Could we get this story picked up and circulated in the Muslim world? The United States elects its first Muslim congressman, and when a pundit suggests he ought not to be able to swear an oath of office on the Quran, there’s a near-unanimous condemnation of the idea, including calls by many prominent Jews to […]

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My friend David Glenn at the Chronicle of Higher Ed forwards this paper on government responses to natural disasters. The upshot is that in the wake of events like Hurricane Katrina, it becomes politically inevitable that the government will pour money into relief for the inadequately insured, but that it typically does so in an […]

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Just made a random last-minute decision to go check out these guys at Black Cat if anyone else is so disposed.

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In opening scene of The Wire‘s season finale, we see a bit of graffiti in the police department bathroom that reads (referring to the deputy of operations) “Rawls sucks cock.” Sigrid Fry-Revere offers a similar assessment in less crude language in a pair of posts over at Cato-at-Liberty, the first of which is titled “Why […]

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The Libertarian Party turns 35 today.

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Ezra has a prima facie reasonable enough defense of New York’s transfat ban: Restaurants don’t have labels. And they’re not one size fits, or serves, all. You could force a big sign in each establishment that uses the substances, or a little emblem next to each food that carries the fats, and that would be […]

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Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr takes one commenter’s remarks on the treatment of Jose Padilla as an occasion to assert that “sarcasm is not an argument”: The problem with sarcasm is that it pokes fun at the other side without actually making an argument. If you happen to agree with the speaker’s view already, […]

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Geekademic legal theorist and free software guru Eben Moglen gave an excellent keynote address at this year’s Plone conference. Check it out.

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If you’re interested in constitutional interpretation (and, really, who isn’t?), you’ve got to be practically giddy about a debate between Justices Breyer and Scalia on jurisprudential theory: Audio and video are available at the Federalist Society website. If you don’t have time for the full hour and a half now, there’s a four-minute appetizer excerpt […]

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Jason Kuznicki suggests that I might “outdo” him in terms of—well, I’m not sure, obscurity? indie cred?—in the quest for the “perfect album,” which he describes as: the rare compilation where every track is outstanding, and where all of them fit well together, such that you never want to skip a single song. But as […]

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