Libertarian weblog covering politics, education and current events.

Unbelievable. Maybe more on this later.

Update: I returned from classes with my knickers still in a knot about the appalling Meiers nomination to find that the most glaringly obvious criticisms have been duly leveled by those usually considered Bush’s intellectual base.

A great appellate judge loves the law so much it practically oozes from her pores. Meirs has demonstrated no such fondness for the thinking end of lawyering. Rather, she has voluntarily spent much of her professional life sitting on committees that would’ve driven Scalia to poke his eyes out with a sharp object. Meirs is probably a good person and a good lawyer, but I can think of personal friends who’d make more promising Supreme Court nominees. The Senate should demand better.

Please keep my brother in your thoughts for the next few weeks. He is travelling to the Middle East today for a special project. We look forward to getting him back safe and sound before Thanksgiving.

As some of you know, I’ve been trying to learn how to write proper feature articles this summer. My most recent effort about the social significace of Ohio’s new school choice program is in the American Spectator today. Can you say “narrative?”

The Jay Gatsby of American politics is reportedly considering a run for Governor of New York. Bill Weld is an atypical relief in his industry — an honest, funny dilettante who doesn’t care enough about getting ahead to layer on the bulls***. How could anyone not love a budget balancing, socially tolerant Republican who hates Jesse Helms?

Paul Krugman expands on the now-conventional wisdom that we are experiencing a housing bubble, warning that the economic recovery is perched on its fragile and slippery foundation. He then cautions:

“Beyond that, there’s the disturbing point that we’re paying for the housing boom (and the military buildup and tax cuts) with money borrowed from foreigners. Now, any economics textbook will tell you that it’s fine to borrow from abroad if the money is used to expand the economy’s productive capacity. When 19th-century America borrowed from Europe to build railroads, it was also enhancing its ability to repay its debts later. But we aren’t borrowing to build productive capacity.”

I’m trying to decide whether residential real estate is as pure a consumer good as Krugman’s analysis suggests. The boom is largely driven by an influx of affluent buyers in city centers. Such buyers may be enhancing their productivity in one of two ways. Either 1) they avoid commuting two hours a day from the exburbs, or 2) they move from smaller cities to larger ones where their professional opportunities are greater. To the expent that either of these things are true, the real estate boom will make us more productive.

Further, the boom can be regarded as an effect, not a cause, of two more fundamental, productivity-enhancing social trends: the drop in urban crime rates and marginalization of racism. We’ve paid a steep price, economically speaking, for those two hour commutes all these years. Giving them up should pay dividends for the economy.

And chicken and egg-like, gentrification triggers further gentrification, pushing down the marginal cost of a hipteresque lifestyle and attracting later adopters. Yep, I think Krugman may have this one wrong. The only losers will be the truly hep, who’ll find it increasingly difficult to locate a charmingly decrepit urban neighborhood.

In light of recent teacher cheating scandals, you have to wonder what, exactly, Superintendent Rodden-Nord means by the following:

“Junction City Superintendent Kathleen Rodden-Nord said she expects ratings for three of her schools – Junction City High, Oaklea Middle and Territorial Elementary – to change from ‘not met’ to ‘met’ after errors are corrected.”

From the Eugene Register-Guard.

It looks like U.S. Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts wasn’t grown in a vat after all. The New York Times reports that Roberts provided pro bono legal advice to the gay respondents (plaintiffs below) in Romer v. Evans, a 1996 Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of a Colorado initiative to ban local ordinances that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Romer wasn’t exactly a gay rights case. It presented some rather technical issues related to federalism, standards of review and legislative intent in direct democracy situations, and Roberts only consulted on the case for a few hours. Still, the Christian right is up in arms.

Roberts’ involvement is a surprise to Senate Republicans. The guy seems so off-puttingly perfect that I almost find it comfortingly human that he “forgot” to disclose the case on his Senate questionaire. I have to imagine that the Bush administration didn’t know either.

Fierce personal loyalty is one of Bush’s trademark personality traits, so I expect him to stand by his man. But will Senate conservatives do the same? I’ve heard Roberts likened to Rehnquist by boosters and to Souter by skeptics. Perhaps the better comparison is with Anthony Kennedy.

I was struck today by some of educational psychologist Deborah Ruf’s comments regarding problems common to gifted children. Here are a few of the points I found salient:

“Many intellectually gifted children do not fit in and are seen by others as behavior problems or even by themselves as faulty. When the work in school is below what gifted children are capable of doing, they can’t show effort – so they often lose ‘points’ in the eyes of their teachers. For a child who is gifted in America, it means that school can be one confusing trial after another until high school or college. Gifted children often wonder, ‘Why am I here? What point am I missing?’”

The NYT defends planetary exclusivity in response to the discovery of a new heavenly body in the outer solar system. Is it a planet? That it is larger than Pluto, similarly composed, and orbiting our Sun suggests that it is, but scientists fear that new technology will foster the discovery of dozens of similar objects.

While the “four terrestrial planets” and the “four gaseous planets” clearly “deserve their status,” the Times is unimpressed with Pluto and its lookalikes. “Scientists may well discover many more ice balls” larger than Pluto, it disparagingly notes.

Astronomer Michael Brown wants to bite the bullet and call anything a planet that is as planetary as Pluto, but the Times opines that demoting Pluto is a more wieldy solution. “It is a safe bet that few in our culture want to memorize the names of 20 or more planets,” the editors sniff.

The Times recommends downgrading Pluto to the status of “an icy sphere that was once mistakenly deemed a planet.” Pluto’s devotees can then start a support group with discouraged boosters of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.