Has The World Gone Mad? Libertarian/Conservative blogger Eugene Volkh is defending John Kerry from somewhat liberal Slate (Volokh is right on the money, too). What’s next? Mark Kleiman defending Bush from The National Review’s Bruce Bartlett? AB UPDATE: See also this lukewarm endorsement of Kerry by Volokh contributor Jacob Levy.

Faith-Based Fertility Treatment Some of you may recall a purported study from a few years back claiming to demonstrate that remote prayer by strangers doubled the success rate of in-vitro fertilization among infertile women. The study, by researchers then employed by Columbia University, was published in the reputable-sounding Journal of Reproductive Medicine. Now, astoundingly, like […]

Job Growth Slows This is bad news, via the WSJ (subscription): The pace of job growth in the U.S. slowed for the first time in four months in June and fell short of expectations, catching Wall Street off guard. Nonfarm business payrolls grew by a net 112,000 jobs last month, raising this year’s total to […]

Postcards from Old Europe – A tale of two (central) banks The recent decision by the FOMC to hike the Fed Funds rate to 1.25% was widely reported and commented on. All the noise surrounding the Fed’s decision may have drowned out the fact that the European central bank, the ECB, decided to leave interest […]

Importing Drugs: Bad Medicine / Bad Economics? The conservative argument against importing pharmaceuticals from Canada claims to be one part science and two parts economics with Sally Pipes (Pacific Research Instititute on Public Policy) putting her own formulation to two of the three parts in “Say No to Foreign Drugs”. Pipes raises the safety issue […]

InstaAngryBear(*) Jesse qua Peggy Noonan: Unicorns with rocketpacks that urinate the fuel for cold fusion and whose hair is made of licorice… It truly is astounding that Noonan gets paid money to write. AB (*) The “Insta” prefix denotes the practice of merely excerpting other blogs and directing readers there, rather than coming up with […]

Nation of War Scott, don’t you mean “at”? “The president’s most important responsibility is the safety and security of the American people,” he said. “We are a nation of war and the president does have the right to detain enemy combatants during this time of conflict and to hold them during that conflict. The court […]

Dean and Nader If it’s true that many Democrats who voted for Nader in 2000 were Dean supporters in 2003-04, then this could be quite an effective way to help keep them voting Democratic this time around: Dean, Nader to Debate Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential hopeful who attracted legions of liberal followers before […]

Another Fafblog Hit If they keep this up, I can stop writing original posts and just excerpt Fafblog posts and direct my readers over there. See, like this: … Look at Al Gore, and how ANGRY he is over the torturing of Iraqis in American-run prisons. Such rage and pessimism! Look at Michael Moore, and […]

Blotchy O’Reilly From the Washington Post: In kicking off what he called “no-spin coverage” of the issue, O’Reilly began the show by saying that “the Times and other newspapers have been under heavy fire for their misleading headlines, basically saying there was no link” between Iraq and al-Qaeda. As Cole listened from Washington, the program […]