Kevin Drum linked to a most fascinating piece yesterday (admittedly, the cover story in the magazine that pays him to blog) on conservatives and governance. I've read it twice now and find the article to be very well written and much in tune with evidence beyond the three issues he cites-Iraq, FEMA and Medicare. Why just today Drum writes in response to Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Hudson v. Michigan:

This is, of course, why I decline to take originalism seriously. Even its proponents pretty obviously understand that it's ridiculous to pretend that nothing has changed in the past 200 years, and they mostly use originalism as little more than intellectual cover for making the conservative rulings they want to make anyway. But when conservative rulings require that originalism be tossed overboard, they do so without apology. Some doctrine, eh?

All of which reminds me of a conversation that Lee had last summer with a colleague of ours in which he said that capitalism and conservatism, when both are true to form, cannot be reconciled as they are mutually exclusive. Which reminds me of Marx talking about capitalists were indeed the most revolutionary party, but we can save that for another time.  Posted by Outlaw Genius  at 6:26 PM 0 comments

  Wow, 30 hours and no initial posting from the OG. Apologies to all of you reading this then (um, Hi Mischa!). By way of introduction, this is a joint venture by two men, thrown together in the cosmos by a little thing we like to call Duke "We don't even want to mention the word 'lacrosse'" TIP. I served as Lee's teaching assistant last summer, and we decided to combine our respective blogging powers, his being impeccable and invaluable analysis on the political, economic and legal news of the day, and mine being the ability to make said analysis look pretty.

We do have a mission for this blog; while both of us have our own individual blogs, we will be using this forum to take a hopefully profound, mostly serious, sometimes irreverent, but always genuine attempt at making sense of the world around us. While we may betray political leanings on various issues, we are both decidedly independent of not just political parties, but also political labels. Through this blog we will address articles and events on issues as wide ranging as our interests and curiosity allows, that we might help affect a fresh approach to public policy and social thought. We might not have the answers, but we can at least start asking the questions, and in a free society, that is indeed most essential.  Posted by Outlaw Genius  at 10:57 PM 0 comments