Professors Yoo and Epstein, if you don't mind a question from the back of the class, I'd like to shift to a different topic and benefit from your expertise.  

Word is the DOJ is preparing to take action against Arizona regarding its new immigration law.  Specifically, they are contending that the Arizona legislature exceeded its authority by effectively impeding federal responsibility to enforce its immigration laws.  From the perspective of a layman, three questions arise:  

First, how in the name of Judge Wapner's gavel can federal enforcement be impeded when there is no federal enforcement taking place in the first instance?  It would be like citing me for impeding traffic when I'm the only one on the road, no?  If your answer is that it is the fed's responsibility, not their enforcement, that is being impeded upon, I would counter that it is a responsibility that is being ignored.  Am I wrong? 

Second question:  How can the fed's responsibility in this matter be impeded or infringed when the new state law merely restates existing federal law?  

Lastly, do you gentlemen think that DOJ will suceed in its effort to derail the Arizona law?  

"This book," Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, "is about...the larger forces...that have left Europe...enfeebled....The key factors are: 1. Demographic decline; 2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state; 3. Civilizational exhaustion." Today, four years after the publication of America Alone, the New York Times confirms the enfeeblement of Europe in every particular. Excerpts:

In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70....”

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

“The easy days are over for countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but for us, too,” said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French lawyer.... ...

What Mark proclaimed to the world in his 2006 book, America Alone--namely that Europe is suffering demographic collapse and civilizational exhaustion--the New York Times, I noted the other day, has finally gotten around to confirming. To which James Poulos in effect replied, aw, cheer up:

[S]urely some among Europe's rising generations will revolt against the notion that exhaustion and failure are their only birthright....We'd better prepare ourselves now, I wager, for a few inspiring surprises in Europe.

I'm not so sure. Consider this graf from the Times article:

More broadly, many across Europe say the Continent will have to adapt to fiscal and demographic change, because social peace depends on it. “Europe won’t work without that,” said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, referring to the state’s protective role. “In Europe we have nationalism and racism in a politicized manner, and those parties would have exploited grievances if not for our welfare state,” he said. “It’s a matter of national security, of our democracy.”

Fischer may speak of "our democracy," but what he's really saying is that Europeans simply cannot be trusted with democracy. Ordinary people? ...

I wanted to share my piece today in the New York Times, which argues that Elena Kagan is not the great friend of presidential power that her supporters claim. Her academic work praises Bill Clinton for taking the authority to issue regulations from the agencies (which are given that power by Congress) to enact what she calls progressive solutions to national problems. But she says it is not because of any power that the Constitution grants the President. Because of that, I argue that she would not recognize any powers of the President, under the Constitution, to wage the war beyond what Congress allows him -- the common view in the academy, I must admit.

I must admit surprise that a) the New York Times would let me appear on its pages, except as a target (let me make clear, that being a moving target for the New York Times can be great fun) ; and b) that it would allow a criticism of her for not supporting presidential power. Thoughts?

The taxi's coming to take me to the airport in about three hours. I just woke up with a start, thinking that I'd overslept, and now I'm afraid to go back to sleep for fear that I will. I'm all packed, and it's the middle of the night, so Ricochet buddies, would you please help keep me awake for the next few hours?

I'll give you something to start with. This reminded me of our earlier conversation about the critical things we just don't notice when we're focussing on something else.

I posted a link to our conversation about whether Islam itself is the enemy to my Facebook page. Some of my friends here in Istanbul (who are Moslems, and, as the word "friend" suggests, not my enemy) weighed in with responses that I think confirm my assertion that the Islamic world is not monolithic. In particular, my friend Babür left a long, thoughtful response, which I'll reproduce in full. ...

At the beginning of each summer vacation, Drew, I like to buy a stack of books, set the books on top of the dining room table, and then command my children to start reading. ("Command?" That's the way I'd like it to happen. The truer words would be "cajole" and "beg.") May I ask your advice? My oldest, home from her first year in college, will be reading for courses she'll be taking next fall, while my youngest, only eight, will devote her time to children's books. That leaves the three teenaged boys in the middle.

All three of the boys have already read--devoured, actually--your first book for young adults, The Last Thing I Remember, making it more or less mandatory for me to begin my summer book purchases with your second book in the series, The Long Way Home. But where do I go from there? Ideally, I figure, I'd give the boys half a dozen or ten books, including, perhaps, a work or two of American history, a work or two of good sports writing, and maybe a brief volume of good science writing. What would you recommend? ...

I know you're all wondering what's new in Turkey. This is the big news. I also know it makes little sense to anyone outside of Turkey, so let me explain the two key points. If you remember these, you'll be able to fake your way through any dinner party. Or Senate hearing, for that matter.

1) The AKP has been able to dominate Turkish politics since 2002 not because everyone here loves them so much, but because there's been no credible opposition. The reason there's been no credible opposition is that the main opposition party, the CHP, has been under the control of the elderly, authoritarian, singularly uninspiring Deniz Baykal. Think John Kerry's populist touch mixed with John Edwards' feel for fine ethical judgments. The big news -- huge, from the Turkish perspective, although I'm aware it barely registered outside of Turkey -- is that somehow, by means of a devilishly ingenious and typically Turkish conspiracy, Baykal's enemies have finally forced him out. They caught him on tape with his mistress. Who caught him? Beats me. It's not the kind of thing anyone claims credit for, really. But they got him. And he's out. ...

Whatever happened to Reddy Kilowatt? I have indelible childhood memories of the friendly power company mascot extolling the virtues of electric power on radio and television. Reddy’s purpose was to encourage all and sundry to purchase more of the reliable, inexpensive electricity being produced down at the power plant: Capitalism 101.

That was before green regulatory agencies inverted the incentives for success. In 2007, Pacific Gas & Electric began saturating the Northern California airwaves with “Flex Your Power” ads featuring recycled Gore-isms such as “Global warming is a choice,” and concluding with a plea for listeners to save the earth by refraining from buying anything sold by PG&E.

Incidentally, PG&E’s marginal price for residential electricity, at 49.78 cents per kilowatt-hour, is nearly five times the national average of 10.54 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Why would a private business mount a publicity campaign saying, essentially, “If you care about humanity, if you value the planet, if you want your children to thrive, please stop using our products”? A glance at the PG&E web site provides the answer:

Does PG&E earn more money by selling more electricity?

No. ...

Not just yet. But North Korea's sinking of a South Korean vessel raises yet another round of grim questions about how long Pyongyang can perpetuate its national hell without lurching into open, general hostilities. What to do? Read Michael Magan at Foreign Policy's outstanding Shadow Government blog.

Update: Outside the Beltway's Doug Mataconis gives pause.

Here is the liberal pundit Bill Press, in a widely circulated quote that offers a good window into the modern liberal mind. He is outraged about Obama’s sinking polls:

I think this says more about the American people than it does about President Obama. I think it just shows once again that the American people are spoiled. Basically, spoiled-- as a people, we are too critical. We are quick to rush to judgment, we are too negative, we are too impatient. Especially impatient. We want it all solved yesterday, and if you don't, I don't care who you are -- get out of the way.

And again, basically spoiled. To the point where it makes me wonder if it's even possible to govern today. I gotta tell you, I don't think Abraham Lincoln -- who certainly didn't get everything right the first time -- could govern today.

Appreciate the progressive themes here:

1) Condescension: We are “spoiled”—meaning the less sophisticated outside of Georgetown cannot appreciate the Obama godhead: apparently near 10% unemployment, apologizing to thugs abroad, a $1.7 trillion annual deficit, socialized medicine and a constant barrage of unhinged advice from cabinet members and appointees (e.g. ...

During our podcast conversation about Sarah Palin, I noticed that everyone seemed to express some variant on the sentiment that they wished they liked her more because she so obviously infuriates the people they most loathe. I discussed this phenomenon in a review of her autobiography. It's a curious kind of blackmail. Why should we pretend to love her just because pantywaist leftists are snobs about her? If the same snobs refuse to eat Velveeta, that still doesn't mean it's a great cheese.

More than seven years after the United States invaded Iraq, President Obama will confirm next week that the final American combat troops have departed. From the current issue of The Economist:

Mr. Obama always considered this a “dumb” war, and events have proved him largely right. America and its allies may have rid the Middle East of a bloodstained dictator, but Saddam Husseins’ vautned weapons of mass desctruction turned out to be a chimera and the cost in American and especially Iraqi lives has been hideous. Iraq, it is true, is no longer a dictatorship. Thanks in part to Mr. Bush’s lonely refusal in 2007 to heed the calls to cut and run, the sectarian bloodletting that followed the invasion has abated. But the country’s new democracy remains chronically incsecure…which is one reason why some 50,000 American “support” troops are to stay behind to shore it up.

Two questions—and I intend these questions as genuine, not in any way as leading or tendentious. I’d truly like to know what Ricochet members think. And I’d like to know how they think—how they frame the costs and benefits. ...

...in this case, it's on to something. Sort of, but worth thinking about. Virginia Heffernan, who it's been scientifically proven is wrong about everything, is wrong about what she frets about in the Times today, in her article "The Death of the Open Web," which is a typical piece of NYT silliness.

She's worried that with more stuff going behind a paywall -- a lot of News Corp's titles, for instance -- and she frets about the app universe, especially Apple's, for its restrictions and censorship and general all-around supervised play.

Neglecting, naturally for a New York Times writer, the giant, floating, pulsating reality in front of her. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter -- all open, WIDE open, all growing at an amazing clip. YouTube, for those who don't know, is the second-largest search engine in the world. In addition to being a wide-open platform for video. In addition to changing the entire media landscape for ever -- by creating an open, democratic, chaotic video marketplace.

How's that for open? Yes, Virginia, there are apps. And news sites behind a paywall. But that's hardly the trend. ...

I've managed to watch exactly zero minutes and zero seconds of LOST, the supposedly gripping series which has, apparently, now come to an end. Lest I seem anti-TV, let me emphasize that I've made time in my life for The X-Files, Deadwood, Project Runway, and many other shows great and small. I'm susceptible to hype. I'm inclined to trust my friends' judgments. But I never felt even a shiver of longing to dip into Lost. And with reactions like this coming in from trusted sources, I'm feeling certain of my final verdict on the end of Lost: no big loss.

That's what Simon Schama sees coming:

Objectively, economic conditions might be improving, but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising expectations. What happened to the march of income, the acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation will live better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions sinks in and engenders a sense of grievance that “Someone Else” must have engineered the common misfortune.

Yes, sometimes it's what Schama says it is -- a mere sense of grievance, as opposed to the real thing. But America's tea-party uptick in popular politics can't be explained away by reference to our grievance culture. Schama implies what Mark Lilla just made explicit in the New York Review of Books -- that populist activism today is neo-Jacobin. Pre-revolutionary France simmered in a toxic mix of real tyranny and what Tocqueville called 'literary politics' -- an approach so unreal in its unreason, abstraction, and utopianism that all attempts to realize it in the flesh and blood world of human affairs issued forth merely in the blood of the Terror. ...

Just finished taping an episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Sebastian Junger on his new book, War. Based on five extended trips to the American outposts in the Korengal Valley, the location that saw more combat than any other in the Afghan theater, War is beautifully written and full of acute, vivid portraiture--incomparably the best extended reporting on actual combat in Afghanistan that I've encountered.

Before we sat down, though, I'd developed the suspicion that Junger might simply want to discuss the experience of war, limiting himself to description and narrative while avoiding the larger questions. In the book itself, after all, he takes pains to demonstrate how irrelevant all the big think seems to the young men doing the fighting.

"The moral basis of the war," Junger writes in one place, "doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero." "It was a weird irony of the war," he writes elsewhere, "that once you were here—or your son was—the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant. ...

You've got questions. We've got answers.

Here's the place to post whatever you'd like us to talk about -- all of us, one of us, or some of us, in any combinations.

We're listening. Fire away.

I am a sexist. I believe men and women are inherently different and that it’s therefore appropriate to treat them differently. I continue to open doors for women, curb my occasionally profane tongue around them and stand when they leave the table. Feminists have occasionally berated me for this, believing such manners display a patriarchal and protective attitude toward them. They’re right: a protective patriarch is exactly the kind of patriarch I am. Compare our Muslim friends. In his book What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis reports that a Turkish visitor to Vienna in 1665 was flabbergasted by the “extraordinary spectacle” of the emperor tipping his hat to a lady. He speculated this bizarre behavior might derive from Christian respect for the Virgin Mary. Maybe so. It's certainly true that the local rules of politeness bear within them the deepest attitudes of the culture. Which is something to consider in light of the imminent stoning of Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani in Iran, an Islamic horror story which inspires in me the very impolite desire to slug somebody, preferably with a clawhammer. ...

Why can't we grow up already?

Articles like these crop up every now and then, bemoaning kids in their twenties for not facing the responsibilities of adulthood, for putting off the process of becoming grown ups by living with their parents after college, depending on them financially, delaying their careers by traveling abroad or doing Teach for America, and waiting until their mid-thirties to start families.

Now, there are numbers to back up our flakiness:

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation. ...

Ursula Hennessey writes about her disappointment on learning that Richard Thomas was participating in the sexual revolution while portraying John-Boy Walton, prompting Andrew Klavan to write in turn that Mel Gibson, now given to anti-Semitic rants, and Roman Polanski, given to statutory rape, have both produced fine movies. "We have to learn to celebrate the artist's creation as a gift from God," Andrew concludes, "and leave the artist himself to his foolishness, imperfection and inner darkness."

Well, okay, I guess, but let's not understate just how hard it can be to celebrate the way God goes about distributing those creative gifts. I mean, really. Why could John Kenneth Galbraith write better than Milton Friedman? Why does Christopher Hitchens write better than Mother Teresa? Why were Paul Newman and Marlon Brando better actors than John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart? The bad guys have Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. Our side has Tom Wolfe. That's three to one. When it comes to the arts, it's almost as if God wants the good guys to start from behind.

When--or, rather, if--I get to heaven, I intend to take this up with the Almighty. ...