New Jersey legislators have voted to create civil unions for gay couples, though also left open the possibility of extending full marriage rights in the future. I find myself less inclined than I used to be to reject this as an unacceptable “separate but equal” solution for a couple reasons. The legal semantic difference matters […]

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The Post reports that citizens’ concern for privacy is yawning and blinking after a long hibernation: Two-thirds think intelligence agencies are “intruding on some Americans’ privacy rights” in terrorism investigations, and the number who say this is justified has fallen from 63 percent to 51 percent over three years. Better still, a majority want to […]

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Ramesh Ponnuru observes (with a caveat) that while Republican congressional candidates lost significant support from libertarian-leaning voters since the last midterms, they actually gained relative to 2004. From this, we’re meant to infer that even if libertarians are up for grabs, they’re hard to appeal to, since they’re just congenitally truculent folks who will always […]

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I’ll be rolling over to this AFF roundtable on “neoprohibition” later today. And getting roaring drunk at the bar later strictly as a political protest.

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Via Radley, I see I can finally link to an online version of Chuck Klosterman’s most recent Esquire column on the seeming impossibility of revolution in modern America. Short version: I’ve started wondering what would have to happen before the American populace would try to overthrow its own government, and how such a coup would […]

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There’s an interesting piece at Slate arguing, pace Richard Epstein, that allowing the government to negotiate bulk pharmaceutical prices for seniors won’t harm industry innovation… because it’s unlikely to lower prices much either.

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Great post by Jim Henley on how folks warning we can’t risk withdrawing from Iraq keep “defining catastrophe up.”

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I was going to post about something that came up in conversation with Yglesias earlier today—the way that policy discussion gets skewed because health, which can be scientifically quantified, takes on an aura of being more objectively valuable than other sources of human satisfaction, even though almost all of us think it’s sometimes worth trading […]

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In a follow-up to their recent study, David Boaz and Dave Kirby have an article at TCS Daily looking at how voters with broadly libertarian views punched their ballots in the midterms. And what they found was a pretty dramatic swing: Libertarians were still mostly supporting Republicans over Democrats, by 59-36 percent. But then, they […]

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I’ve been waiting for the new Democratic majority to remind me why I probably won’t like them all that much better than the Republicans—and presumably it’s still coming—but this is actually a shockingly heartening way to start. The GOP piled the pork high over 12 years of paying lip service to small government; the Dems […]

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