Richard Epstein weighs in on the wiretap issue on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal with Executive Power on Steroids. While claiming to be for legal wiretaps, he is strongly against illegal ones:

The major danger with presidential surveillance does not lie in this particular overreaching of executive power. It’s what comes next. If President Bush can ignore FISA, then he can disregard a congressional prohibition against the use of nuclear force.

Perhaps too melodramatic to be convincing. When I did Oxford debate in high school, every plan from water quality to farm policy ended with nuclear war. But there are myriad ways that presidential powers could become tyrannical if a Jacksonian president took the law into his own hands. I may not like Jackson as chief magistrate, but he sure knew how to give a good speech.

Richard Epstein weighs in on the wiretap issue on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal with Executive Power on Steroids. While claiming to be for legal wiretaps, he is strongly against illegal ones:

The major danger with presidential surveillance does not lie in this particular overreaching of executive power. It’s what comes next. If President Bush can ignore FISA, then he can disregard a congressional prohibition against the use of nuclear force.

Perhaps too melodramatic to be convincing. When I did Oxford debate in high school, every plan from water quality to farm policy ended with nuclear war. But there are myriad ways that presidential powers could become tyrannical if a Jacksonian president took the law into his own hands. I may not like Jackson as chief magistrate, but he sure knew how to give a good speech.

I’ll bet that some Senators wish they’d been a little more reasonable about Senator Coburn’s medical practice. It was surely just one more reason to be unwilling to play ball (though I suspect that in fact it probably wouldn’t matter).

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle — $500,000 for a sculpture garden — Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was scandalized: “We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy.” She invoked the code of comity: “I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us.” And she warned of Armageddon: “I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.” But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

I hope he has lots of fun.

I’ll bet that some Senators wish they’d been a little more reasonable about Senator Coburn’s medical practice. It was surely just one more reason to be unwilling to play ball (though I suspect that in fact it probably wouldn’t matter).

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle — $500,000 for a sculpture garden — Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was scandalized: “We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy.” She invoked the code of comity: “I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us.” And she warned of Armageddon: “I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.” But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

I hope he has lots of fun.

I’ll bet that some Senators wish they’d been a little more reasonable about Senator Coburn’s medical practice. It was surely just one more reason to be unwilling to play ball (though I suspect that in fact it probably wouldn’t matter).

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle — $500,000 for a sculpture garden — Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was scandalized: “We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy.” She invoked the code of comity: “I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us.” And she warned of Armageddon: “I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.” But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

I hope he has lots of fun.

French winemakers are suffering the consequences of their government’s defense of Saddam, EU policies that keep the Euro high, and resting on their own laurels. There are too many good wines in the world now to expect to sell it just because it’s French:

Riot police will be on standby this week for clashes, expected to involve up to 16,000 winemakers. Many of the demonstrators feel they have nothing to lose, since up to half of them are expected to go to the wall in the next five years unless the French government – or the Europe Union – bails them out.

Critics say French wine producers have brought the crisis on themselves by arrogantly overproducing wines of indifferent quality that do not sell.

Last year Mrs Montosson did not sell a single drop from her 50-acre vineyard for eight months because she refused the price offered by her agent. “He offered me only half of what I’d got for my wine the year before,” she said. “I said it was too low and refused to sell. But afterwards the prices just fell lower and lower.”

It’s not all about the boycott, but that has to be a major factor.

I get very irritated when people, even intelligent people, who I respect greatly, use the phrases “tax cuts” and “tax-rate cuts” interchangeably, and one of the things that I’d do if I were King would be to outlaw this.

But because so many are unfamiliar with the difference, the administration has managed to pull a fast one on the Beltway. They are going to require an analysis of tax proposals by scoring them dynamically, rather than (absurdly) they’ve done in the past, statically. What does this mean?

In the past, any time the CBO or GAO did an analysis of a proposed change in tax rate changes, they assumed that said rate changes would have no effect on the growth rate of the economy, either in the general economy, or in the specific economic sphere in which the tax change would take place. Anyone familiar with economics knows that such an assumption is…to put it gently…nonsense.

We can’t necessarily know what the effect of a tax rate change will be on an economic sector, but to assume that it will be nil is ridiculous.

So, people who are “scoring” (that is, attempting to estimate what the revenue effects of a proposed tax change will be) will now have a more difficult job–they will have to attempt to estimate what the effect of the tax change will be on the affected economic sectors when coming up with their estimate of revenue change for the federal government.

Will they get it right? Who knows. But at least now, they’ll have to make the attempt, instead of absurdly assuming that the effect is zero. It will also provide one more thing to argue about when we attempt to reduce tax rates, but since it will also have that effect on attempts to increase them, that’s a wash, in my opinion. At least it will force a debate on the subject, and make it a respectable topic of discussion.

Cindy Sheehan won’t be running against DiFi (whose intellect I’m also unimpressed with, though she’s nowhere near the moron that Cindy Sheehan is). Too bad. It would have been an entertaining self-immolation among CA Democrats.

Hillary’s presidential poll numbers at Rasmussen are at a low:

…just 27% of Americans say they would definitely vote for the former first lady while 43% would definitely vote against. Still, 59% of Americans believe it is somewhat or very likely that she will be the Democrat’s nominee in 2008.

Among Democrats, the number who would definitely vote for Clinton dropped 11 percentage points over the past two weeks.

This is a microcosm of the Democrats’ problem. Their base won’t allow them to nominate anyone who can win a general election, whether Hillary (who is a powerhouse of the party but politically unappealing to much of the electorate) or someone who will have to tack too far left to win the nomination to find their way back to the center in the fall.

Even brobdingnagian. Lileks comments on the latest federal budget:

You can expect the news stories to fasten on that 5.5 percent cut, since the media seem to operate with three unspoken and largely unexamined assumptions: We don’t spend enough on education; conservatives don’t want to spend anything on education anyway since it leads to godless rational beliefs like “the Earth is round”; and a reduction in the overall rate of increase is tantamount to a reduction in funds.

Really? If you find two $5 bills and lose one, are you $5 ahead or $5 behind? The latter, if you work in Washington.

A reduction in the projected rate of growth is always a cut. Note the headlines about the `07 proposals: “Bush’s $2.77 Trillion Budget Plan Calls for Medicare Cuts,” said The New York Times. The Washington Post had the same idea, and graciously upped the budget total: “Bush’s $2.8T Budget Proposal Cuts Domestic Programs.”

To which Democrats say: But of course. To which Republicans say: If only.

Conservatives will still, for the most part, vote Republican, even if they weep and rend their garments before checking off “R.” Why? Because they see Democrats as the ones more likely to tax everything that isn’t nailed down, levy “gravity user fees” for things that are, take away private health care, strangle school choice and want SpecOps to get a warrant before sabotaging Iranian nuke factories.