The Great Cases, No. 4
This one took me a very long time to write. The subject matter was difficult and complex to research, the opinion dense, and I wanted to do the case justice. I’ve had a lot of...
Monthly Archive: May 2012
Amendment Barriers
[Cross-posted from NaPP] Doug Mataconis and Steven Taylor go back and forth on whether the Constitution is too hard to amend. This is an area where my instincts are to agree with Mataconis, but...
Gill Goes As Anticipated
The First Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in the companion cases of Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. Department of Health and Human Services this morning. To the surprise of...
Bathroom Bolsheviks
Timothy Sandefur does some fascinating research about a purported McCarthy-era magazine ad. The truth is out there, but it turns out — horrors — to be sort of nuanced.
Everything I Simultaneously Love And Hate About American Politics In One Short YouTube Video
I’m not sure which part of this I find the most simultaneously entertaining and depressing:
Wendell Berry’s Passion Play
I don’t hesitate to say that damage or destruction of the land-community is morally wrong, just as [Aldo] Leopold did not hesitate to say so when he was composing his essay, “The Land Ethic,”...
How We Watch TV
From Graeme McMillan at Spinoff: And then there are the shows that I accidentally skip out of synch with and all of a sudden, there’s a terrifying backlog of: Seven episodes of Mad Men?...
An Ambiguous Utopia
I just finished The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and despite the fact that I am probably not going to contribute much to the body of criticism surrounding it, I wanted to write...
“They Will Take Up Serpents…”
There are so many points here where an unkind person could laugh: Mack Wolford, a flamboyant Pentecostal pastor from West Virginia whose serpent-handling talents were profiled last November in The Washington Post Magazine, hoped...
Enough Already
From the Rural Blog: Over half of American adults favor “legalizing and regulating marijuana similar to the way alcohol and tobacco cigarettes are currently regulated,”
Brooks, Broder & the Illusion of Right-Left Political Spectrum
There are many things that confuse me about the liberal blogosphere. (e.g.: Why is it that even when you’re in power you seem to think the end of the world is nigh?) But the...
None of this has happened yet
In doing research while watching Fringe episode “Momentum Deferred” from the second season of Fringe for the most recent Mindless Diversions Bookclub! post, I asked the question “Do people still do cryogenics?” In googling,...
Guest blogging for Kevin Drum
Leaguefest Las Vegas was a blast. Other than my wife coming down with a stomach bug; the headache I got Friday night that came on like a pre-hangover hangover; and the flu (or bad...
The Evangelical War on Mormonism That Wasn’t
[Promoted by request from the Dutch Courage sub-blog.] A rather odd–or underreasoned–op-ed from Harvard prof Noah Feldman is making the rounds, that Mitt Romney’s candidacy is Mormonism’s ticket to American Protestant acceptance. That’s a...
Language Police
It’s leaked that homeland security or other law enforcement authorities are screening social media facilities to find plots about attacks, toxic gas incidents, drugs, gangs, violence, assassinations, and other threats by targeting certain words in...
“So What are The League Contributors Really Like In Real Life, Anyway?”
by Deep Throat This weekend’s Leaguefest™ is finally winding down and its various members are sadly breaking off from one another, each heading back to their various points of origin. Most of what happens...
Alas, if only she’d follow the rules…
…this girl wouldn’t have to spend a day in jail and pay a fine. The nerve of some people, to think they can work to support their family and do school work and that...
