Here’s an excerpt from Paul Krugman’s Common Dreams essay, “Wobbled by Wealth.” One of the saddest stories I tell in my book is that of Al Smith, the great reformist governor of New York, who gradually turned into a narrow-minded economic conservative and bitter critic of F.D.R. H. L. Mencken…
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,…
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…
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…
On October 20 and 21st, 2007, Blumenthal attended the Value Voters Summit, “a massive gathering hosted by the Colorado-based Christian right mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, and its Washington lobbying arm, the Family Research Council.” I admire Blumenthal’s work. He sticks his nose under the tent to allow us to…