At the risk of rambling on redundantly, I want to stress one thing about my attitude toward the Citizens United case: We’ve been focusing on this question of “corporate personhood” because that’s the legal frame we’ve been handed, but it’s pretty much irrelevant to my thinking about this question. The root conviction here is just […]

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Something that’s implicit in a lot of defenses of the Citizens United ruling I’ve seen in the past day is probably worth noting explicitly: The ban on independent corporate/union expendituures for “electioneering communications” that the court struck down was actually quite narrow.  Basically it covered TV and radio advertising, and didn’t touch myriad other forms […]

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For those who didn’t want to sit through the full panel, here’s an eight minute excerpt:

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Federal prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the investigation into Arizona thug Joe Arpaio. I suppose he’s unlikely to spend his last  pathetic years chained to a peg in the ground in some sweltering “tent city”—but one can dream.

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There’s a running conversation over at the Corner about the parallels between opposition to torture and pacifism, which is really just a thinly-veiled version of one of those tendentious hypotheticals about the nuclear bomb in Manhattan whose location (you know with apodictic certainty) can only be uncovered through the judicious application of thumbscrews. As such, […]

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I haven’t seen Sherlock Holmes yet, but I’ve seen way too many writers who ought to know better pitching the so-contrarian-its-now-CW line that Guy Ritchie’s transformation of Conan Doyle’s überrational sleuth into a two-fisted brawler is actually faithful to Conan Doyle’s original stories. After all, Holmes is described as being not just a skilled boxer, […]

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