Liz at Yellow is the Color opens an interesting discussion of emotion and politics with this vaguely What’s the Matter With Kansas-flavored anecdote: My professor told us this story (which I am now going to promptly butcher) about his time on the campaign trail. In 2004, he was going door-to-door campaigning deep in the backwoods […]

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So, I’ve now become accustomed to running into alums of the American Parliamentary Debate Association in the wacky, wonky world of political journalism and punditry, but I just became aware, via a chance reference from a film-buff friend, that someone I knew very slightly from the old college circuit is now some sort of indie […]

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In a special Panopticon Edition of BloggingHeads TV, I chat with Spencer Ackerman about FISA, satellite surveillance, and the NSA lawsuits making their way through the Ninth Circuit.

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Nota bene, New Republic: the whole “counterintuitive” shtick has its merits, but it’s sort of cheating when the argument is counterintuitive because obviously wrong. The trick is to run pieces with premises as superficially implausible as Ben Wittes’ lukewarm endorsement of the Protect America Act, but which actually turn out to be at least somewhat […]

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“You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances. In this case the matter was simplified by Brunton’s intelligence being quite first-rate, so that it was unnecessary to make […]

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Megan starts blogging at her new digs today.

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Wired‘s invaluable Threat Level blog has a detailed account of hearings earlier this week to determine whether a pair of lawsuits challenging alleged government wiretapping can continue. Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has a good short summary of the tortuous logic that prompted one judge to announce he felt like a character in Alice in Wonderland. The […]

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I started noticing this last week, but the level of bald-faced mendacity indulged in by defenders of the recent FISA amendment is sort of gobsmacking, which is saying quite a bit given how little I expect of GOP dead-enders at this point. Consider this, from the Weekly Standard‘s blog: One of the last things Congress […]

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The Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger I wrote about in June will be allowed to go forward despite the FTC’s bizarre objections.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, a three-month-old decision by DNI Michael McConnell has dramatically expanded intelligence agencies’ access to domestic surveillance images from spy satellites. There are a couple of interesting legal questions here, as the WSJ article notes. The first is whether routine domestic intelligence use of satellites developed by the military runs […]

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