Redefining the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality is David Boies and Ted Olson’s attempt to cast themselves as the driving force behind legalizing gay marriage. The pair write that they hoped their challenge to California’s Proposition 8 would “change the course of history” and serve as a “critical step in the process of […]

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  Exit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Not a day too soon and five years too late. The enormity of the tragedy he helped create is almost too great to grasp. Civilians murdered with weapons the U.S. had provided an Iraqi army that proved incapable of confronting a small but disciplined band of terrorists. Rape […]

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  A predominantly African-American audience filled the chamber on a late June morning as the Senate Judiciary Committee convened for a hearing on a bill that would restore parts of the 1964 Voting Rights Act (VRA). What was arguably the most effective civil-rights legislation ever enacted had been gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court exactly […]

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  Iassume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side,” the late columnist Molly Ivins wrote in 2003. “The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’” Ivins never considered herself an authority on […]

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  In June, Harvard professor and activist Lawrence Lessig launched the MaydayPAC to support candidates who will champion campaign-finance reform. By July 4, it hit its target of $5 million from 50,000 small donors, which will be matched by Silicon Valley donors. MaydayPAC continues to solicit individual donations online. The excerpt below, from MaydayPAC’s website, […]

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