In happier news, Judge Victor Montiglio has had the moral courage to issue 129 arrest warrants against former political and military leaders who committed crimes against humanity under the Pinochet regime. If only the United States had the same respect for the rule of law as ... Chile?

Zacharek seems to believe that discount culture is a new phenomenon, but it is not. Manufacturers have been producing cheap, non-durable goods for the masses, including furniture, since at least the "consumer revolution" of the mid-eighteenth century. If you look at furniture produced 50 or 100 years ago, you invariably find that it was built to last, but the reason should be obvious. The much larger quantity of non-durable furniture built by our ancestors has simply not survived. Most of it was probably chopped up for kindling after it collapsed under its own weight.

It seems to me that the "center" can only be defined functionally as the point at the center of the actual political spectrum. To say that the country is center-right is like saying that all the children are above average. The assertion cannot be argued empirically since it is wrong by definition.

As Paul Krugman keeps trying to explain, Canada does not have a socialized health-care system. They have socialized medical INSURANCE (called "Single Payer"). Their health-care providers remain private, just like ours.

Arise O Rintrah thee I call! & Palamabron thee!

Go! tell the human race that Womans love is Sin!

That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters

In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come:

Forbid all joy.

-- William Blake, "Europe a Prophecy," plate 5.

With all due respect to Glenn Greenwald, George Bush's speech to the Federalist Society is not actually a rhetorical shift from his administration's previous position. The administration's legal scholars, including John Yoo, have argued consistently that the founders understood supreme military authority to be the exclusive prerogative of the executive, not the legislative, branch of government. They have consistently invoked the "separation of powers," but have done so as a coded way of saying that congress possesses no constitutional authority to meddle in national security (except perhaps to approve or deny funding). There are a number of profound problems with this legal theory, including those outlined so well above by "CMcC," but Bush's speech last night does not represent a new departure.

Typically, the biggest hurdle in passing a federal constitutional amendment is not winning the approval of three fourths of the states, but simply getting it through the Congress. Abolition of the Electoral College would have some important consequences that are seldom mentioned, but which are, I suspect, the true reasons why the Congress fails to send such a constitutional amendment to the states.

One of the effects of the Electoral College is to limit voting in presidential elections to residents of the fifty states. It would be politically unfeasible to propose a constitutional amendment that establishes direct election, but continues to disenfranchise U.S. citizens who reside elsewhere. That means that Puerto Rico would suddenly become a major force in national politics. Personally I think that would be a good thing: if Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens then they should help elect the president. Our country’s prevalent racism, however, will probably prevent that from ever happening.

A second pernicious effect of the Electoral College is to guarantee to each state a certain weight in presidential elections regardless how many of its residents fail to vote. As a result, the states have little incentive to get out the vote, and voting rates remain abysmally low. With a system of direct election, each state’s weight in the election would depend directly on the number of its citizens who actually vote. As a result, we would probably see state officials make strenuous efforts to promote voting, for fear of losing all influence with the president. Do our political leaders really want to deal with an engaged electorate?

Contrary to what Pete and Art Guerilla imply, no one is proposing to repeal Ms. Coulter’s First Amendment rights. But the First Amendment also means that we are allowed to respond to her words with our words. By criticizing her, we do not violate the Constitution.

Why do we assume the worst? Maybe she was just thinking of a bundle of firewood, which is what the word means in England. Someone should point this out to Hannity before his next show.

The problem is that science journals are run as for-profit companies, even as they exercise an effective monopoly over their markets. No matter how high the price goes, no academic library can possibly cut its subscription to a major scientific journal like Science or Nature. You don’t have to be an economist to anticipate the result: prices that bear no rational relation to the cost of production. For decades the soaring cost of science journals has been devouring the acquisitions budgets of academic libraries, forcing them to gut the rest of their collections to keep up. Social science and humanities journals, by contrast, are run as non-profits, and continue to charge very reasonable subscription rates even as they shoulder the costs of peer review and continue to publish first-rate scholarship.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose there is some unknown reason why publicly funded science research has to be published by private for-profit companies. How then can we keep the companies honest and prevent price gouging? There are really only two options: either strict governmental regulation, or market competition.

New cheaper alternatives like PubMed Central and Public Library of Science should be congratulated for finally forcing long overdue innovation on a venal and fossilized industry. Throughout history monopolists have argued that, paradoxically, monopolies are actually good for society. And throughout history monopolists have been wrong, wrong, wrong.