The New Republic

by Cass Sunstein For those wondering about the future of the Democratic Party, it's worth paying careful attention to Barack Obama's speech at the evangelical AIDS conference sponsored by Saddleback Church, available here. I am pointing not to the fact of the speech, which has already gotten considerable attention, but to its content. READ MORE >>

It's been a bad couple of days for Mitt Romney. You probably have already read that John McCain crashed the Republican Governors Association meetings in Doral, Florida. This was supposed to be Romney's turf since he's head of the organization, and he had certainly made planes for it to be just that. Then McCain came to town, courted the governors, their associates, and the many lobbyists, and turned the event into, well, more than a competition, but a triumph of the senator's audacity and charm. READ MORE >>

For your Friday afternoon viewing pleasure, the now-notorious Bank of America conference video, featuring a couple of bankers playing--with the kind of earnestness you really can't fake--a version of U2's "One," with rewritten lyrics about their employer. READ MORE >>

Civil marriage is not permitted in Israel. Historically--that is, when the state was founded in 1947-1948--this was less a concession to the rabbis than to the Muslims and especially to the Christians of Palestine, who were fiercely represented by the Catholic countries in the U.N. General Assembly. The representatives of these governments extracted many concessions from the Zionists in exchange for support of the Partition Plan. Among these was that matters of personal status were to be left to the official religious communions. And so it has been. READ MORE >>

On its front page yesterday, November 7, The Guardian trumpeted a speech it was reprinting by David Grossman, the well-known (I think more than a little precious, but no matter) Israeli novelist. Grossman gave the address at a huge memorial meeting for Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv on the fifth anniversary of the prime minister's assassination. "What has happened to my beloved Israel?" cries out the headline, placed directly under the Zionist banner, two blue stripes and a Star of David on a white field. READ MORE >>

by Jacob T. LevyThis isn't very scholarly of me, but I'm just too delighted not to say: good-bye to Senator Man On Dog. In memoriam, the transcript, one last time. READ MORE >>

by Sandy Levinson READ MORE >>

by David Greenberg READ MORE >>

The DiTomasso brothers may not have much in common with George W. Bush, but there's one thing the president and the mob-linked contractors share: Both have reason to rue the day they met Bernard B. Kerik. READ MORE >>

You don't often find in the Boston Globe an article that puts forth Israel as a model for the legal treatment of terrorist detainee rights--or, for that matter, as an exemplar of anything good. Except insofar as it puts the United States in a terrible light. I don't think that was the intent of the authors of yesterday morning's op-ed, "The Israeli model for detainee rights," by Professor Martha Minow and Assistant Professor Gabriella Blum, both of the Harvard Law School and formidable legal scholars. I don't know Blum. But I do know Minow, and she is a very exacting civil libertarian. READ MORE >>