If Only Nixon Knew you could do this with an Enemies List In the too weird to not be true category: Vanity Fair reported in the article that in 2000 [Michael] Jackson attended a voodoo ritual in Switzerland where a witch doctor promised that Spielberg, music mogul David Geffen and 23 other people on the […]

Rate cut 1/4 point To 1%, the lowest level since 1958: NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – The Federal Reserve cut its key short- term interest rate Wednesday by a quarter percentage point to the lowest level in 45 years, expressing worry that the economy still isn’t strong enough to fight off deflation. Because the rate cut […]

Press Still Turning Still slowly, but in ways medium and small (not yet big), the press is continuing to be less sycophantic towards the administration (see posts here, here, and the initial post here). Josh Marshall picks up on this phenomenon in this post [emphasis mine]: Actually, in my Wednesday morning column in The Hill […]

Quotas and Metrics Rehnquist made the argument that Michigan’s bonus point system is tantamount to a quota system, which was ruled unconstitutional under Bakke. Commenter Andrew wrote below that “There might be a distinction between quota or bonus-point affirmative action programs and a more subjective system, but I can’t see it.” At first glance, there […]

Slow News Day Normal posting should be resuming now, but other than yesterday’s batch of Supreme Court rulings, news is pretty slow. Iraq is still a mess (see this one, also). The economy is still in bad enough shape that almost everyone thinks the Fed will drop rates on Wednesday. The only debate is whether […]

Good News Bad News News Actually, it’s on balance good news, at least compared to what the SCOTUS could have done: Affirmative action is constitutional. Using race-based bonus points is not. (Salon here and the NYT here). It was pretty easy to peg four of the votes on each side, and I feared that O’Connor […]

In the News See O’Reilly’s Online Spanking for some mocking of Bill O’Reilly by Kurtz, who quotes various bloggers. He manages to plug InstaPundit, Volokh, and Lileks, but no big lefties, unless you count Scott Rosenberg. Katrina Leung, FBI employee and alleged double-agent, got bail today. If you didn’t already know it, there would be […]

Traveling I’ll be traveling for the next few days, so posting might be light. In the meantime, I offer this for your consideration. It’s a graph of Federal Revenue by year, on a deflated and per capita basis. To derive this, I took annual Tax Revenue (all sources) for 1980-2000, converted to constant 1996 dollars […]

Ready to Laugh? Click here. (via TBOgg). AB

Alabama, Home of Progressive Politics From the home state of 11th Circuit Court Nominee-who-must-be-stopped, Bill Pryor, also comes a plan to increase Alabama’s overall state taxes by 14%, progressively. To wit, the proposed property tax “would mean an extra $93 a year in state taxes for the owner who lives in an $85,000 house, which […]