Among the certainties of today's American conservative movement is the hostility towards objective truth and the scientific method. As I wrote in "The Potemkin President", the Lysenkoism of the Right requires an attack on any finding that runs counter to its policies or ideology. The Right's same fierce denial, it appears, also applies to journalistic […]

I've often taken conservatives to task for their papal claims of infallability. In the GOP Schiavo memo case, as in so many others too numerous to recount here, the Republicans and their amen corner got it wrong and refused to own up and apologize. If liberals are going to cast stones, however, we better get […]

Yesterday, AOL hero turned villain Steve Case announced his next new thing. Launching a company called Revolution with $500 million of his money, Case has the outsized goal of transforming the health care system for American consumers. But while the health care market may succeed in making Steve Case richer still, it will almost certainly […]

Among her legacies, Russian Empress Catherine the Great brought the term "Potemkin Village" into the vernacular. It refers to the elaborate villages erected by Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin to impress Catherine with her new Crimean conquests. In today's political parlance, the term has become synonymous with the sophisticated facade and the clever ruse - […]

As expected, the President's commission on pre-war intelligence regarding Iraqi's weapons of mass destruction offers a scathing critique of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. (The full report and other commission background can be found here; other Iraq/WMD documents are also available in the Perrspectives Document Library.) Also as expected, the report essentially absolved […]

For those who have been following Perrspectives' take on the Schiavo affair, my defense of individual liberty and personal autonomy can be found in the March 28th Op Ed section of The Oregonian: "Liberty and the Culture of Living" You can also read the full text below.

In recent days, criticism has unfairly rained down on House majority leader Tom Delay for supposedly comparing himself to Jesus. As Delay put it in his own defense, "people hate the messenger. That's why they killed Christ." On this Easter Sunday, it is worth noting that the similarities between Jesus and Tom Delay are striking: […]

As the Terri Schiavo tragedy continues, we've learned that most Americans believe that these complex, deeply private end-of-life decisions should be made by families, not the government. What we've also learned that is that one of the Americans who apparently feels that way is none other than Tom Delay. The Los Angeles Times reports that […]

The political clash over the tragedy of Terri Schiavo is highlighting once again the Achilles Heel of the conservative movement. Dormant for two presidential elections, the yawning chasm between economic and social conservatives is reemerging, and with it, a serious threat to the Republicans' majority status. As we've noted before, the ascendancy of the Right […]

Three critical points have been almost entirely absent from the media's discussion of the Terri Schiavo affair. I've written about two and others in the blogosphere have done a great job addressing the third: 1. Moral Arguments Favoring the End of Life Support A thorough discussion of the very strong moral arguments in favor of […]