I confess I find the constitutional argument a little strange, Adam. The statute explicitly gives the President the right to make this appointment. Other statutes explicitly give him the right to appointment assistants to the President within the Executive Office of the President. Are you arguing that the statute violates the Appointments Clause? Given the Bush Administration's extraordinary abuse of signing statements, however, the new-found conservative skepticism of executive power is at least refreshing.

For what it's worth, here's one place where most of the folks here and a Liberal Troll like myself might agree on: filibuster reform. At the very least, appointments to executive branch offices should not be subject to filibuster. That would make it difficult for the Senate Republican caucus to filibuster Deputy Assistant Secretaries of Everything, as they are doing now, and is probably the reason for Obama's move, but it would also prevent the Dems from doing it under a Republican President. And I think that that would be good for everyone.

Adam, you have a point there: I was just arguing that the First Amendment goes farther than just banning prior restraints. But Eugene might be right about the problem: if you can ban speech from a funeral, which is a private affair, could you ban speech from a private university? Students are SOMEWHAT captive there as well. I'm wary, but could be persuaded. This is going to turn on some subtleties about the nature of the forum and the degree of captivity. (Marlon Perkins will make a guest appearance).

Going against Harry Reid is easy! That's why there ISN'T a liberal conspiracy: we never listen to anyone. You guys are much better than us at being on-message. I'm also supposed to be part of a Jewish conspiracy, and I haven't gotten my orders on that one, either.

Dave Carter (Sorry, I don't know how to embed yet): Great Britain's libel laws are much more pro-plaintiff than ours, so it's much easier to sue someone for libel there than here. But I think we do it better here. More speech isn't always better, but I'd be willing to bet that way if I had to. Example: David Irving, a "historian" (to use that term loosely) who insist that much of the Holocause didn't happen, repeatedly sues people under British libel laws for saying he's a Holocaust denier. Deborah Lipstadt, a distinguished historian of the Holocaust, had to spend tens of thousands defending herself for disagreeing with Irving in print. http://www.amazon.com/History-Trial-Court-Holocaust-Denier/dp/0060593776/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283908102&sr=8-1

Imagine if you had to defend yourself in a libel case every time you criticized a politician. The Sullivan case arose because segregationists nearly shut down the NYT's coverage of the civil rights movement.

There are problems with the difficulty here of suing for libel, but I'd rather have our problems than Britiain's.

The First Amendment actually WOULD cover this. Recall New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the famous libel case: there, the Supremes held that Alabama libel law violated the Free Speech clause because of the chilling effect. There wasn't any prior restraint, but that didn't matter.

As an Official Liberal Troll on the site, I agree with everyone that the speech here is disgusting. I also would not be too upset if he woke up with a horse's head in his bed....

Nice try, but it doesn't wash. Ryan didn't make his revenue estimates in consultation with Treasury -- he says he made it "in consultation with Treasury and other experts", which is a weasel phrase meaning "I made the revenue estimates talking to the people who told me what I wanted to hear." If this really was a Treasury estimate, then there would be a Treasury document stating how it was done. How precisely were these estimates made? Where did they come from? What were the assumptions? Ryan won't say, and he won't ask the JCT to make 10-year estimates because that would be transparent.

Suderman claims that Ryan's estimates were based on the alternative fiscal scenario, but Ryan himself belies this by saying that CBO wouldn't give him a revenue estimate.

Bottom line: Ryan wants to take credit for his spending cuts, but not account for the massive revenue losses of the tax cuts. He believes that massive tax cuts will not yield to any loss of revenue, but he can't get anyone credible to say that, so he just skates over that. There's a word for that: flimflamming.

Rob (and Trace) -- I take your points about over-regulation, but it's also important to recognize that there has been a real and significant problem with outright fraud and criminal behavior in a lot of vocational schools. I remember working on this issue briefly a few years ago: people would get federal money to learn, e.g., how to repair computers, would learn nothing, would use up their grant money, and the operator would skip town. For example: http://articles.latimes.com/1997-01-18/local/me-19724_1_pell-grant-program. My vague sense -- and it is only a sense -- is that Harkin doesn't care about DeVry: he cares about Joe's Computer Training "School" that rips people off. No one has ever accused Harkin of being a legislative craftsman, and maybe the regs are overbroad. But the origins of this, at least, are not about snobbery: "(Re)-Presenting the Modern: Studies in Gender Identity and Power in the 18th Century French Lyric", on the other hand, is.

By the way, Rob, what'd you get in that class? ;-)