“There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi,” journalist David Corn wrote in left-leaning Mother Jones magazine. “But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story.”

Nuance you see.

Robbie George isn't the only conservative professor at Princeton, but there are precious few...

Not quite.  If private ownership of firearms is abolished, then local, state, and federal law enforcement will still use them.  Likewise with prosperity, for whenever the government appropriates private wealth, it will use it for purposes both good and ill.  So they do not deny human agency.  Rather, they would restrict the right of the people to use guns, wealth, or the press to promote their self-chosen ends.

But this position is only tenable if one believes that the State can make better choices about these matters than the people themselves.  And that is hard to square with a notion of a limited, republican government.

A fine choice, Mandrake!

Murray has an interesting way of dividing presidential epochs:  Washington to McKinley--McKinley was in many ways the last of an old, order, the post-Civil War/Reconstruction Republican party that focused primarily on economic growth, catered to capital, and resisted the bubbling populist movements that clamored for redistribution; McKinley to Eisenhower--Eisenhower, our last general-president; Eisenhower to Bush--that is, everything before our "new era of responsibility" (see Obama's first inaugural address).

To all Ricochetti, I recommend a fine book on the presidents and power players from Harrison to Coolidge: "Masks in a Pageant" by William Allen White.  It's completely engrossing, the best book on presidential politics I've encountered.  It has given me an extraordinary respect for certain presidents--Harrison, Cleveland, and Coolidge--now forgotten (though Coolidge is enjoying a richly-deserved revival).  

If one accepts White's account of those presidencies and personalities--and he knew several personally--then something has been lost.  I believe many of those men would be uncomfortable with the ever-increasing powers and trappings of our modern Imperial presidency and the concomitant decline of humility and duty as animating principles in political rhetoric.

About an hour ago, when I was jogging around Greenwich Village, I saw a small, white bill plastered to a sign post warning "May Day is coming."  

When I'm outside next Saturday, let's hope the stench of the marauding horde will alert me of the imminent danger before I'm overrun.

Speaking of sovereignty, Professor Yoo, I would love to a Law Talk discussion of the Supreme Court's vexed (to put it politely) treatment of the Eleventh Amendment.  I think Hans v. Louisiana is utterly indefensible and the only reason it still stands is because the Court--notably its right wing--steadfastly refuses to back down from its mistake.  On this I stand with--gasp!--Justice Brennan.

Probably the first time those words have been uttered on Ricochet.

Well that didn't take long.

Today the Court agreed to take on another dispute over lawsuits in American courts against foreign companies.  The granted case, DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman (docket 11-965), also involves ATS, but the issue could have a more general impact on lawsuits against business, and might affect state as well as federal courts’ powers.  The issue is whether a corporation may be sued based solely on the fact that it has an indirect, corporate subsidiary that provides some services where the case was filed.  DaimlerChrysler is a German company, and it was sued in federal court in California for alleged human rights violations in Argentina for actions by a subsidiary in that country.  The basis for suing the company in the U.S. was that it has another subsidiary that sells the company’s autos in California.  (Daimler was merged with the U.S. company, Chrysler Corp., in 1998.)

Kiobel was ostensibly a unanimous opinion,  but Justice Roberts' majority and Justice Breyer's concurrence split on the question of whether ATS could apply extraterritorially in very extreme cases involving conduct comparable to piracy, and where considerations of comity with foreign sovereigns are not in play.

I'm Reformed and drifting away from libertarianism toward what I will call "civic republicanism."

America's Chechens came home to roost! #tooeasy 

I look forward to hearing about how America failed these immigrants and turned them into terrorists. If only our nation were less xenophobic, then they wouldn't try to kill us.

They won't read him his Miranda rights and they won't treat him as an "enemy combatant." That seems reasonable to me.

If only there were a way to foresee problems with a bill that was 2700+ pages long, that restructured 1/6 of the economy, and that no one in Congress read before voting for it!

You all may thank me for making the motion that equal suffrage in the Senate cannot be subject to amendment!

I see you're making predictions again, Professor.  Is that wise, given your track record?

But I hope it will be so!

Both clips show the progressives' approach to "social costs."  In the first video, Perry argues that it takes a village because "private parenting" is not sufficient to produce well-educated, productive members of society.  In the second, Perry argues that raising a child is expensive and mothers are often unable to handle those costs and shift them to society as a whole.  

This creates a paradox.  The problem of social costs leads Perry to recommend collective action for decisions about education, yet demand individual autonomy for decisions to abort an unborn human being.  In both cases she reveals the progressives' aversion to letting the costs fall on the individual, forcing him or her to internalize and take responsibility for the consequences of her decisions.