Free Republic

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will speak at a right-leaning policy group’s event recognizing the adoption of the Constitution next month. Cheney will give the annual Constitution Day Lecture for the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank, on Sept. 19. The Wyoming Republican will speak on why President Lincoln’s call for patriotism grounded in “reverence for the Constitution” is essential for defending “our inheritance of liberty.”

President Bush appointed a longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday to be his top domestic policy adviser, a post that has been vacant since February, when Claude A. Allen stepped down after being charged with stealing more than $5,000 in a phony refund scheme. Karl Zinsmeister, who has worked the past 12 years as editor in chief of the American Enterprise magazine, is slated to assume his White House post June 12. At the institute, he focused on examining cultural issues, as well as social and economic trends. His columns for the magazine included pieces praising Wal-Mart's efficiency...

...[I]n almost every other consumer industry-- booksellers, retailers, home appliances, insurance, banking, stock brokers-- the introduction of Internet and discount sellers has been a phenomenal financial benefit to customers.... Economists call this process of squeezing out transaction costs "disintermediation." If any industry is ripe for this, it is the $70 billion-a-year real estate brokerage market. Yes, fees have fallen modestly to about 5.1% on average in recent years. But a new study... concludes that in an unimpeded free market, fees should be dropping much faster -- particularly amid a real estate boom that has doubled home values over the past...

The Supremes, after all, waded into the 2000 election only with great reluctance, and only in the face of gross judicial overreach: ..."the problem in 2000 was not that the U.S. Supreme Court acted politically but that the Florida Supreme Court did so — not once but twice." Today, five of the seven Florida Supreme Court judges from 2000 remain on the bench. In Ohio.... Then there's the fiasco-waiting-to-happen in Colorado — a ballot initiative that would turn the state from a winner-take-all to a proportional split of electoral college votes. If that had been in effect in 2000, Al...

...The Bush administration filed its answer two Septembers ago with the National Security Strategy, a 31-page document whose most famous word was "preemption." It said, "In an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world's most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather." Preemption now is wholly associated with the Iraq war. But whether to act preemptively again -- or not -- is almost certain to re-emerge over the next four years with another country that we know but cannot verify is building a nuclear weapon. Just this week in an interview...

Bird's EyeKarl Zinsmeister Old And In The Way  In April of this year, I was asked by the State Department to give a presentation on American culture at a large conference of European academics, government officials, and businessmen held in Warsaw, Poland. The event was sponsored by a major German foundation, and there were hundreds of Germans and Poles in attendance, plus smaller numbers of Brits, Scandinavians, Dutch, and other Europeans. There were barons and sirs and Danish executresses in microskirts and fey Frenchmen and Italian journalists sucking cigarettes as if a firing squad awaited--the whole panoply of Eurocharacters,...