Think Tank West

I’m delighted that Julian Sanchez has joined us at Cato. He’s as smart as they come. I’m equally pleased that I’ll have an intellectual sparring partner here on some of my issues from time to time. I encouraged Julian to share here some of what we had been discussing about privacy notices via email. There [...]

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Hearings were held on both sides of the Hill last week to consider a trio of surveillance powers set to expire under PATRIOT Act sunset rules. But the stage is set for a much broader fight over the sweeping expansion of search and surveillance authority seen over the past eight years; the chairmen of both [...]

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Federal prosecutors moved to criminalize internet harassment last year by prosecuting Lori Drew. Lori Drew, as you may recall, is a Missouri woman who created a fictional MySpace profile named “Josh” and started an online relationship with Megan Meier, a teenage girl who may have spread gossip about Drew’s daughter at the local high school. [...]

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Twenty inaccurate claims in Obama’s speech to Congress on health care. “If [members of Congress] yelled out every time President Obama said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.” Political tensions decreasing between Taiwan and China. How Americans misunderstand war: “America’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan and Iraq was to think [...]

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Some state governments have claimed that a pending compliance deadline for REAL ID requires them to tighten up their driver’s licensing procedures consistent with the 2005 national ID law. (But see this.) In fact, REAL ID is dead and the deadline is fake. More than a dozen states have statutorily barred themselves from complying, and in a rule published Monday the [...]

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Harvey Silverglate’s new book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is receiving a good bit of press. L. Gordon Crovitz has a good piece up at the Wall Street Journal discussing federal overcriminalization and how it impacts information technology. National Review Online has an audio interview with Silverglate discussing how federal [...]

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One of the main recommendations in my recent paper on climate change and trade was to reduce trade barriers on “environmental goods and services.” Trade liberalization in this area is slated for special attention in the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations, but progress there is decidedly unimpressive. I’m under no illusion that this development had [...]

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Don Fisher, co-founder of the The Gap chain, passed away on Sunday. Not only was Fisher a partner in the construction of a vast retail empire that would make any entrepreneur proud, he was also a partner in funding the expansion of the KIPP chain of charter schools — something that would make any philanthropist [...]

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Last night, Chris Matthews presided over an odd, staccato interview with AEI’s Michael Rubin and Time magazine’s Bob Baer that was enough to make one feel sorry for the interviewees.  Matthews was wildly whipping questions at Rubin and Baer, but they both did an admirable job returning Matthews’ volleys. One interesting topic that came up [...]

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Max Boot, fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and perhaps one of America’s most radical neo-imperialists, eight years ago this month likened the Afghan mission to British colonial rule: Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in [...]

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