Free Republic

WILLIAMS BAY, Wis. -- After more than 100 years of operation, the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, is closing. Owned by the University of Chicago, the observatory is slated to cease operations Oct. 1 “Unfortunately, operating Yerkes no longer makes sense for the university from a programmatic or cost standpoint," said David Fithian, U of C's executive vice president, in a statement. "Drawing to a close our operations there is the first step in a collaborative process to determine the ultimate disposition of the buildings and property. We currently have no specific plans nor have we approached any potential...

It’s a lie often repeated that Obama was a Constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago law school. In fact, he was just a lecturer there for a short time who never much impressed his colleagues. Watching this administration in action one wonders what, if anything, he understands about the Constitution at all. His is an administration based on flouting it. It’s true that the judicial process moves slowly and such conduct can continue for a while until halted, but repeatedly the courts are catching up. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously against the administration 20 times....

President Barack Obama heads to law school next week to push his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Obama adviser Brian Deese said Friday that Obama will return Thursday to the University of Chicago Law School to argue for Senate consideration of the appeals judge’s nomination. Obama taught constitutional law at the university for several years before he entered politics. …

Mike Murphy, who helmed the Right to Rise super PAC backing Jeb Bush's presidential run, will lead seminars on the race for the White House as a University of Chicago Institute of Politics fellow, the school announced Monday. . . . Murphy, who is based in Los Angeles, spent more than $100 million through Right to Rise in his attempt to boost Bush's White House run

I had to cringe during a particularly elitist remark that left Obama's mouth during his rteary town-hall on gun control; "I believe in the Second Amendment. It is there, written on the paper. It guarantees a right to bear arms. No matter how many times people try to twist my words around -- I taught constitutional law, I know a little bit about this -- I get it." Well, a colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago, economist John Lott quoted Obama as having told him that he doesn't believe that people should be able to own guns when...

For Republican presidential contenders challenged by the media, the go-to answer has become a claim of victimhood: You are biased against us. As Marco Rubio put it at the CNBC debate last month, "The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC. It’s called the mainstream media." Are media outlets really biased against Republican candidates? One of the most careful studies, by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago, doesn’t find much evidence of that. Its central conclusion is that readers...

A recent study that was conducted by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab has learned that Chicago criminals do not acquire their guns from gun shops, gun shows or the internet. The study examined and interviewed inmates in Chicago’s Cook County Jail who are either facing current gun charges, or have a background consisting of firearms related convictions. The study learned that virtually zero criminals have ever used the internet or gun shows, because that method is easily traceable. It’s much safer for a criminal to acquire firearms on the streets where they’re harder to keep track of, and that’s...

Longtime presidential adviser David Axelrod claims 'there hasn't been a major scandal' in the Obama White House – and draws a mix of applause and laughter Longtime Obama administration political insider David Axelrod claimed on Monday that the Obama administration hasn't been tainted by a smidgen of scandal. The surprising boast came during a Q&A at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, an organization he founded and leads. 'I'm proud of the fact that basically you have had an administration in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,' Axelrod said. 'And I think that...

The Obama administration's nominee for a senior legal position at the Pentagon is one of the congressional staffers accused by Republicans and intelligence officials of stealing classified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, Fox News has learned -- and the controversy could imperil her shot at a major career promotion. Sources on Capitol Hill and in the intelligence community say Alissa Starzak, a majority staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) who has been nominated for the position of general counsel to the U.S. Army, is one of two SSCI employees accused by the panel's Republicans, and by...

Not what it appears to be: the Archaic Mark LONDON. A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early 20th-century forgery. Although speculation as to the authenticity of the Archaic Mark codex has been rife for more than 60 years, prior to this definitive research many believed it was an early record (possibly as early as the 14th century) of the Gospel of Mark and the closest of any extant manuscript to the world’s oldest...

The story begins with a letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. The celebrated physicist warned the president that Nazi Germany was developing the makings of an atomic bomb. Roosevelt knew what would happen if Hitler got such a weapon. The president ordered a massive secret project to make sure the U.S. beat him to it. Scientists from all over the country were enlisted in the effort. Early in 1942 Enrico Fermi and a team of physicists gathered at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. Their goal was to develop a self-sustaining nuclear pile. This was the...

Documents obtained by The Daily Caller show that President Barack Obama’s close friend Eric Whitaker, who runs the University of Chicago Medical Center’s Urban Health Initiative, spoke at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago-area church in 2006. Whitaker was a speaker at Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ during a Sept. 17, 2006 “Health Care Justice Forum,” according to a church bulletin TheDC obtained. The bulletin is no longer on the church’s website. Whitaker made headline news Monday when New York Times bestselling author Edward Klein alleged during a radio interview with Sean Hannity that Whitaker offered Wright $150,000 to stay silent...

University of Chicago Law Professor Richard A Epstein has brilliantly argued that the Reid bill unconstitutionally turns private health insurers into public utilities. Luckily for those who haven't time to study his detailed argument, he's now summarized it nicely in the Wall Street Journal: "As Harry Reid's 2,000 page health-care bill is being rammed through the Senate, most of the public debate has been focused on its expanded coverage, its now defunct public option, and its high taxes. Lost in the shuffle has been its intensely coercive requirements on health insurance issuers, especially in the individual and small group markets....

You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. A new intellectual champion of absolutism has now emerged. Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the...

Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, once worked for a man who was an identified member of the Communist Party USA, a registered agent of the Soviet Union and a paid disseminator of Soviet black propaganda. This man went on to become a key Chicago political fixer who helped elect communist linked politicians including the late Chicago mayor Harold Washington and former US Senator Carol Moseley Braun. This man knew Barack Obama and was a key member of an organisation which endorsed Barack Obama in his 2004 US Senate race. Barack and Michelle Obama were active members of this...

There's a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago--at least we'll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems likely. The U of C may be best known these days as home to the law school where Barack Obama used to lecture on constitutional law (twice a week!), but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc.,...

Academic papers posted on a Harvard Web site don't normally attract enthusiastic praise from prominent white supremacists. But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has won David Duke's endorsement as "a modern Declaration of American Independence" and a vindication of the ex-Klansman's earlier work, presumably including his pathbreaking book, "Jewish Supremacism." Walt and Mearsheimer contend that American national security dictates distancing ourselves from the state of Israel; that U.S. support for Israel has led to such disasters as America's status as the No. 1 target for Islamic terrorists; and that such an otherwise inexplicable...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

<p>Kathy Boudin, carrying roses she was given after her mother died, walks out of a Westchester prison yesterday (above). She was jailed 22 years ago for her role in the infamous Brinks heist that left two cops and a guard dead.</p>

The now infamous remarks of Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova of Columbia University calling for "a million Mogadishus" are appalling enough in their own right. Even some of the leftist faculty with whom De Genova shared the stage in this anti-war teach-in, such as historian Eric Foner, have prudently distanced themselves from his comments. What his sentiments reveal about higher education in this country, where professors at Ivy League institutions come from and what they are doing when war does not offer the occasion to publicly denounce America, is far more alarming. Now in a tenure-track position in anthropology at...