Free Republic

Several days into a campaign of air and sea strikes against Libya, I agree with many of the arguments from critics of the intervention: President Obama acted imprudently in committing American forces to a conflict with an ill-defined national security justification. It is unclear how, on balance, a third war in a Muslim country helps our foreign policy goals. It is uncertain that the intervention will produce a regime more to our liking than Qaddafi's. It is hard to justify military action in Libya while the United States does not use military force in the face of brutal crackdowns by...

When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats' private prayers, but I do hear the stories they're telling themselves. The new meme is that there's a civil war raging in the Republican Party. The Tea Party will wreck it from within and prove to be the Democrats' salvation. I don't blame anyone for seeking a deus ex machina when about to be swept out to sea. But this salvation du jour is flimsier than most. In fact, the big political story of the year is the contrary: that...

In another blow to Israeli shares, the Harvard Management Company notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday that it had sold all its holdings in Israeli companies during the second quarter of 2010. No reason for the sale was mentioned. The Harvard Management Company manages Harvard University's endowment. (Snip)Harvard Management Company's 13-F Form shows some interesting investments. Its two largest holdings, each worth $295 million, are in iShares ETFs, one on Chinese equities, and the other on emerging markets.

Clinton supposedly had his own private legal team for the Lewinsky scandal. Any work that Kagan did was paid for by the taxpayer and should be made public. If Clinton used her or any of her staff for private advice, it would be an ethical issue that should immediately disqualify her from serving on the Supreme Court.

At a conference yesterday, White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers repeated a superficial critique of the U.S. corporate income tax that we’ve heard often from the Obama administration. Politico notes that Summers suggested “that U.S. corporate tax rates are relatively low, despite complaints from U.S. corporations.” And they quote him: “If you look at taxes paid by corporations as a fraction of profits, they’re actually very low” because the U.S. tax code is replete with “evasion and avoidance.” The Obama team’s solution to the supposed problem is to pile more complex IRS rules and regulations on U.S. corporations...

Are you racially biased? Harvard University has been trying to find out with its racism test, Project Implicit. The less than 10-minute test throws different races at you and has you identify the images as "bad" or "good" as quickly as you can. The idea is that your first reaction is usually the most honest. You can try the test out for yourself. Simply click on the "Demonstration" button and then click the "Race IAT" button. Project Implicit, started 11 years ago by Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia, is a joint investigation into our subconscious...

Large swaths of economics are going to have to be rethought on the basis of what's happened." So said Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, in an interview in the weeks after the markets crashed a year ago. Yet to a remarkable degree, economic thinking hasn't changed very much at all. (Click here to follow Michael Hirsh). Now financier George Soros is announcing a $50 million effort to speed things along. This week Soros is gathering some of the leading practitioners of the market-skeptic school, who were marginalized during the era of "free-market fundamentalism," among them Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz,...

he dollar will extend its drop versus the euro over the next two to five years, falling as much as 20 percent to an all-time low under a widening U.S. budget deficit, Harvard University’s Professor Niall Ferguson said. Policy makers favor the dollar’s slide as a means of supporting a recovery from the worst economic slump since the Great Depression even as they voice support for a strong greenback, Ferguson said in an interview on Bloomberg Radio. A weak dollar is “the simplest solution to most of America’s problems right now,” said Ferguson, author of “The Ascent of Money: A...

Verbotten. story here.

--snip--The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Minuteman Project Founder Jim Gilchrist News Release     For Immediate Release October 15, 2009  Media contact: Tim Bueler (530) 401-3285   Anti-Free Speech Fanatics at Harvard Threaten Disruption and Violence       Cambridge , Ma.-Harvard University seems to be resigned to suffer the same embarrassing fate as Columbia University in 2006 as they scamper to rescind their previous invitation to Jim Gilchrist, founder and president of the Minuteman Project, to participate in its immigration symposium scheduled for this Saturday, October 17 in Cambridge , Ma.         Despite appearing at last February’s symposium at the Harvard Law School on immigration law...

Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead. The 1,000-page monstrosity that emerged in various editions from Congress was done in by widespread national revulsion not just at its expense and intrusiveness but also at the mendacity with which it is being sold. You don't need a PhD to see that the promise to expand coverage and reduce costs is a crude deception, or that cutting $500 billion from Medicare without affecting care is a fiction. But there is an exit strategy. And a politically clever one, if the Democrats are smart enough to seize it. (1) Forget the public option. Whatever the...