May 2009
“Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put...”
– George Lakoff
“[Jeffrey] Rosen can give up blogging and every other perceived vice all he...”
– Glenn Greenwald
“In another revealing and disturbing development, the former chief of staff to...”
– Bill Moyers
Torturing Democracy →
Example of How Activists Misuse History of... →
Mr. Boone,
The ACLU is simply the Constitution in action, with particular emphasis on the First Amendment. If you don’t like what the ACLU does, then either you really don’t approve of the Constitution and the First Amendment themselves, or you don’t fully understand what they say and mean.
As a combat veteran of World War II, I fought to preserve and protect our Constitution. So I joined the...
“I’d submit that the debate over America’s founding has been polarized to suit...”
– Alissa Wilkinson
Library of Congress Blog →
“…those who today, either out of despair or because they are victims of the...”
– Gianfranco Sanguinetti
Rogues, Robes and Racists →
First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I...
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the...”
– Winston Churchill
“Scenario we’ve seen over and over again white cop, dead black man. This scenario...”
– The Black Sentinel
Fairness in Sports: A Modest Proposal →
To increase agricultural output on a fixed amount of land, you increase labor and fertilizer. If a nuclear limitation treaty limits the number of missiles, a nation that wants to maintain its arsenal does it by increasing the size of warheads, the number of warheads per missile, or both. Consider the same principle in the context of sports. A football team faces an artificial constraint on the...
Was Bush on a mission from God? →
Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.
“This confrontation is willed by...
“In the nineteenth century, when a woman had been raped, or had experienced...”
– Naomi Wolf
“If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have...”
– Seth Godin
“Think tanks, lobbyists and military contractors have had tremendous influence in...”
– Henry Pelifian
Why the Palm Pre Will Fail →
The Palm Pre UI is slick and appealing, new and innovative. But in the mass consumer handset market, only three things count: Brand appeal, simplicity and apps. And on all three counts, Apple clobbers Palm. That’s why iPhone has destroyed every other “better” phone that has come along.
Palm’s Synergy feature allows users to pull together contacts from multiple sources,...
“Remember when capitalism’s apologists used to dismiss the very idea of socialism...”
– The Consumer Trap
“Lyons dismisses my accurate prediction (written in the mid to late 1980s) of a...”
– Ray Kurzweil
Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships →
Now we’re swimming in information. We can call up nearly every bit of news, music, and entertainment we want on demand. In fact, there’s so much of it that we need filters to block the boring or irrelevant stuff and help us find the bits we need or desire. This has created what many call the “Attention Economy.” Says Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the Information...
“The Discovery Institute seems to have given up on the pretense that intelligent...”
– Cheryl Shepherd-Adams
Translation of La Raza →
Many people incorrectly translate our name, “La Raza,” as “the race.” While it is true that one meaning of “raza” in Spanish is indeed “race,” in Spanish, as in English and any other language, words can and do have multiple meanings. As noted in several online dictionaries, “La Raza” means “the people” or “the community.” Translating our name as “the race” is not only inaccurate, it is...
Palm Pre To Sync Seamlessly With iTunes →
In the first case of its type, a federal judge in... →
“The way taught by Jesus’ gospel sends us into the world with an otherly...”
– Brian McLaren
Newspaper runs Obama assassination ad →
“I think an economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on...”
– Wendell Berry
The Myth of the Balanced Court →
Here’s a simple way to expose the Myth of Balance. In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how...
“However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are...”
– Judge Sotomayor
The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American... →
Any job that’s even slightly routine is disappearing from the U.S. But this doesn’t mean we are left with fewer jobs. It means only that we have fewer routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing. When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won’t be returning—but new jobs will take their place. A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that...
“Most industrial democracies employ some form of single-payer health care system....”
– Robert Frank
Lessig's Change Congress Accuses Democratic... →
In this particular case, Change Congress makes the shocking observation that Nelson’s receipt of millions of dollars from insurance and health care interests might call the sincerity of his (now-renounced) opposition to a public health insurance option into question.
“Obama is a socialist/fascist; Sonia Sotomayor is a racist, and La Raza is the...”
– Paul Krugman
“It is a fact that in America the term “socialism” is a smear....”
– Lessig
Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods,... →
“Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of...”
– Will Durant
“The experiences of the early bloggers prefigured every one of the dilemmas that...”
– Scott Rosenberg
“How can we preserve immigrants’ vital contribution to our economy while also...”
– Guest-Worker Caste System
Will GOP regret attacks on The Times? →
If the Times eventually fades or, in its nightmare scenario, is acquired by conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch, do conservatives really think the journalistic functions and bedrock liberal assumptions that define the paper would disappear? Those functions and values are already dispersing across the blogosphere, which is busy erecting its own liberal establishment.
This new establishment,...
Rising sea levels: Survival tips from 5000 BC →
A revealing anecdote about Sonia Sotomayor →
“We have only this short life in which to prove our love.”
– Edel Quinn