Think Tank West

Appropriations lobbyists have weathered a rough few years of media scrutiny, and a series of earmarking outrages has put pressure on Congress to pass minor reforms. Luckily there may be fewer vehicles for earmarks this year as Congress will probably pass only one or two appropriations bills for Fiscal Year 2009 and leave the budget [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

Over at Ars Technica, I’ve got an in-depth write-up of the White House’s problems with email archiving. Federal law has required executive branch officers’ official emails to be preserved for legal and historical purposes. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has had some difficulties with this: In 1994, the Clinton administration reacted to the previous year’s court [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

In a piece by Jad Mouawad, Tuesday’s NY Times reports that Oil Price Rise Fails to Open Tap. He identifies a number of reasons for the lack of responsiveness on the supply side: OPEC countries’ “explicit goal is to regulate the supply of oil to keep prices up”. Iran and Iraq’s productive capacity has been [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

Yesterday, Andrew Coulson wrote a detailed response to an attack on libertarian education reformers by Chester E. “Checker” Finn, Jr., President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Finn declared, among other things, that libertarian support of universal school choice, unfettered by government-imposed standards, typified how libertarians “never let their vision of how the world ought [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

In its infinite wisdom, C-SPAN chose to commit this Hudson Institute panel to celluloid. Of course, I can’t get the dang video to work right, but I had the fortune to catch most of the panel last night on the teevee. Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Senor, and Peter Rodman got the old gang back [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

Jay Greene and Marcus Winters have just authored a new Manhattan Institute study on Florida’s McKay voucher program for disabled students. According to Greene and Winters, the academic performance of mildly disabled students (the vast majority of all special needs students) who remain in public schools was positively affected by the proximity of their schools [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

I recently had the opportunity to conduct a pair of briefings for congressional staff regarding electronic employment eligibility verification. A pair of bills are vying for the attention of Congress these days. I suggested in my recent paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” that Congress should ignore both. Indeed, it [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn recently responded to Neal McCluskey’s review of his new book. Let’s compare what Finn has to say with reality: Finn: “You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works.” Reality: [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

George Will has another great column on threats to political speech in modern America. He reports the story of some people in Parker North, Colo., who didn’t want to be annexed to the larger town of Parker. When some residents proposed annexation, others began trying to persuade the rest to oppose annexation. They printed lawn [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

The Supreme Court has rendered its decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. This is the case challenging Indiana’s voter ID requirement. Briefly, the plaintiffs in the case did not establish sufficient proof of the burden on voting that the ID requirement would have. This was a facial challenge to the statute, and there [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »