Daily Archive: June 6, 2016

When the U.S. economy slowed during the recession, so did one of the major demographic shifts of the last several decades. For a brief respite, the Northeast and Midwest stopped shedding quite so many...

Today’s topic (inspired by Short Circuit) is an article about U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes published by the same group.*  Generally, I read Short Circuit because the summaries are great and the politically motivated asides are easy to ignore.**  This article, though, takes a well-earned victory lap after securing an order that I believe everyone should support.

*Lest you think my title is facetious, both the Institute for Justice (google blurb: “An U.S. libertarian public interest law firm. Dedicated to advance economic liberty, school choice, property rights, and free speech.”) and the Pacific Legal Foundation (wikipedia: ” the first and oldest conservative/libertarian public interest law firm in the United States”) appear to be unabashedly libertarian.

**For example, the June 3rd summaries accurately describe the Ninth Circuit’s rebuke of Arizona’s attempt to punish the Arizona Students’ Association for its speech, but can’t stop without noting the case makes “[n]o mention of the First Amendment rights of students compelled to fund advocacy with which they may not agree, who are not parties to the case.”

From: A Libertarian Victory Everyone Should Love – Common Law

The grandson of Hamas founder Said Bilal, Calvin changed his name to both protect himself and separate him from his family’s past. Calvin fled the West Bank, where he grew up, at age 14...

In 2005, both of us became fixated on a late-night infomercial that promised access to “hundreds of billions of dollars” in “free government money.” As journalism grad students at the time, our evenings often ended with a couple beers as we decompressed by watching whatever was on our tiny 13″ TV. And what was on at the time—repeatedly—was a half-hour advertisement for an outfit called “National Grants Conferences” (NGC).

Why did the NGC infomercial captivate us? It wasn’t the charisma of the commercial’s star, ex-football player and former Congressman J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), who was busy making a mockery of whatever credibility he once had. And it wasn’t the enthusiastic couple who founded NGC, Mike and Irene Milin, proclaiming that numerous government grants were there for the taking.

No, we couldn’t stop watching because NGC just felt so sleazy. Even in comparison with other get-rich-quick schemes competing for time in the twilight TV hours—the obnoxious guy with the question marks all over his suit, the insufferable smile factories bragging about their real estate conquests from tropical locales—this one seemed suspect.

Source: Trump University and the art of the get-rich seminar | Ars Technica