Author: Pericles

I offer my letter in today’s Boston Globe as an example of how to frame the warrantless wiretapping issue: WHAT SCARED me most as I watched Alberto Gonzales’s testimony Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee was...

Over at Intel Dump, J. D. Henderson is doing very good analysis of the warrantless wiretapping issue. He’s careful to make the distinction between wiretapping the bad guys (which he’s for) and warrantless wiretapping...

[From the diaries by susanhu. This is very good and, as Marisacat says, “he did the dirty deed.” Thank you, Pericles. By the way, you have an amusing bio.] I wasn’t sure what I would find when I started reading...

When President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, he said that he knew her heart. That recommendation is her only real qualification: She has no judicial experience, no academic experience in constitutional law, and no meaningful writings not covered by attorney/client privilege.

“Heart” might strike you as a strange qualification. No one, after all, chooses a brain surgeon, an airline pilot, or a clean-up hitter solely on the basis of “heart”. Why a Supreme Court justice? Who would think that training and experience are not necessary?

There’s an answer to this question, but the professional pundits don’t seem to know it: In the worldview of fundamentalist religion, texts interpret themselves. Expertise just gets in the way.