Folk are meeting at noon at the cultural office of the Egyptian embassy on Friday to demand the release of the jailed Egyptian blogger. Visit FreeKareem.org for more info, or RSVP at the Facebook page for the protest.

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If jailed Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Soliman (better known as Kareem Amer) is ultimately freed, I think it’s safe to say it’ll be in large part due to the tireless efforts of my friend Constantino Diaz-Duran, who is one of the major reasons any of us have even heard of the case. He’s got […]

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Replying to Megan’s offer of a bargain on school choice—liberals support vouchers, and we’ll support higher education spending for them—Kevin Drum writes: Double spending per student, for all I care. Sure, sure, this is hyperbole, but even so it represents a pretty straightforward admission of what many of us have always suspected: voucher proposals are […]

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Apropos of last week’s revelations about frequent abuse of NSL powers at the FBI: It’s Sunshine Week, and the organizers have launched a blog rounding up relevant news.

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It turns out that when you give law enforcement sweeping powers to demand access to private records with minimal oversight, you get lots of abuses. A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of “national security letters” surveyed 293 such letters from 77 casefiles and found 22 potential breaches (at least one in almost a […]

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If you’re in the D.C. area, you can come out to a panel tonight where I’ll be debating the role of faith in politics: Don’t forget that tonight AFF will host a roundtable discussion on the topic of liberals and faith. Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi created a “Faith Working Group” for members of the […]

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Wired reports on a new study, due to be published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior, debunking the purported link between pixelated carnage and real-world mayhem, which not a few culture warriors seem to regard as having been established beyond any reasonable doubt. Ars Technica has more.

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Glenn Reynolds reports yesterday’s anti-surge vote as: “Resolution in favor of defeat passes in the House.” Next up, Congress declines to fund research into perpetual motion machines, Glenn sniffs: “Resolution in favor of thermodynamics passes in the house.”

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My phone is hosed; use e-mail if you need to reach me. Or, to quote Yglesias: “Looking at the Razor, you’d think they couldn’t make a phone that small. Then you realize they sort of can’t.”

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Gene Healy’s irritated by the growing chatter about a “politics of meaning.” I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that this is an unintended, but possibly unavoidable, side effect of expecting the national government to be an all-purpose solver of problems and doer of good. People come to think that—perhaps like […]

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