If Theodore Lowi is correct that the Republican Era died in the 1990’s, last week’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee was the equivalent of digging up the corpse and adding further humiliation to a long dead body.
A quick survey of James Madison’s Federalist #10, which presumably every college educated American [...]

Time magazine has an interesting piece on the ouster of White House Legal Counsel Greg Craig.  Let me see if I understand what has happened here correctly.  Our government has

rounded up terror suspects as if they were fishing for tuna in the 1980’s, treating the innocent they have caught in this dredging as if they [...]

You know, you try and convince everyone that everything is fine… and then you have to go and read something like this.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) was founded in 2005 by U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and Reagan administration White House counsel Mikey Weinstein, after the harassment his own sons faced as Jewish cadets at [...]

In case you missed it, Brian Leiter responded on this blog to an earlier post about his take on the potential of the evisceration of democratic institutions by the “know-nothing” wing of the Republican party.  Leiter makes an interesting point:
One quick observation: you state that we have three branches of government, that are separate, not [...]

I have a lot of respect for Brian Leiter as a philosopher, but I strongly disagree with this post he linked to and Leiter’s interpretation of what it means.  With all due respect, it simply is not up to Leiter’s own stringent standard’s of making careful distinctions.  Here’s the conclusion of the piece by Sara [...]

It should not be surprising to anyone that the laws passed to regulate toys in the wake of a lead-based toy scare has created stringent regulations forcing independent manufacturers out of business while providing a competitive advantage to those toy companies who were originally the offenders in the first place.  Anyone who follows my writing [...]

Glen Greenwald wrote (and I read via Will Wilkinson) 
(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats [...]

Ms. Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post has an article today on Senator Voinovich’s comments about the GOP having “too many Southerners.”  While the Senator defends himself by saying the comment was “off the record” ( I never understand this defense.  It doesn’t mean, “I didn’t mean what I said,” and it doesn’t mean, “I’m sorry,” [...]

Via Julian Sanchez (via Doug Bandow), Congressman John Conyers has pledged to make “the right to health care” a “Constitutional right.”  One can consult many sources as to why this is a bad idea, that’s not what I’m interested in.  What I am interested in noting is the utter breakdown in understanding about our government [...]

There are a couple of things to notice about Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation process.  The first is that she has strong public support for her nomination.  The second is that, since she has fairly broad public support, many Republicans have jumped on board for her nomination.  How do we explain why this has happened?
imagine you are a Republican [...]