(Correction appended.) (Clarence Thomas in his separate concurrence]* adds that in his view the First Amendment religion clauses don’t apply to the states in the first place. And it only probably bars the establishment of a national church—leaving open the question for another day. — Let Us Pray:The Supreme Court gives its blessing for prayer […]

The most important turn in Monday’s Supreme Court ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway—a case that probes the constitutionality of explicitly religious prayer in legislative sessions—isn’t that the courts no longer have a role in policing the Establishment Clause, or that pretty much any sectarian prayers can be offered at town meetings so long […]

I can not believe the nerve of  Greg Mankiw posting a blog about the Veterans Administration having problems. He suggests giving Vets a voucher. I suggest that he should apologize to all the Vets  for the War and Tax cuts policies that were implemented while he was at the White House that created the problem […]

The Supreme Court has long been criticized for its unwillingness to televise, or even record, its proceedings. But debate about transparency at the nation’s highest court should extend far beyond the issue of television cameras. Citizens deserve transparency from the court about how it decides which cases to hear, how justices decide whether to recuse […]

Who wins, who loses? And which who are you? The complexities of the 1%, multinational companies and agendas, government goals and responses and treaties, the trade deficit (US) and surplus (China), and what is globalization mostly about? Looking for posts…write to my gmail account. source New York Times

Heather Parton, aka the blogger many of us know and love as Digby, will on Tuesday be granted a prestigious honor. She’ll be receiving the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. The award is named after the great labor leader Sidney Hillman. (Via Washington Monthly….hat tip Run 75441)

Via Mark Thoma, Antonio Fatas has a really excellent post on what’s wrong with economics education. It is too good to excerpt (and besides Thoma does that better than I can). I was particularly interested in one of Fatas’s points #3 The need for a unified theory. The idea that economics is a rigorous science […]

At Crooks and Liars, Parker Higgins focuses on comments made by Chief Justice John Roberts during the oral argument in the cellphone privacy cases, in which the Chief Justice expressed skepticism that many law-abiding people carry more than one cellphone.  Higgins suggests that if the Justices “fail to recognize where their assumptions about society and technology […]

I haven’t read Scalia’s dissents–either one of them–in EPA v. EMA Homer City Generation, and don’t plan to. Nor did I plan to post more than I already have about it. But Kenneth Jost has read it, and at his blog Jost on Justice points out another line in the first of the two: In dissent, Scalia saw the EPA as making up the […]