Think Tank West

The Second Annual International Students For Liberty Conference will be held at George Washington University (Washington, D.C.), from February 20-22, 2009. The conference has already received 100 applications from students in 13 countries, and will be accepting between 150-200 students. Bringing students together to hear about issues affecting liberty and discuss how to promote liberty [...]

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Reuters reports that: Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more people than hurricanes do, according to a U.S. “death map” published on Tuesday… Heat and drought caused 19.6 percent of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8 percent and winter weather causing 18.1 percent, [...]

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A few weeks ago, while attending the Federalist Society’s annual lawyers convention, I got to chatting with UCLA law professor (and former member of the Cato Supreme Court Review editorial board) Eugene Volokh about something that a commenter to his well-known Volokh Conspiracy blog had queried: might Hillary Clinton, then just-announced as “on track” to become the next secretary of [...]

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More hysteria about boys and their toys.  Expulsion?  Arrest?  Criminal record?  Juvenile detention? Jonathan Turley has a good backgrounder.

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President-elect Obama is expected to announce his candidate for Secretary of Agriculture today, former Iowa governor and Democratic presidential candidate, Tom Vilsack. Although a champion of shifting some money from traditional agricultural programs such as commodity subsidies into environmental management payments, and not the worst possible pick for Agriculture Secretary, Mr. Vilsack is still essentially [...]

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State governments are facing declining tax revenues and increasing budgetary demands. So lawmakers should take note of a state report from Florida released today that concludes Florida is saving millions of dollars with school choice. School choice is the only policy that means huge returns for state governments, school districts, taxpayers, and children all at [...]

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Newsweek has a very interesting story on Thomas M. Tamm, the former Justice Department lawyer who was a source for New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, who broke the warrantless wiretapping story three years ago yesterday. The dimension of the story most interesting to me is the failure of congressional oversight to [...]

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I’ve often said, as for instance here, that P. J. O’Rourke is so funny that people forget what an insightful reporter and analyst he is. (In the article linked, I suggested giving young people his books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich as “a post-graduate course in political science and economics .”) Now it [...]

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Just as predicted, more and more ivory-tower sharks are gathering for the taxpayer bloodlet…er…stimulus. But what choice do they have? Even Harvard’s had to cut back: Even holiday parties for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have been scaled back. On Thursday, Harvard deans and administrators will gather in the faculty room in University Hall [...]

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Remember the summer of the shark? That was 2001, when the media, feeding on a few high profile incidents, gave Americans the impression that they faced an outbreak of shark attacks, when in fact shark attacks were down. Something similar may be happening today with piracy. If you’re reading the news these days, you are [...]

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