IN THE MAIL: From Gerard de Marigny, The Watchman of Ephraim.
Archive for 2012
September 14, 2012
RIOTERS BREACH U.S. EMBASSY IN TUNISIA: No flamethrowers available, I guess. Also, any time this happens we should cancel all visas from the offending country, and have at least a 90-day moratorium on new ones. Plus instant aid suspension. #Reynolds2016
REMEMBER WHEN EUROPEANS LOVED HIM? Der Spiegel: “Obama’s Middle East Policy Is In Ruins.” Of course, historically their taste in leaders has tended to lead to disappointment.
UPDATE: Check out this Google Map of Muslim protests around the world. Does this look like “Smart Diplomacy?”
ER, WHAT RECOVERY? American Families Not Feeling The Recovery: “Recovery may be underway, but most American families aren’t feeling the love. The recent census report shows that despite (extremely slow) increases in national GDP and employment, inflation-adjusted household income—an indicator with far more impact on the lives of most Americans—has been dropping since 2009. As the New York Times notes, median household income is now 8.1 percent below its level in 2007. Obama has spent the past two years trying to make the case that his policies have made Americans better off. Reports like this one and last month’s abysmal jobs report don’t make that case any easier to make.”
Because, you know, it’s not true.
“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Prof. Jacobson: Obama’s Great Islamist Delusion has come home to roost. “Watch this video clip from Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009.” I think we’ll be seeing that one a lot.
UPDATE: Ouch.
RASMUSSEN: Romney 48, Obama 45.
THE NEW KINDLE FIRE HD IS NOW SHIPPING. This is the 7″ wi-fi model. The bigger 4G version won’t be shipping for a while.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: September 11, 2012—and Obama Apologizes.
MAYBE, UNLIKE OBAMA, HE’LL ACTUALLY ATTEND THEM: Romney to receive intelligence briefings starting next week.
AT AMAZON, markdowns on bestsellers in Men’s Watches.
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Rep. Walsh: Obama should follow standard procedure, fire Sebelius for violating Hatch Act. “The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) said Wednesday that Sebelius violated the law when she publicly endorsed Obama’s re-election and North Carolina Lieutenant Gov. Walter Dalton’s gubernatorial primary in a multi-way race during a taxpayer-funded public event on Feb. 25, 2012. The standard penalty for violating the Hatch Act is termination. But, the White House has suggested that Obama will offer Sebelius special treatment and let her keep her job.”
If this were a Republican administration, the press would be making a big deal of this. But hey, it’s not a Republican administration, so no big deal.
MEDIA CRITICISM: Kirsten Powers UNLOADS on Obama and Media After Mideast Embassy Attacks.
UPDATE: Related: Joe Scarborough: “We’re Biased, But It’s ROMNEY’S FAULT!”
WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: Byron York: Romney will be judged on actions, not coverage. Because, you know, the coverage sucks.
SPEAKING OF SSRN, NFIB v. Sebelius: Five Takes, which I coauthored with Brannon Denning, is now #1 on SSRN. It’s a chart-topper, baby!
“BLOWBACK:” NOW THERE’S A TERM WE USED TO HEAR A LOT: “From the Arabian Spring of hope (although technically protesting soaring food prices, something which is about to happen all over again) to the Arabian Fall of anti-American revulsion in under two years: has to be a blowback record. The latest casualty: the German embassy in Sudan.”
How’s that “smart diplomacy” workin’ out for ya?
Related: Bloody Hand Prints at Consulate Reveal Americans Were Dragged From Building Before Their Death.
Also: Ouch.
Maybe Obama really should fire Hillary. Or maybe she’ll resign to avoid going down with the ship. . . .
UPDATE: Bloody handprints: The defining image of the Obama Administration? “The parable of the scorpion and the frog has never been more applicable.”
With Bush it was purple fingers . . . .
THE SECRET SAUCE FOR LAW REVIEW PLACEMENT: The Secret Sauce for Law Review Placement: Letterhead, Citations, and Liberal.
Lots of people are bashing law reviews over this latest incident, but let me offer a few thoughts of my own. First, though Tennessee letterhead is no more than respectable, and though I’m not especially liberal, my stuff has generally placed pretty well: Columbia, Virginia, Penn, USC, Northwestern, etc. Would I have done better if I were at Yale and liberal? Probably, but by no means certainly, as a look at some Yale profs’ publication lists will show. You can’t know much about why you’re rejected, except when stuff like this leaks out, but I can’t say that my stuff does better when it seems leftier.
Second, the good thing about law reviews is that there are a lot of them, and they’re diverse. Just because you got rejected at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Law Journal doesn’t mean you won’t get published somewhere else, and quite possibly better. (I had never even heard of this journal, and I’ve always had a weak spot for obscure law reviews.) There are no gatekeepers in law review publishing like there are in other disciplines where there are only a few top peer-reviewed journals, often peer-reviewed by a small clique that overlaps.
Third, it matters less than ever now that more people probably read law review articles on SSRN than in law reviews anyway. It’s gotten to where I feel that an article is really published when it’s posted on SSRN, with the law review acceptance being mostly for archival purposes. I still advise junior faculty to pursue “better” placements because that still matters to many older law professors, but I think it will matter less and less. And many schools look at SSRN download rank as much as they look at placement now, which is probably better for people who are less traditionally academic-liberal-theoretical in orientation.
I’m not saying that there’s nothing to see here — it’s certainly wrong that a law review might reject an author just because of his/her political history — but the impact of this sort of political misfeasance is much less than it used to be.
My thoughts, anyway.
JEREMY LOTT: Why Obama Should Fire Hillary. “It’s wall-to-wall ugly for American diplomacy right now and the person responsible for our diplomacy is not acquitting herself well at all. Moreover, many of the initiatives that she supported — siding against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and supporting the overthrow of Libya’s strongman Muammar Gaddafi and encouraging the protests associated with the ‘Arab Spring’ — helped sow the seeds of protest that now batter against the embassy walls. . . . After the disastrous 2006 midterm elections, George W. Bush decided that the US government had to change its approach to Iraq and thus Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was shown the door. Now, it is clear US diplomacy is in need of a major overhaul as well. Obama should look to his predecessor’s example and fire Hillary Clinton at the earliest opportunity.”
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Obama runs riot with facts on ‘ally’ Egypt.
Perhaps President Fact-Based should have toned down the sanctimony. That evening, in an interview with Jose Diaz-Balart, of the Spanish-language network Telemundo, Obama was asked whether Egypt was an ally of the United States. “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” Obama responded.
This comment was so incredible that NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel later commented that he “almost had to sit down” when he heard it. Egypt, the 16th largest nation on Earth and by far the largest in the Arab world, was designated a non-NATO ally by Congress in 1989, along with other important countries like Israel, Japan and Australia. Not at any point during the Arab Spring did the U.S. government hint at any change in that status. And Obama has strenuously resisted the idea, promoted by some Republicans, of canceling the $1.5 billion foreign aid package that the U.S. furnishes to Egypt annually. No wonder jaws dropped when Obama dropped this bombshell in a casual news interview on Spanish-language television.
Remember when they told us he was smart and Sarah Palin was dumb?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Concordia To Slash Tuition, Fees by $10,000. “The St. Paul university hopes that a lower sticker price will impress a public weary of the high cost of college.”
JAMES TARANTO: Shariah vs. The Constitution: The Muslim Brotherhood Sets Up An Irreconcilable Conflict.
The Obama administration has repeatedly denounced the video that riled up the rioters in Egypt and elsewhere. But those condemnations, which we quoted yesterday, rather miss the point. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo, in its infamous apology statement, deplored “efforts . . . to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the video “inflammatory” and suggested its message is counter to “America’s commitment to religious tolerance.” Obama rejected “America’s commitment to religious tolerance.”
But although the video may indeed be insensitive, inflammatory, intolerant and insulting, that’s not why the rioters are rioting. They are rioting because in their view it is blasphemous, and therefore forbidden under Shariah. And although the Muslim Brotherhood has cannily adopted the rhetoric of wounded feelings, it is calling for the criminalization of blasphemy world-wide. . . . One suspects that, like the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in 1979-80, Morsi and the Brotherhood have been emboldened by the U.S. administration’s apparent weakness. It’s fine for U.S. officials to denounce the video–and Mrs. Clinton today did so in even stronger terms, calling it “disgusting and reprehensible” and saying that “the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video.”
But such declarations, on their own, will not appease the mob. They only fuel the expectation that the U.S. prosecute the video’s makers, a demand to which officials cannot yield but seem afraid to answer with a clear “no.” . . . The president takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In this most solemn duty, Obama is, at best, leading from behind.
Under a Reynolds Administration, such demands will be met with the Napier Response. “Let us all act according to our national customs.” #Reynolds2016.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: When The Economy Is Bad, Debt Is Worse. “One of the best arguments for the existence of a higher education bubble is simply the massive increase in debt, accompanied by a run-up in prices. This is, of course, particularly worrying in a down market, when students are burdened by debt that has become a lot harder to pay. And especially so in this economy, when the students who entered graduate school in order to ‘ride out the recession’ are emerging on the other side to find that unemployment is still over 8%.”
Well, a lot of ’em voted for “change.” This is the change.