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Bench Memos - National Review Online

Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

Post Frequency: 91/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 05:00:54

Obama?s U.N. Debacle

Posted on March 25, 2011
The Obama administration?s big hopes of reforming the Human Rights Council from within are in shreds. President Obama's decision to place the United Nations at the center of his foreign policy took another hit Friday as the U...

How Democrats View the World

Posted on March 25, 2011
A new Democratic foreign-policy consensus emerged from the Vietnam War, and it has been misguiding us ever since. Criticism of the Obama administration's handling of the current Libyan crisis, following hard on the heels of similar criticisms of its approach to the dramas of Tunisia and Egypt, has tended to focus on the president's personality and his alleged incapacity for global leadership...

The Damning Contradictions of Obama?s Attack on Libya

Posted on March 24, 2011
Obama's Libya policy seems unlikely to produce the desired results. Let's imagine that all goes well in Libya. The rebels, protected by air strikes, recapture lost territory and sweep into Tripoli...

On Libya, France Takes the Lead

Posted on March 24, 2011
Sarkozy vs. Qaddafi Having almost foamed at the mouth in this column for weeks about the irresolution and incongruity of the administration's Libya policy, I would be churlish and ungrateful if I did not express my sense of relief that the president moved, just before it was too late...

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Send In the Clones

Posted on March 24, 2011
Blame it on flying the girls from Brazil down to Rio. Rio de Janeiro --- So here I am, dateline Rio, just like Anderson Cooper heading into the teeth of the Cairo street riots, only with girls in thong bikinis instead of people who want to punch me in the face...

Year One of the Obamacare Era

Posted on March 24, 2011
A look back, and a look forward One year ago this week -- March 23, 2010 -- President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law. Joe Biden called it a 'big [flipping] deal...

We Do Declare

Posted on March 24, 2011
Libya and the United States Constitution Is what we're doing in Libya constitutional? How ought a president go about such a thing? We asked some experts. Bill Burck President Obama's war in Libya is unconstitutional without congressional authorization...

Ohio?s Jobs Budget

Posted on March 24, 2011
Buckeye State governor John Kasich is slashing spending to encourage economic growth. For conservatives, it's a recession-era dream budget. 'It balances the budget, preserves our tax cuts, and sets the stage for renewing the ability of Ohio to create jobs,' Ohio governor John Kasich tells National Review Online...

Revenge of the Deficit Commission?

Posted on March 24, 2011
The looming entitlement crisis is making some strange bedfellows. By rights, Obama's deficit commission should be dead and gone. Next month will mark the one-year anniversary of the first meeting of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, chaired by former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan Simpson (R...

The worst celebrations, &c.

Posted on March 24, 2011
I'm thinking of Itamar at the moment -- the massacre of that family. And I'll say what I've said many times, over many years: It's not so much the murder of Israelis as the mass public celebrations by Palestinians -- that's what gets you. Every society has its murderers and horrors...

A Man-Made Energy Crisis

Posted on March 24, 2011
Obama?s policy is working . . . to raise energy costs. Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California — and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad? That should be a stupid question...

An Arab Spring?

Posted on March 24, 2011
We don?t know that yet. Readers of tea leaves, tarot cards, and goat entrails may be able to predict the future. But prognostication is an ability that few journalists, politicians, diplomats, and intelligence officials have demonstrated consistently over time...

London Journal, Part II

Posted on March 23, 2011
Yesterday, I had an account of the memorial service for John Gross, the late literary critic, and all-around intellectual star. Actually, 'account' is not the right word: I jotted some notes on that service. Jot some more notes today, about London? These'll be mainly light...

A Political Dispute, Not a Legal One

Posted on March 23, 2011
Trimming Obama?s Libya ambitions is a job for Congress, not the courts. On the Corner, NR editor Rich Lowry notes that Harvard's Jack Goldsmith, formerly chief of the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (and author of the invaluable book, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration), has offered characteristically valuable insights on the question of whether President Obama acted constitutionally in starting a war with Libya...

Libya's Backseat Drivers

Posted on March 23, 2011
The Arab League is not a force for good in the Middle East. Maybe the next time Pres. Barack Obama is tempted to follow the leadership of the Arab League, he'll think twice. Having brandished the Arab League's call as the classiest of multilateral credentials for going to war in Libya, and praised its members as partners, Obama is now left with little more from this crew than promises and the on-again off-again hectoring of Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa...

The Horror of Killing One?s Own

Posted on March 23, 2011
Are we just going to let it happen? Yemen's security forces have killed more than three dozen protesters in the last few days. Qaddafi has announced that allied efforts to destroy his anti-missile defenses are a form of terrorism and as a consequence, he is prepared to decimate the rebels in Libya...

Servants, Not Servile

Posted on March 23, 2011
One congressman seizes the moment. Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R., Michigan) is author of the new book Seize Freedom! American Truths and Renewal in a Chaotic Age, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute...

The FDA?s Genetic Paternalism

Posted on March 23, 2011
Stifling research, costing Americans more, and sending them into the black market ? some likely consequences of overregulation Ever wonder why your hair is the color it is, where your remote ancestors resided, or whether you carry genes for diseases that could affect you or your children? As of today, it's not possible to know all of that with certainty -- not even close...

Drilling Ken Salazar

Posted on March 23, 2011
The Interior Department drags its heels, then cooks the books. After two years of unrepentant contempt for science, jobs, law, and truth, why should Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's words mean anything anymore? While President Obama promotes offshore drilling overseas, thousands of miles away in Brazil, Salazar now promises to revitalize America's oil and gas industry...

Missed Opportunity in Libya

Posted on March 23, 2011
Obama wanted a war completely on his own terms. He got what he wished for. As someone who supported a Libyan no-fly zone from the earliest days of what once seemed like a revolution but now looks like a civil war, I have to admit that Operation Odyssey Dawn may be a perfect example of being careful about what you wish for...

The Tea Party Talks Libya

Posted on March 23, 2011
The conservative activists are divided over the constitutionality of the president?s actions. Ask a tea partier if Obamacare is constitutional, and you'll receive a quick, firm no. But ask him if Operation Odyssey Dawn passes constitutional muster, and a range of answers pour out...

Are We Broke?

Posted on March 23, 2011
On both measures of debt, we are in trouble. With the United States running a $1.65 trillion budget deficit and getting ready to hit the $14.3 trillion national-debt limit, a strange new mantra has surfaced among advocates of big government: We're not really facing a budget crisis...

Wrong, Baby, Wrong

Posted on March 22, 2011
How to undo the Obamacare disaster and do health-care reform right. ObamaCare Is Wrong for America: That's the title of a new book out today, from familiar National Review Online authors Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute, and Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation...

Running for the Exits

Posted on March 22, 2011
Hedge funds are dumping Treasury bonds. Do they know something? The wisest and most successful bond investor of all time, Bill Gross, has dumped his bond fund's $150 billion investment in U.S...

Our Libyan March Madness

Posted on March 22, 2011
The prognosis for Libya might be better if our president cared more about it than about the NCAA. The Obama administration's Libyan strategy is a paradox -- resulting from the president's belatedly announcing that Moammar Qaddafi must go, using military force against him, and then denying that our objective is to see him leave...

Another Three Mile Island

Posted on March 22, 2011
Fukushima will probably be mostly harmless, misunderstood by the media, and a rallying point for anti-nuclear activists. ‘Nobody at Three Mile Island was actually hurt or killed, or anything of that nature,' remembers John McGaha, formerly a senior executive of Entergy, a Mississippi company that runs and operates nuclear utilities...

London Journal, Part I

Posted on March 22, 2011
As you may remember, John Gross, the remarkable man of letters, died in January. There was an outpouring of appreciation for him in newspapers and magazines all over. This was in part because writers know other writers -- and they have platforms (i...

The Fog of Obfuscation

Posted on March 22, 2011
In Libya, the only goal that makes sense is the ouster of Moammar Qaddafi. Everyone knows about the fog of war. In Libya, Pres. Barack Obama has added to the inherent indecipherability of immediate military events the fog of obfuscation...

Arab League Redefines Chutzpah

Posted on March 22, 2011
Damned if we do, damned if we don't Many readers will recall one of the most famous headlines in modern American newspaper history -- the 1975 New York Daily News title 'Ford to City: Drop Dead...

Obama?s Incoherent Case for War

Posted on March 22, 2011
The president can?t distinguish the Libya campaign from the Iraq War. In the Democratic primary campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama scored points because he, unlike many Democrats, had opposed the Iraq War from the start...

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