Looks like the shutdown's going to occur. This'll be interesting.

I've just been watching Lincoln, and have been reminded how vicious American politics has been during most of our existence. In 1798 Congressmen Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold got into a fight with walking stick and fireplace tongs on the floor of Congress, and Preston Brooks ( Read more... )

I've seen people on my FL repost something that starts out, "if Baroness Thatcher is given a state funeral, I will leave the country for the day, because what her policies did, what her belief did, what her legacy did, is doing to this day are things that are anathema to me ( Read more... )

I recently picked up an 1888 copy of Walter Bagehot's classic Lombard Street: a Description of the Money Market. It's excellent. Bagehot was the second editor of The Economist, and it's both interesting and impressive that its clarity of writing and thinking dates back at least to him. The book first came out in 1873. This passage strikes me as ( Read more... )

Will Wilkinson just wrote one of the best blog posts on American politics (and maybe politics in any Western democracy) that I've ever read.

The GOP is not, in fact, committed to replacing "a free-market system balanced with government regulations, tax-funded social programs and legislative and judicial guarantees of civil rights" with "one that ( Read more... )

"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government that is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

-- James Madison (1751-1836)

"The mandate's opponents favor a federal government as James Madison fashioned it, one limited by the constitutional enumeration of its powers. The mandate's supporters favor government as Woodrow Wilson construed it, with limits as elastic as liberalism's agenda, and powers acquiring derivative constitutionality by being necessary to, or efficient ( Read more... )

This guy says what I believe.

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground."

-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788.