Carroll Andrew Morse
Reason 1: Why Pardoning Taricani is the Right Thing. Reason 2: Why the Right Thing is Consistent with the President’s Agenda. Institutionally, American democracy has forgotten something — all three branches of government are charged with defending the rights of the individual. Somewhere that idea was lost, replaced by the idea that the court system…
The President and his conservative coalition, as a matter of principle, do not like activist judges, i.e. judges who use their power to go beyond just interpreting the law. Here is uber-conservative and Bush supporter Phyllis Schlafly on the subject… “Finally, we have a president who comes right out and targets ‘activist judges’ as the…
Rhode Island just passed a separation-of-powers referendum on the state level. But do we have it at the Federal level? Separation-of-powers means that a legislative branch of government makes the laws, a judicial branch of government interprets the laws, and an executive branch of government enforces the laws. At the moment, Jim Taricani is being…
Providence Journal media writer Andy Smith has an update on the Jim Taricani situation in Sunday’s paper. For those unfamiliar with the events, here is the background. Jim Taricani is a political reporter for the local NBC affiliate, WJAR-10. In 2001, about two months before the (former) Mayor of Providence was indicted on federal corruption…
Arianna Huffington has an article on her blog nominally analyzing how Kerry’s reluctance to talk about foreign policy contributed to his defeat, yet in her detailed tactical description how foreign policy came to be muted, she doesn’t tell us what she thinks that the Kerry campaign should have been saying. She attributes the avoidance of…
I’d like to offer a suggestion to the conservatives mounting a challenge to Arlen Specter’s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee. They need to do a better job explaining what exactly the powers of a committee chair are, and exactly how a committee chair can frustrate the appointment process in a way that any other…
My latest article for TechCentralStation, on the subject of the Democratic party and national security issues, ran today. As luck would have it (or maybe it’s my vast network of spies in the vast right-wing conspiracy), the article serves as something of a response to blog entries from Kevin Drum and Matt Ygelsias (scroll up)…
And having opened talking about the local roots of this blog, I now move immediately to a national-level post… The (mostly tongue-in-cheek, I think) talk about some sort of red-state blue-state secession has me feeling like I’m living in the Bizarro World. I have a track record on the issue of secession. I’ve written a…
John Fund documented in yesterday’s Opinionjournal, that more and more states are tending towards one-party rule at the state level. This is an intersting trend. If you believe what people say about voting for “the best candidate” instead of party affiliation, you would expect, at the local level, less dominance by any single party, because…