A lost parakeet in Japan was returned safely to its owner last week after it told police its home address. Why do captive birds mimic human speech, and how do they decide what to say? They’re trying to fit in with the flock, and they’ll say whatever it takes.  —  “Why Parrots Parrot: When birds mimic […]

The new Florida [voter-identification] law requires that voter registration drives be conducted by third-party groups that are certified by the state and requires the groups to account for all forms that are checked out from the election division. Those rules are the centerpiece of a training effort this weekend by the Obama for America staff in […]

It will take a few more months of legal maneuvering before American finally throws in the towel and agrees to a US Airways merger. American executives and directors will no doubt have to be bought off with golden parachutes, while trade creditors such as Hewlett-Packard and Boeing will likely be brought on board with promises […]

(Reuters) – Invoking Pope Benedict, Republican Representative Paul Ryan defended his budget plan on Thursday at Georgetown University, where a group of the Jesuit institution’s faculty has accused him of misusing Catholic teachings to push cuts to programs that serve the poor. “The overarching threat to our whole society today is the exploding federal debt,” […]

Okay.  The subtitle of this post is a loose paraphrase of statements that Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom made to ABC News on Thursday.  But not all that loose a paraphrase. It’s actually a direct deduction from Fehrnstrom’s comments. As Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent mentioned on Friday, Fehrnstrom test-drove a new, or rather a newly […]

“I’ve never seen a less optimistic time in my lifetime in this country and people wonder why,” the first-term Republican governor said at the Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth in New York City. “I think it’s really simple. It’s because government’s now telling them ‘stop dreaming, stop striving, we’ll take care of […]

Okay, okay.  I know that Obama doesn’t read AB.  So I know that his decision, reflected in his speech today at a lunch with Associated Press editors and reporters, to finally—finally—start refuting the Republicans’ economics proposals with actual examples and statistics, was not prompted by my repeated laments here that Obama just doesn’t do specifics, i.e., […]

The answer to the title’s question—Can your state mandate that you buy broccoli or join a gym?—depends upon which of the two possible grounds the 5-4 Supreme Court majority overturns the ACA’s individual-mandate provision.  And which grounds the majority selects also will determine whether under the Court’s new “liberty” jurisprudence, Social Security and Medicare also […]

I’ve written repeatedly now on AB that the challenge to the constitutionality of the ACA’s minimum-coverage provision (a.k.a., the individual-mandate provision) is not really a Commerce Clause challenge but instead a challenge under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, under what is known as the “substantive due process” constitutional law doctrine.  The Fifth Amendment’s due […]

To the general public, all that matters are the headlines, reflecting the bottom line.  The universal consensus among reporters who attended the 90-minute Supreme Court argument yesterday on whether an 1867 law called the Anti-Injunction Act bars the Court from considering challenges to the constitutionality of ACA’s individual-mandate provision was that the justices will decide […]