christopher_hallam

After Joe Stack flew a plane into the IRS building, killing one person (that would be more people than underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad combined) media outlets seemed reluctant to cover the story as an act of terrorism, given that Stack was not a Muslim. As Matthew Yglesias notes, there […]

The ACLU has filed a legal challenge to Arizona’s draconian immigration law along with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the ACLU of Arizona, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. […]

I find this version of the argument in favor of Elena Kagan‘s confirmation that basically amounts to, “all these prominent Democrats know her, and know her to be a liberal,” deeply unpersuasive. But having thought about it, it’s not really because I doubt that Kagan is a liberal. At this point, between her lionization of […]

In 2002, lawful permanent resident and Vietnam veteran Jose Padilla (no relation to the terrorist) who had been living in the U.S. since the 1960s, plead guilty to a drug trafficking charge in Kentucky. Padilla had been selling marijuana. His defense counsel had advised him he did not have to worry about being deported if […]

Stuart Taylor doesn’t bother to do much researching on Elena Kagan‘s record (not that there’s much to investigate) and instead leaves the heavy lifting to the left. He concludes: Speaking as a moderate independent, I like everything about Kagan that the left dislikes. To borrow from my friend Harvey Silverglate, a leading Boston lawyer who […]

A new Government Accountability Office report found that 1,119 of 1,228 people on the U.S. terror watch list were able to purchase guns because “no prohibiting information was found—such as felony convictions, illegal immigrant status, or other disqualifying factors.” Democrats and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg want to close the “loophole” that allows people on […]

The case against the Michigan-based Hutaree milita isn’t going too well. Yesterday Judge Victoria Roberts ruled that the government didn’t meet the evidentiary threshold necessary to keep the accused locked up, and the government is trying to appeal the case. It’s worth noting though, that the Hutaree are accused of trying to wage war against […]

Reihan Salam revisits an old counterfactual in Afrocentric circles, the idea that desegregation ultimately did more harm than good to racial equality. This time though, Salam posits that school choice would have been better than school desegregation: One wonders, however, if voucherizing public education might have actually proved a more effective way to achieve racial […]

When I was a young, other kids used to diss the really scary kids, who seemed irrationally prone to violence, as “crack babies”. It was a reference to a widely held myth about how crack cocaine use affected humans, which concidentally turned into a kind of modern scientific racism. Black people were voluntarily making themselves […]

New York Daily News Columnist Michael Goodwin has jumped the freaking shark: The first time I saw the swirling logo for the Nuclear Security Summit, it looked familiar. I soon figured out what it reminded me of: a crescent moon. […] Obama has been open about his aim to improve America’s relations with Muslims. His […]