Quick Links 9/28/09

*Neil Stevens takes apart Nate Silver’s latest series on the polling firm Strategic Vision.
*The Second Circuit reverses a prior decision and concludes that foreign governments, like states of the Union, are not “persons” with rights protected by the Due Process Clause. Perhaps more controversially, the court then extends this rule to companies that act as instrumentalities controlled by the foreign state.
*In the vein of other liberals suddenly switching gears to oppose the war in Afghanistan now that it can no longer be used as a club against Bush’s Iraq policy, Rich Lowry takes apart Frank Rich’s sudden about-face on Afghanistan. I’d agree with Lowry that, especially in Rich’s case, this may be as much ignorance as duplicity at work. The Left’s freshly-minted campaign to demonize the Karzai government is simply a fig leaf to cover this reversal, and it ignores the history of Afghanistan, a poverty-stricken country with an appalling history of all sorts of misrule.
*Obama is going to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago getting the Olympics. Yes, the President of the United States has officially run out of better things to do with his time.
But I think we can confidently predict his smile.

4 thoughts on “Quick Links 9/28/09”

  1. Isn’t this really the best use of any politicians time? Personally, I’d love to pay for every single California politician to travel out of the state rather than “governing.”

  2. Agreed Tom. I live in NY and everyone was bemoaning the gridlock in Albany this summer that was preventing anything from being “accomplished” by the NYS govt. Gridlock is good.

  3. The man is good at raising money. Wouldn’t the Olympics essentially be a massive fundraiser for the US tax base? $100 million maybe? I think it’s time well spent. Better than having him experiment with vague, weak, and expensive “change.”

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