have used the lyrics of Bob Dylan in their opinions.”
Plus, in the L.A. Times: In some courts, Dylan rules.
HYPERMILING a Ford F-150.
CHANGE! U.S. Inflation Jumps as Gas and Food Prices Rise. Do tell.
PEOPLE WRITING TO ASK WHAT HAPPENED TO ANN ALTHOUSE’S BLOG should scroll down to see her post here. Don’t worry, she hasn’t deleted it, it’s just some sort of Blogger problem that will be fixed eventually. They’re working on it.
IN THE MAIL: Why Businessmen Need Philosophy: The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
And for more on Rand, here’s PJTV’s Bill Whittle and Andrew Klavan:
“HE WHO WALKS BEHIND THE LINKS”: That will be Glenn’s new name. It’s Aztec! I’m officially handing the Insta car keys back, you will be relieved to know. Hope I didn’t bang the vehicle up too much. Thanks for having me, and I’m headed back to the Volokh Conspiracy and Opinio Juris.
MICHAEL BARONE: There Is No Republican Frontrunner.
“THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF GOVERNING”: Hoover Institution scholar Morton Keller delivers a progress report on the Obama administration in Defining Ideas. “It’s safe to say that Obama’s is the most Congress-centric administration in modern history.”
SO THANKS TO ALL THE GUESTBLOGGERS, WHO DID A GREAT JOB. Meanwhile, I was scuba diving again — with my friend Nat Robb’s dive operation — and taking some Internet-free time to clear my brain. I love the Internet, but time away from it can be therapeutic. . . .
I also read Charles Stross’s new book — not out yet — Rule 34. It’s like the perfect InstaPundit novel — there’s a burst higher-education bubble, talk of the Singularity and artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and even home-based fab/maker technology. What’s not to like?
I’ll be ramping up back to normal as the day goes on. I’m tanned, rested, and ready!
ADDED: Is my exclamation point ridiculous? Sorry. I live in Wisconsin.
PROFESSOR FRANK PARTNOY ON THE GALLEON VERDICT. In the Financial Times.
THE DEFINITIVE GUANTANAMO DETENTION LITIGATION DATABASE: Brookings Institution releases a new report that tracks Guantanamo litigation, which will be updated on the web into the future. As you might guess, keeping track of all the lower court cases, appeals, dispositions, etc., is a major undertaking, and this is the place to go for any kind of serious research in this area. The Emerging Law of Detention 2.0: The Guantánamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER ON WHY what the international community did with Libya can’t be done with Syria: Video interview with Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Hmm … is entirely “ad hoc” the term I’m looking for here?
JONATHAN ADLER: Kloppenburg’s Folly (Cont’d).
A one day sale on Firefly: The Complete Series.
DAVID HUME’S 300th BIRTHDAY. (We are a couple of days late here at Insta, it was May 7.)
WOULD YOU REALLY HAVE WANTED OBL ON TRIAL?: Mark Osiel, University of Iowa international law professor, sends an email running through just a few of the many issues that an actual trial of OBL would have had to address, off the top of his head. It’s a long list and just a start. If you think there was no problem, as a matter of law or morality, in attacking with lethal force, then it is pretty hard to see how the benefits of a trial outweigh the costs. At least if you are a government with ‘skin in the game’ and have to worry, for example, about waves of hostage-taking around the world, in the run up to a trial or imprisonment or execution. Life is much easier if you are an NGO and can focus solely on the presumed benefits of your policies rather than the costs which, in any case, the NGO doesn’t bear. The rest of us don’t have that luxury. Professor Osiel:
We should think practically for a second what the legal problems would have been in trying to prosecute Osama Bin Laden, rather than kill him. Anyone in international criminal law could immediately reel off at least half a dozen such major obstacles. The educated American (and world) public should be aware of these. They begin with the abduction of OBL from Pakistani territory, raising jurisdictional issues confronted in Alvarez-Machain, where the Supreme Court’s decision to allow U.S. prosecution (despite capture without consent of Mexican authorities) was uniformly rejected by the rest of the world. There would also be the considerable evidentiary difficulties, given the high burden of proof, of linking bin Laden to the 9/11 conspirators, i.e., without disclosing confidential intelligence sources and methods. And then there would be all the uncertainties within the law of crimes against humanity, such as whether those attacks could be considered “widespread” or “systematic,” especially if viewed in isolation from Al Qaeda’s earlier, more limited attacks. In any event, there’s no U.S. statute on crimes against. humanity, hence requiring recourse to ordinary federal criminal law, an approach too ‘parochial’ to convince non-U.S. publics of its legitimacy; direct recourse to customary international law on crimes against humanity would be highly vulnerable to a due process challenge. And so forth. All that said, the bigger obstacle is clearly prudential, not legal: risk of U.S. and Western hostages taken by jihadists demanding the defendant’s release. Potential hostages have human rights too.
DEFINING ‘SYSTEMICALLY IMPORTANT’ FINANCIAL FIRMS: For purposes of the Dodd-Frank bill.
EATING THE NEXT GENERATION’S SEED CORN, DEPT. OF: Stanford University Professor John Cogan’s WSJ piece on redistribution from young to old, summarized by Veronique de Rugy.
PARTY ASYMMETRY IN NATIONAL SECURITY AND FOREIGN POLICY, a one graf public choice analysis: “In a dangerous world, there is a clear set of policies that is required to protect the country, but only one party is honest about it.” Jim Geraghty says this by way of saying that Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg are too charitable toward the Democrats’ national security policy. He’s right – but also way too charitable himself. Why?
Assume that Democrats know that Republicans will generally support them when Democrats are in the White House and taking tough national security positions. But the Democrats also send unmistakeable signals to the electorate that, if they are pushed out of power, they will undermine a Republican administration trying to do exactly the same, and taking exactly the same actions. Their support is not reciprocal even when the action is the same. Message to voters:
“Paradoxically, the more you value national security, the more you actually need to vote for Democrats, because we’re the ones who matter on the margin, not the Republicans. We have the hold-up, not the Republicans. The Republicans in principle might be tougher than us – but unless we are in office, we will hold up all or most or much of it, so their extra toughness doesn’t matter, because it will be less than ours. The Republicans would be tougher than us – but we’re actually the best you’re going to do, because if the Republicans take office, we’ll make sure they do less. So thanks for your national-security vote – TeamObama, investing today in tomorrow’s Nash Equilibrium.”
THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT DID NOT CENSOR BOB DYLAN. Says Bob Dylan. Also:
Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.
And if I know Bob Dylan that means: Shut up, you losers. You don’t know me.