I wonder if Rod Dreher is similarly "shocked" by this news. ...

Of Obama's decision to reverse Bush's ban on federal funding for stem cell research, Yuval Levin has this to say: ...legitimate dispute underlies the stem cell debate. But that is not the ground on which the president made his case yesterday. He argued that to deny free rein to stem cell science is ...

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this article is: President Obama’s directive on Monday to “guarantee scientific integrity� in federal policy making could have a far-reaching impact, affecting issues as varied as climate change, national security, protection of endangered species and ch...

Megan McArdle explains why she thinks that people do-to some degree-have a moral obligation to repay their debts (lengthy excerpt warning): Four weeks ago, I bought a grill on my credit card. It was not the best grill Home Depot had--indeed, because I am cheap, and also have never longed to rotisser...

While Republicans and their useful fools in the media elite are busy complaining about "pork" that might possibly arise to single-digit percentage points of the total stimulus package, economists are worried that the stimulus package isn't doing enough to boost the economy. Paul Krugman: To see how ...

I sent this story of a horrific murder in East Texas to Nat-Wu and Adam over the weekend, both of whom reacted to the story by saying "that's one of the worst things I've ever read." Which was pretty much what I thought when I read it too. Well, via John Cole and Andrew Sullivan, it seems that Rod D...

Republicans, demonstrating again that the only thing they can get behind is screwing the little guy out of some money....

Kevin Drum quotes Ross Douthat, who thinks he sees a grand strategy at work in the Obama administration's spending: What you see in his budgeting proposals, I think, is the liberal equivalent of the conservative attempt to "starve the beast." In both the Reagan and Bush eras, Republicans passed tax ...

But not so much for Pakistan, or the Pakistani government, or anybody forced to live under the harsh rule of Taliban militant Mauluna Fazlullah's version of the Sharia law: The Taliban and the Pakistani Army signed a truce last month in Swat, the once popular tourist area just an hour north of the c...

Brian Tamahana explains exactly how atrocious the legal reasoning is in the OLC memos authored by Yoo, Bybee and (to a lesser extent) Delahunty. Here's an example: Some of the arguments veer into the bizarre. Consider this concluding passage from a Yoo-Delahunty memo arguing that the president can o...