AEI welcomes David Gelernter as a national fellow. Mr. Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard. His essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including Time, The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, T’cheilet (Israel), the Washington Post, Wired, the New York Times, and The New York Times Book Review. Mr. Gelernter will write on a wide variety of subjects, such as technology, foreign policy, and religion.
In a special edition of National Security Outlook, Judge Richard A. Posner addresses the existing tensions and problems within the U.S. intelligence community. In a memorable comparison, Posner says: “[T]he FBI agents are like dogs, and the CIA officers like cats. The pointer, the retriever, the hound has a definite target, and goes for it. The cat is furtive, slinks about in the dark, pounces unexpectedly at the time and place of its choosing.”
In a May 9 Wall Street Journal article, Reuel Marc Gerecht questions the CIA’s role in the twenty-first century: “The CIA is a dispirited organization. It should be: [t]he end of the Cold War removed a sustaining sense of purpose and the broad indulgence of the agency’s unenviable record of clandestine-intelligence collection, counterespionage and analytical forecasting.”
In a Copley News Service article, AEI national fellow Herbert G. Klein expresses high hopes for new White House press secretary Tony Snow: “With Bush’s low rating in the public-opinion polls, he needs a strong press secretary, and Snow has the qualifications to be that man.”
On May 8, Frederick M. Hess and Andrew Rotherham spoke about school reform at the Parkside campus of the César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy. Hess, author of Tough Love for Schools (AEI Press, 2006), and Rotherham, a former educational advisor to President Bill Clinton, addressed a crowd of fifty high-school students and teachers about a number of important school-reform issues, including charter schools, for-profit schools, and teacher preparation.
On May 17, Senator James DeMint (R-S.C.) and Congressman Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) introduced legislation designed to amend Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). In a May 10 Wall Street Journal article describing their proposed legislation, DeMint and Feeney argued that SOX had proved “costly for domestic and foreign businesses” and that it is also “discouraging U.S. companies from raising capital by going public.” The arguments of AEI scholars Alex J. Pollock and Peter J. Wallison have been widely noted in the debate over the effects of SOX.
A recent item in Science magazine features Sally Satel’s personal experience with organ transplantation. Dr. Satel “says the experience [her kidney transplant] awakened her to the ‘horribly broken’ state of organ transplantation rules in the United States.” In an effort to improve and reform the existing transplant system, she is organizing a summer conference at AEI on Monday, June 12, to discuss how the organ system can be mended and made more efficient.
On May 16, Adam Lerrick testified on the regulation of hedge funds before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Securities and Investment.
A related series of papers entitled “Demystifying Hedge Funds” was posted to the AEI website in May. Mr. Lerrick’s paper by that name and John Makin’s “Hedge Funds: Origins and Evolution” are part of the series, which can now be found at www.aei.org/aps/.
At the White House state dinner for Australian prime minister John Howard on May 16, the prime minister mentioned to Steven F. Hayward that he had just finished reading Hayward’s book The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. The prime minister pronounced it “terrific.”
