James Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 has never been a bestseller. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, randomly flips open his own copy of a published edition to page 129 and starts reading aloud to illustrate why. “Mr. Randolph's plan,” Madison wrote, “as reported from the Committee June 13 being before the house, the 1. propos: ‘that a Natl. Govt. ought to be established consisting &c.’ being taken up.” For one, this stuff doesn’t translate out loud very well. The book continues like this for some 600 ... Read More
How Incumbents in Washington Hurt the Economy
March 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Conventional wisdom suggests that states are better-served in Washington by elected officials who can stay there long enough to accumulate power, get things done, and funnel home some of that government largesse. The longer an incumbent serves, the higher he or she rises in party ranks, and the more likely constituents will benefit. (The people of Maine, for instance, may be bigger losers than the GOP following the retirement announcement this week of long-serving and well-respected Senator Olympia Snowe.) There is new research, however, that suggests really powerful politicians may ... Read More
Think Tanks Are Nonpartisan? Think Again
February 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the strangest institutions in Washington — and perhaps the hardest to comprehend from the outside — is the think tank, that quasi-academic, sort-of-political organization that offers, as its primary output, ideas. Universally, think tanks claim to be nonpartisan, and as tax-exempt nonprofits, this is a basic requirement in the tax code. But most people in Washington know the ideological leanings of think tanks that may obscure this fact in their titles: There’s the Cato Institute (libertarian), the Heritage Foundation (conservative), the Brookings Institution (moderate liberal) ... Read More
Surplus Government Property: Homeless Help vs. Revenue
February 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
For the past 25 years, many organizations that serve the homeless in America have been able to do so with a free supply of real estate: surplus federal property that the government no longer wants. Old warehouses have been turned into food banks. Small agency office buildings have been converted to counseling centers. Decommissioned military housing now sometimes shelters the homeless. But in a reality of the recession, as America’s homeless ranks have risen, so too has the pressure in Washington to make a buck by selling these properties. “The issue has kind of devolved into a ... Read More
Pirate Party Docks at Berlin’s Parliament
January 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The recent U.S. shutdown of the Hong Kong-based file-hosting service Megaupload has led other file sharing sites to tighten their content sharing practices, for fear of facing criminal charges. Seven of Megaupload’s executives were charged with copyright violations, racketeering, and money laundering, while CEO Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish citizen, was arrested along with four others and could face up to 55 years in prison. Hackers have retaliated, leading some, like the ubiquitous “Anonymous,” to claim credit for attacking the Justice Department's website. But while pirating ... Read More
Who Owns Government-Funded Research Papers?
January 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Who owns publicly funded research — and the knowledge that comes from it? Is it the researchers themselves? The taxpayers who make their work possible? The community of academics who volunteer to peer review it? Or the academic journals that package and distribute all of this under respected titles? Maybe this sounds like inside baseball within the already too-insular world of academia. After all, is the public really clamoring to access the contents of the Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography? But there is a big question at play here as the U.S. Congress considers a bill called the ... Read More
The FCC and Indecency: Here We Go Again
December 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
“It is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to air indecent programming or profane language during certain hours...The courts have held that indecent material is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be banned entirely. It may, however, be restricted in order to avoid its broadcast during times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.” — The Federal Communications Commission In 1973, a public radio station in New York City broadcast comedian George Carlin’s “Seven ... Read More
Neo-Nazis and ‘Defensive Democracy’
November 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The weird revelations in Germany this month about a small group of neo-Nazi terrorists who killed at least nine foreigners and survived “underground” for 13 years by knocking over the occasional bank have, understandably, embarrassed a number of law enforcement officials. It’s even more confusing to Germans that the group managed to kill a policewoman in 2007 and plot against a very specific list of 88 politicians and public figures without coming to the attention of “Verfassungsschutz” authorities — Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV. The BfV ... Read More
The Last Word on Wartime Contractors?
November 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
At the end of September, after three years of hearings, reports and deliberations, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan turned off its lights for the last time. It left behind a report that is arguably the most comprehensive examination yet of the fraud, waste, and abuse rife among contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Contractors are a reality,” says the commission’s co-chair, former nine-term Republican congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut. “You can’t go to war without contractors. The irony is that we went to war unprepared to use ... Read More
Post-Gadhafi: What’s Next for Libya’s Government?
October 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Moammar Gadhafi, the former Libyan dictator whose regime was toppled in August amid the Arab Spring, was killed on October 20 in his hometown of Surt. Writer Marc Herman was in Libya recently and reported for Miller-McCune.com on how the best the Libyan government can transition from a dictatorship to a democracy. This is his full report, as it appears in the latest issue of Miller-McCune magazine. For much of this summer, few knew where Moammar Gadhafi had fled, but it was a good bet he wasn’t in Nalut. A town of 30,000 residents in Libya’s Western mountains, Nalut was among the first ... Read More
