What fuels media coverage of political campaigns

Marty Kaplan has described how the media covers political campaigns.  The media: work for a big business, whose oxygen is attention. They live or die on grabbing and holding audiences. To stay in business, they need combat, conflict, heat, meat, flip-flops, gotchas, losers, boozers, hairpin turns, heroes with feet of clay, Rockys,…

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Are you having difficulty figuring out who you are ? Then take an inventory of your friends.

Periodically, I become a bit disoriented in the swirl of life, which gives rise to the question: “Who am I?”  We aren’t static beings, of course.  We are complex adaptive systems, communities of relatively simple cellular life that number in the trillions.  Many of “our” cells (in fact, the great…

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Jeffrey Stone on originalism

In "Supreme Imbalance: Why Originalism and Conservative Activism Are Wrong," I think Jeffrey Stone has it about right in his Huffpo article on the jurisprudential doctrine that goes under the name of "originalism." With this mindset, the notion that any particular moment's conception of rights should be taken as exhaustive…

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Why don’t conservative Christians protest the use of legal mind-altering drugs?

I spent some time over at Focus on the Family, a site that teaches God's own version of morality, to see what they had to say about drug use.  As it turned out, the advice depended on whether the drug was illegal, as though God defers to the U.S. Congress…

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