Goodbye to Richard Ben Cramer.

The author of the great book "What It Takes," died yesterday at the age of 62 . Here 's Throwing Things: If you've never r...

If we truly care deeply about the death of young children...

... what are the most effective things we can do? There's so much talk about gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, but r...

Gun control and the "common sense" meme.

I got 19,300 results from a Google news search for "common sense" and "Sandy Hook." To be fair, not all of the "com...

"Why are people so much smarter at making personal decisions than deciding how to vote?"

Jaltcoh points to Bryan Caplan's discussion of self-correction, which keeps us from dumb decisionmaking in our personal affairs, but: ...

65% of like voters agree with the adage: "A government powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you have."

A new Rasmussen poll. (Only 23% disagree.) Just 10% of all voters believe the government should be allowed to do anything that a majority o...

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

A quote that came up in conversation just now. I had to look it up to get it verbatim and was delighted to see it came from Samuel Johnson ,...

"The Constitution is the rules; politics is the game."

"The alternatives to organized political contention are anarchy or sheep-like passivity." Richard Brookhiser speaks in one aphoris...

"Pay Pal founder... Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters..."

"Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy w...

"The Parallax View."

A famous sequence from the highly esteemed political movie (which you can see tonight, free, at Cinematheque , in Madison): Glenn Erickson h...

The Reel Geezers tell you what political films to watch.

ADDED: A quote: "Every political movie about the electoral system shows that it's corrupt." Is that true? And why is it true? ...

"No solution to a problem can be more elegant than the problem itself."

"We are dealing with a very difficult problem. Given the dimensions of the problem, I believe we have done a good job. It includes genu...

"Orwell said, 'I never wrote a decent word that wasn't motivated by a deep political feeling.'"

"I totally disagree with Orwell, who I admire," says Tom Wolfe. "I have never written a decent word that was dominated by po...

Unexpected graffiti in Madison.

Is it ironic? Is it related to the pro-Ron Paul scrawlings I witnessed in the area (State Street)? ADDED: Is Urban Outfitters putting up its...

The conservative mindset. The liberal mindset.

This half of a Pogo cartoon strip by Walt Kelly says it all: Photographed from the framed original on display at the Mustard Museum in Mount...

Tibet rally in Union Square.

Nearby, the buttons for sale were miscellaneous: ADDED: Click here to enlarge the buttons picture. The empty row at the left seems to have ...

Women are afraid to talk about politics.

Via Bloggingheads.

"People are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states."

Biofuels have been a "terrible mistake," says Paul Krugman . [E]ven on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from co...

Was Wisconsin's state Supreme Court election "a tragedy"?

Governor Jim Doyle said it was and the Wall Street Journal is not pleased: It's surprising to hear how little he thinks of his constitue...

"Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle."

Somehow I missed this story from 2005. So how political is hair anyway? Fashion too. Don't forget to watch "Dressing in accordance...

"He showed us that politics do not have to be harsh or overly partisan."

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle pays tribute to our former governor, Lee Sherman Dreyfus, who died yesterday. Dreyfus, who had been ill for so...