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It is an interesting legal question whether a man who fraudently claims to be a Nobel laureate in a legal filing can, in any sense, be defamed.

The GOP needs to use their one big chit in the tax negotiation. They need to demand that included in this deal is increasing the national debt limit. In return for increasing the national debt limit they need to get something tangible. Something like no tax increase. They can not accept illusions of spending cuts that will never happen. They could link the debt ceiling to the current tax code and everytime the debt limit comes up, the tax code would too.

To me seemingly lost among this hand wringing today is that Romney lost to Obama by less than 300,000 votes of out almost 117,000,000 votes casts. The electoral college can fool one into thinking a close election is a blowout. This was a close election. As of when I started to write this, had Mitt Romney won 46,040 more votes in Florida and 33,770 more votes in New Hampshire, 100,764 more votes in Ohio and 106,726 more votes in Virginia or 287,301 out of more than 17,500,000 cast in those 4 states. http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results People here and on the radio need...

Yesterday I posted about how Alan Dershowitz alleged that Zimmerman prosecutor Angela Corey called up Harvard Law School complaining about Dershowitz and treatening to sue for libel based on Dershowitz’s criticisms of her handling of the case. The whole incident seemed strange, and reflected conduct that should be off limits for any prosecutor and certainly for a senior prosecutor on a high profile case. It appears, however, that the Dershowitz incident was no isolated incident. According to Ron Littlepage, a columnist for the (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, Corey has done this several times before:

If this is true, then Zimmerman prosecutor Angela Corey needs to step off the case. Alan Dershowitz has been a harsh critic of Zimmerman prosecutor Angela Corey. Among his criticisms is that Corey has been too politicized in charging Second Degree Murder.

There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called "debt ceiling" negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one's debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers. Actually, it's more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You...

Take a look at this photograph. It appeared in The Toronto Star’s education section on Saturday: It’s the scene every Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. That’s not a private academy, it’s a public school funded by taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what’s going on is a prayer service – oh, relax, it’s not Anglican or anything improper like that; it’s Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don’t worry, it’s just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams’ disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off...

This fall marks the centenary of William Mitchell. You may not have heard of him, but in his day he was a big cheese. Indeed, he was a big processed cheese, with what’s now Kraft Foods. Mitchell invented Cool Whip and quick-set Jell-O and powdered egg whites for cake mix. He was in the grand tradition of American entrepreneurial energy: Henry Ford made travel faster, Alexander Graham Bell made communication faster, Bill Mitchell made Jell-O even faster. When he died, I wrote an appreciation and noted his one great miscalculation, late in life. He noticed the dahlias growing on his...

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, "respectable" newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees' penchant for "hacking" the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn't as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

With respect to our friend Hugh Hewitt, I think Michael Walsh’s column gets to the big problem with Mitt. It’s not that he’s a glib, finger-in-the-windy opportunist of no fixed principles; it’s worse than that: He has a weird knack for reaching into the icebox to pull out the conventional wisdom when it’s five years past its sell-by date.

Mitch Daniels has wrapped up his "To be or not to be" routine, and, according to Paul Rahe, left the GOP looking like a hamlet without a prince. Paul is upset. I'm less so. As I said on the radio some months back, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's ability to screw up its presidential nomination. The GOP had a grand night last November only because the entire party establishment was more or less absent from the 2010 election dynamic. It would be unreasonable to expect that luck to hold, and a presidential year requires a single frontman for...

One of the reasons why I’m not in favor of Lindsey Graham–style appeasement is because many of the fellows we’re trying to stay on the right side of are, not to put too fine a point on it, nuts. They’re several suras short of a Koran. And attempting to appease loons is an even more forlorn enterprise than attempting to appease the merely evil. Take, for example, our friends the Saudis. It’s a wealthy and influential nation. These aren’t your illiterate Pushtun goatherds. Look at the picture accompanying this fairly typical news story in today’s Arab News: State-of-the-art office chairs,...

‘Why is there no looting in Japan?” wondered a headline in the Daily Telegraph. So did a lot of other folks. Various answers were posited: The Japanese are a highly civilized people — which would have been news to the 22 British watchkeepers on the island of Tarawa who were tied to trees, beheaded, set alight, and tossed in a pit less than 70 years ago.

The Tunisians got rid of Ben Ali in nothing flat, Mubarak took a couple of weeks longer to hit the road, and an exciting new “Islamic Emirate” has just been proclaimed in South Yemen. But, with his usual unerring instinct, Barack Obama has chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement who can’t get rid of the local strongman even when you lend them every functioning Nato air force. From The Washington Post:

Seems like old times. The great columnist Andrew Bolt made some mildly pointed observations about prominent and strikingly pasty-faced Australians choosing to identify as “aborigines”, and found himself hauled into court by the thought police:

If I recall correctly, we went into Libya – or, at any rate, over Libya – to stop the brutal Gadhafi dictatorship killing the Libyan people. And, thanks to our efforts, a whole new mass movement of freedom-loving democrats now has the opportunity to kill the Libyan people. As the Los Angeles Times reported from Benghazi, gangs of young gunmen are roaming the city "rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies." According to the New York Times, "Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned...

Hillaire Belloc on Fleet Street: "You cannot hope to bribe or twist Thank God, the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do unbribed There’s no occasion to." We may have to modify that for the court eunuchs of Obama’s state media:

The money-no-object Metropolitan Police had helicopters whirring non-stop over Central London during today’s mass hallucination (they’re still overhead as I write), but, as usual, not a lot of competent policing on the ground. As is their wont, they did little to prevent property damage – or the general intimidation of visitors to the capital by so-called “anarchists” (an odd term for pro-government welfare-funded thugs).

It is tempting and certainly very easy to point out that Obama's war (or Obama's "kinetic military action," or "time-limited, scope-limited military action," or whatever the latest ever more preposterous evasion is) is at odds with everything candidate Obama said about U.S. military action before his election. And certainly every attempt the president makes to explain his Libyan adventure is either cringe-makingly stupid ("I'm accustomed to this contradiction of being both a commander-in-chief but also somebody who aspires to peace") or alarmingly revealing of a very peculiar worldview: "That's why building this international coalition has been so important," he said...

Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Dan Blumenthal offers an odd little essay called “Why It’s Still A Unipolar Era“: "The current fashion in foreign policy argumentation is to explain that America is in decline, particularly relative to Asia… The new declinists have a point—the raw numbers are impressive. But power is about much more than raw numbers. It is the most elusive concept in politics. It usually cannot be measured accurately until it is used."