Think Tank West

President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica has joined the trend in Latin America of calling for a new constitution that would expand executive powers and get rid of “unnecessary checks” on the president’s authority. Although Arias has less than 9 months left in office and can’t run for reelection, his brother and current minister of [...]

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Nearly 30 European countries have agreed to end their government mail monopolies in the next five years. The U.S. Postal Service has estimated losses of $7 billion this year. It’s time to privatize. If you are curious about how President Barack Obama’s health plan would affect your health care, look no further than Massachusetts. You [...]

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The Justice Department just released some more Office of Legal Counsel memoranda. As you may already know, these legal interpretations facilitated the worst of the Bush administration’s approach toward terrorism — forget the lawful tools that we have on hand; let’s craft a whole new legal regime that tosses out barriers to executive authority and upends [...]

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One of the things that strikes me as curious about supporters of the No Child Left Behind Act is that they talk regularly about “evidence” and having everything be “research-based,” yet they often ignore or distort evidence in order to portray NCLB as a success. Case in point, an op-ed in today’s New York Times [...]

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Lawmakers in the Bay State are rushing to change state law to make sure the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat is filled as soon as possible with a reliable Democratic successor. Never mind that as recently as 2004 the same state legislature had changed state law to mandate that a vacant Senate seat could only [...]

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Further to David Rittger’s post below, here is a sublime commentary on Washington politics, the media, and some other odd phenomena: Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

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The White House and the CBO announced this week that: The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates on Tuesday. The Obama administration’s Office of [...]

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Over the last few days the right has been trying to rehabilitate the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees, claiming that the ends justified the means. For a sample, click here, here, here, and here. Don’t be fooled by these “enhanced justification techniques.” (H/T NonSequitur, who coined the term in response to Charles Krauthammer’s justifications [...]

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The Church Committee was a post-Watergate congressional committee that investigated allegations of lawbreaking by the executive branch, including the CIA and FBI. The committee’s report was incredibly important in helping the public understand the depth and breadth of Cold War lawlessness during the previous three decades. When Cato asked me to pen the chapter on [...]

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The Dept. of Education has just released a study finding that (predominantly college-aged or older) students learn significantly more if their lessons occur at least partly on-line, than if they rack up seat-time exclusively in conventional classrooms (HT: Matt Ladner). This makes sense. On-line learning usually allows students to progress at their own pace, so as soon [...]

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