On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran an absurdly fluffy interview with Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security. It is difficult to envision how the magazine could have crafted a less substantial interview. A brief excerpt:

NYT: You were a Girl Scout?

JN: I still am!...

The killing of Dr. George Tiller is, of course, the second recent politically-motivated church shooting. The first occurred in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church on July 27th of last year. And although one was targeted at a doctor, and the other at liberals in general, both share a common...

Save for John Roberts' flubbing of the presidential oath, the parts of the inaugural ceremony that were broadcast on television went smoothly and predictably. Aretha sang, Rick Warren pronounced Malia and Sasha's names in a bizarre way, and Barack Obama gave a nice speech.

But for the millions of...

There are plenty of reasons to fear the possibility of a McCain-appointed Supreme Court justices, but the future of the exclusionary rule is one we don't discuss much. The exclusionary rule is the legal principle that evidence obtained through improper means cannot be used against a defendant. So anything...

Like all cool people, I have a Barack Obama bumper sticker on my car. I thought I was doing the senator a favor. He'd be proud of me.

And then I accidentally cut somebody off yesterday. He gave me the finger.
And I thought "What did that...

When the time came to vote on the PATRIOT act, a single senator stood up in opposition. Russ Feingold is perhaps the gutsiest senator in Congress, standing up to the Bush administration and even his fellow Democrats on numerous issues from Iraq to heath care to campaign finance reform. He's...

The news that 4 people had been arrested in Iowa while trying to perform a citizen's arrest on Karl Rove got me wondering: Can we arrest Bush administration officials ourselves? So I slogged through a slew of state statutes, and as it turns out, the answer is yes. But...

I live in a fairly absurd congressional district. Katherine Harris used to be my congresswoman. That is, before she spectacularly lost her senate race against mildly useless Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Ms. Harris was always good for a laugh -- during 2006 alone she called separation of church and state...

Because I am a decent, thinking person, I despise FOX News. I believe I have good reason to do this. And yet, because I'm a bleeding-heart liberal who likes to have the facts before spewing prejudices, I feel duty-bound to give FOX a chance. So I'm going to watch 24...

Etched into one of the walls of The Newseum, Washington, D.C.'s massive media museum, is a quote from H.L. Mencken. It says this: "I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter."

As I wandered through the Newseum, I saw...