In a plot twist which should surprise approximately no one, it seems that the August presidential election in Afghanistan was not entirely on the up-and-up. It’s not that the United States is particularly keen to create a warlord-ruled narco-“state” in perpetual war and essentially ungovernable…it’s more just that nations with no literacy, centralized power, or … Read more
So I actually just returned to school from a summer spent working in Tokyo, and so I have been following with great interest the returns from the recent Japanese election. As you may have heard if you’ve heard anything, the bare-bones outline is this: the Liberal Democratic Party (neither liberal or democratic, truth be told), … Read more
Below is a piece on financial regulation from HPR alum Rahul Prabhakar ’09. Rahul is now a Fellow at the Glover Park Group in Washington D.C. ——————————————————————————————————————- Over the past month, the U.S. Congress has held a series of hearings to debate the Obama Administration’s proposal to overhaul the American financial regulatory structure. The fates … Read more
I read the initial article in The Crimson confident that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., would make waves far beyond Cambridge, Mass. Allegations of racial profiling mounted; the charges were ultimately dropped. But let’s not forget, as Stanford Law School professor Ralph Richard Banks wrote in The Times, that the police did exactly what … Read more
You know who is one of the most dependable Democrats in the Senate right now? Arlen Spector (D-PA). It does not take any great insight to figure out why that is; Spector is rightly afraid of a successful primary challenge from Joe Sestak over his insufficient progressivism. On the Republican side of the aisle is … Read more
So in some areas (civil liberties and wars come to mind), there is not so much daylight to be found between President Obama and his predecessor. But in other areas that are not always so visible, it is clear that Obama does intend to pursue a somewhat ambitious liberal agenda. And one of those extremely … Read more
It now appears that the Obama administration, which once seemed so eager to explicitly press the case for liberal constitutional jurisprudence, is trying to characterize Sonia Sotomayor as a bona fide judicial moderate, if not an outright conservative. Take a look at the administration’s talking points: no more talk of “empathy” is to be found. … Read more
The last few days, I’ve been reminded of Lionel Trilling’s rather impolite description of conservatism as a philosophy expressed in “irritable mental gestures” rather than ideas. What keeps provoking this thought in me is all the carping about Sonia Sotomayor’s “reverse racism.” I got to thinking about what I find so, well, irritating about this … Read more
To the Editor: Please explain to me the logic of an article that announces that Sonia Sotomayor has an “issue of temperament,” presents exactly one instance of allegedly intemperate questioning, and concludes with a quote from the lawyer to whom those questions were addressed, saying that the questions were “reasonable and fine.” Okay. Now explain … Read more
Conservative pundits and their mainstream-media abettors are stunned, stunned I say, at the suggestion that a judge’s biography might have some sort of influence on his or her decisions. Somewhere under the Mojave Desert, a cabal of conservative engineers is working on the Adjudicator 9000, the amicus brief-processing automaton that will solve the problem of … Read more